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Moral Issues in Stakeholder Selection

In: Business and Management

Submitted By ksskms
Words 5220
Pages 21
Analysing moral issues in stakeholder relations
Johanna Kujala
Introduction
Empirical research on business ethics has traditionally concentrated on examining managers' attitudes to\yard unethical behaviour (e.g. Izraeli
1988, Preble & Reichel 1988, Small 1992) or toward moral dilemmas presented in scenarios
(e.g. Cohen et al. 1993, Cruz et al. 2000, Kujala
2000, Reidenbach et al. 1991). A lot of attention has also been given to case studies describing lifethreatening or demanding situations, corporate tragedies or human catastrophes (e.g. Beauchamp
1993, Hoffman 1984, Post 1986, Sethi & Stedlmeier
1991, Shrivastava 1987, and Velasquez 1992).
Although all these issues are of utmost importance, they more or less deal with unusual situations and unexpected behaviour, and they can be argued to be beyond the scope of issues on which the managers feel they can exert influence (Waters et al. 1986). It seems that empirical research on ethics in business should be more interested in how managers see the "ordinary life"; the everyday managing situations where they have to face many issues that are moral in their nature
(Hosmer 1996: 1, Stark 1993).
In the context of studying moral issues in business, the stakeholder approach has gained increasing support in recent years (Van Luijk
2000). It has been found to be a suitable tool for analysing a company's relations with its environment and for dealing with moral issues raised in these relations (Nasi 1995, Waters et al. 1986). To answer the demand for the research of moral issues in everyday business life, this paper is targeted at developing a framework for analysing moral issues in stakeholder relations. Furthermore, the aim is to operationalise the developed framework by developing itemised statements to be used as empirical measures in a survey research.
The research question is: how

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