Institutionalizing Ethics in Institutional Voids: Building Positive Ethical Strength to Serve Women Microfinance Borrowers in Negative Contexts

This study examines whether microfinance institutions (MFIs) that serve women borrowers at the base of the economic pyramid are likely to adopt a written code of positive organizational ethics (POE). Using econometric analysis of operational and economic data of a sample of MFIs from across the world, we find that two contextual factors—poverty level and lack of women’s empowerment—moderate the influence of an MFI’s percentage of women borrowers on the probability of the MFI having a POE code. MFIs that serve more women borrowers are more likely to adopt a POE code, especially in negative contexts (where women borrowers face poverty and disempowerment and are therefore susceptible to abuse). This study provides evidence that MFIs can build positive ethical strength in negative contexts

Spiritual Leadership as a Paradigm for Organizational Transformation and Recovery from Extended Work Hours Cultures

spiritual leadership, workaholism, organizational transformation, organizational culture,

The emergence of relationality in governance of climate change adaptation

This chapter presents the emergence of relationality as an individual and collective capacity that has the potential to enable transformative adaptation to meet future climate challenges. Given that people create the social systems that influence their lives, the capacity for adaptation to climate change may be viewed as both an individual attribute constructed through social learning and knowledge exchange and a fundamental component of an enabling environment of social institutions. Governance of climate adaptation, therefore, requires a deeper consideration of the moral and ethical motivation and behavior of participants. The concept of relationality may be operationalized in governance as capacity building through transformative dialogue processes within and among stakeholders designed to generate relational responsibility. Five governance approaches are briefly examined for their potential to facilitate the emergence of relationality including (i) polycentric (ii) middle-out, (iii) collaborative, (iv) transformational, and (v) experimental governance. Key attributes of these processes are synthesized into a relational governance model. Together, these concepts are used to examine two case studies from New South Wales (NSW) Australia that illustrate that relationality can be enabled and expressed in existing forms of governance. This is the case when government is prepared to experiment and improvise adaptation practices across scales and contexts and embrace the norms, values, relations, ways of thinking, paradigms, and mental models that a diversity of actors can collectively bring to bear on a complex problem. These kinds of approaches need to become normalized across formal and informal adaptation governance

All in the mind? Ethical identity and the allure of corporate responsibility

This paper develops a critique of the concept of ‘ethical identity’ as this has been used recently to distinguish between ‘cynical’ and ‘authentic’ forms of corporate responsibility. Taking as our starting point Levinas’ demanding view of responsibility as ‘following the assignation of responsibility for my neighbour’, we use a case study of a packaging company—PackCo—to argue that a concern with being seen and/or seeing oneself as responsible should not be confused with actual responsibility. Our analysis of the case points first to the allure of programmes of strategic corporate responsibility and the ways in which, through identification, they can provide a tacit form of moral sanction to managers in their aggressive pursuit of profit. It then contrasts the responses of different managers to negative staff feedback to illustrate the difference between managers’ attempts to defend their identity of being ‘responsible’ managers, and responsible conduct itself. The paper concludes that a potent danger of programmes of corporate responsibility is that they allow managers to deceive not just others, but also themselves in relation to the exercise of responsibility