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Journal of Business Ethics 40th Anniversary Issue

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1982-2022: Shaping Debates in Business, Ethics and Society for 40 Years

To commemorate 40 years since the founding of the Journal of Business Ethics in 1982, the editors-in-chief of the journal have invited JBE editors to provide commentaries on the future of business ethics. These commentaries were thematically grouped into the following five essays. Professor Laura Spence’s editorial sets the background by touching on the journal’s founding aims, its emphasis on the centrality of ethics in social life, and its support for the diversification of the theories, methodological approaches and perspectives, to enrich the business ethics conversation and practice for “a better world” (Spence, 2022, p.1). Ethics’ centrality is again highlighted in the first essay Ethics at the Centre of Global and Local Challenges where commentaries place ethics in the center of global challenges ranging from climate change to inequality, and highlight the importance of local perspectives. While the second essay Business vs Ethics? addresses the age-old separation fallacy (Freeman, 1994) that juxtaposes business and ethics/society, from different perspectives including legal, firm strategy, business models, and that of non-corporate market players.

Complicating these debates are new Technology, Megatrends and Work. Authors of this third essay argue for a human-centered approach, corporate social responsibility and ethics in light of the impact new technologies, megatrends and Big Tech have on our lives and issues like precarious work, low global labour standards and human rights risks. These and many other under-researched, yet important, societal issues may be better understood through empirical research using new, innovative approaches and critical, non-mainstream perspectives according to the authors of the fourth essay Bringing Excitement to Empirical Business Ethics Research. Finally, the fifth essay Ethics and Politics of Academic Knowledge Production, acknowledges that access to the resources and setting of the rules of knowledge creation and distribution, including business ethics education, are unequal and political. Hence, our responsibility to address these inequalities by opening up our journal to underrepresented voices, ideas and ways of being.

We hope you enjoy these essays as much as we have enjoyed curating them. A huge vote of appreciation to our fantastic editor team who have shown their vision and scholarship though these excellent commentaries, our wonderful managing editor Dr Ju Nah Tan, and our excellent supporters at Springer Nature.

Michelle Greenwood and Gazi Islam

Editors

Articles (6 in this collection)