In this study, we investigated the extent to which business students perceived environmental sustainability to be an important (legitimate) business issue. The results of this study suggest that exposing business students to environmental management (EM) concepts increases their perception of EM being a legitimate business issue. In particular, students reported that studying EM, practicing EM in decision making, and the extent to which they perceived sustainability to be important to executives were all associated with perceptions of EM legitimacy. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

This exploratory study evaluates the ethical considerations related to employees fired for their blogging activities. Specifically, subject evaluations of two employee-related blogging scenarios were investigated with established ethical reasoning and moral intensity scales, and a measure of corporate ethical values was included to assess perceptions of organizational ethics. The first scenario involved an employee who was fired because of innocuous blogging, while the second vignette involved an employee who was fired because of work-related blogging. Survey data were collected from employed college students and working practitioners. The findings indicated that the subjects' ethical judgments that firing an employee for blogging was unethical were negatively related to unethical intentions to fire an employee for blogging. Moral intensity was positively related to ethical judgments and negatively related to unethical intentions to fire an employee for blogging, while individual perceptions of ethical values were negatively associated with unethical intentions. Finally, subjects perceived that terminating an employee for innocuous blogging that did not target an employer was more ethically intense than was firing an employee for work-related blogging. The implications of the findings for human resource professionals are discussed, as are the study's limitations and suggestions for future research.

Although many studies have linked job attitudes and intentions to aspects of in-role and extra-role job performance, there has been relatively little attention given to such job responses in the context of employees’ ethical/unethical behavior. The purpose of this study was to investigate a possible relationship between positive job response (conceptualized as job satisfaction and intention to stay) and behavioral ethics. Ninety-two matched manager-employee pairs from a regional branch of a large financial services and banking firm completed survey instruments, with each employee providing information about his or her job attitudes and intentions and each manager assessing the ethical/unethical performance of his/her employees. Respondents also provided additional information required for our analyses. The results indicated that positive job response among subordinates was associated with higher supervisory ratings of the subordinates’ ethical job performance. The managerial implications of the findings for managing ethical behavior are explored.

For better or worse, the current economic crisis has the potential to be truly transformative. President Barack Obama was elected, in part, on a platform calling for change that was made extremely compelling by the crumbling economy. His Inaugural Address called attention to the lack of ethical and responsible behavior in business today: “Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.” Newsweek Magazine famously ushered in this new age with a cover story entitled, "We're All Socialists Now." Colleges of Business, especially those that are members of The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), have stressed teaching ethics for more than twenty-five years, but few could argue with a straight face that the effort has been a resounding success. Teachers of courses such as business ethics, business law, and business and society can expect to be busy for years to come, fashioning new and different responses to improving the ethics of the graduates of their colleges. Doing more of the same by adding another few hours of ethics into the curriculum will not likely make much difference. As the old saying goes, when you are in a hole, the first rule is to stop digging. In an effort to stimulate classroom conversation and critical thinking on one particular aspect of business ethics, this paper has several goals: a) to introduce readers to the proposed Global Poverty Act, a bill co-sponsored by then-Senator Obama, described as a moral document evidencing an ethical responsibility owed by rich countries to poor ones; b) to illustrate how this proposed Act can form the basis for a lesson on ethics, and especially that form of ethics that is concerned with the ethical distribution of wealth and resources, namely, distributive justice; c) to identify some controversial policies seeking wealth redistribution, nationally and globally; and d) to attempt to gauge student attitudes and receptiveness toward these concepts.

The Symphony of Southeast Texas is a regional, professional symphony orchestra based in Beaumont, TX. The orchestra operates on an annual budget of approximately $550,000, and employs musicians on a per-service basis. In 2009, the orchestra hired a new Music Director following two years of searching and auditions. Chelsea Tipton, II, ignited a fire amongst all of the organizations constituents from his first visit to Beaumont for his audition in March 2009. Following his appointment as Music Director, the organization's members realized what a remarkable opportunity was at hand for the orchestra. The organization had to capitalize on the enthusiasm surrounding a new Music Director, but this came with a unique set of challenges. Orchestras, like non-profit organizations in general, struggle with maintaining a sustainable business model. This case study describes the opportunities, and the challenges associated with them, that regional orchestras, and similarly positioned small non-profit organizations, face.