Public Finance, the Financial Industry, Ethics and Efficiency

Dimitris N. Chorafas “Business Efficiency and Ethics–Values and Strategic Decision Making”, 2015. London, Palgrave-Macmillan Press, hbk. xv+294 pages, ISBN: 9781137484246, £75.00, $ 115.00

Forcing German managers to focus on productivity

Purpose – Aims to test Walton and McKersie’s theory on labour negotiations, specifically in the case of German car manufacturers. Design/methodology/approach – The research is based on interviews with industrial actors in Germany’s car industry – an empirical case study. Findings – The article explains the structural force behind the managerial drive towards production. While German managers act at an enterprise level, a structural force has been responsible for the success of Germany’s post-WW II manufacturing. Germany’s collective bargaining structure removed wage and working-time bargaining from local management and opened four managerial options: production, productivity, innovation, and quality. This structure forced management to focus on these four options because they lie within the realm of management prerogative. The article explains how structural divisions between intra-enterprise level arrangements and extra-enterprise level collective bargaining at a conceptual level can best be understood. Originality/value – Argues that a regional and industry collective bargaining structure has supported the success of a competitive car industry in Germany

Management Communication: Communicative Ethics and Action

As managerial work regimes move continuously towards post-industrialism, forms of communication change with it and work relationships are increasingly becoming communicative relationships. This book seeks to end communicative distortions by establishing a new model of communication that will set up practical and workable communication forums

The ethics of the ILO. Kohlberg's universal moral development scale

International institutions such as the International Labour Organization (ILO) have been examined from various industrial relations viewpoints. This article seeks to discuss the ILO from the standpoint of moral philosophy. Traditionally, philosophy has not been concerned with industrial relations (IR) and IR writers have not engaged with ethics either. Nonetheless, all IR agents and institutions, international or otherwise, are moral agents. Being part of the United Nations (UN), the ILO follows the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). In philosophical terms, the ILO carries connotations of the German moral philosopher Kant's (1724-1084) concept of universalism. Ethical universalism is also the core of American psychologist and philosopher Laurence Kohlberg's developmental model that allows an assessment of moral values and ethical behaviours. To ascertain the ILO's morality, an empirical study (n=121) was conducted at a regional University. The study indicated that most respondents (68%) saw the ILO as a reflection of the morality of " defending everyone's right to justice and welfare, universally applied while applying well-thought principles and being ready to share and debate these openly and non-defensively with others". In line with the ILO's self-understanding, survey respondents also viewed it as a thoroughly moral agent committed to the advancement of humanity as a whole. Respondents also thought that the ILO goes beyond the confinements of the standard industrial relations framework, actively engaging with the universality of all people. The overall conclusion is that the way the ILO is perceived to act along the scale of Kohlberg's text matches the ILO's actual existence and work. For the first time, the ILO's moral status has been tested using Kohlberg's scale of morality. This provides a significant contribution to our understanding of the morality of a very important universal institution that has virtually all countries as members

Critical Reflections on Time and Capitalism

Abstract: Wayne Hope’s book on Time, Communication and Global Capitalism highlights how capitalism depends on two central issues: communication and time.  In that, Hope’s analysis goes well beyond the famous quote on time by the comedian Dave Allen “we spend our lives on the run: we get up by the clock, eat and sleep by the clock, get up again, go to work - and then we retire. And what do they [fucking] give us? A clock”. Hope emphasises the conflicts between two key time concepts: a) real-time and b) clock time. But the books also discusses ideas such as presentism, temporality, coevalness and allochronism. All these notions affect how capitalism communicates time to us. The book, rather convincingly, argues that all these versions of time are part of global media capitalism, financial regimes and the political economies in general. As a consequence, they also shape today’s workplaces and everyday life

Reflections on Bolaño’s Culture Industry

Bolaño’s study of the culture industry builds on Adorno and Horkheimer’s “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” linking it to Habermas’ and Enzensberger’s work. The key to Bolaño is the working out of the double task of what might be called “media capitalism”, namely merging the circulation of commodities through marketing and advertising to the ideological task of pro-capitalist propaganda that, at least ideologically sustains capitalism. Significantly, this double task occurs through “the same channels” of communication as Bolaño argues and is, at least, institutionally set up through an interest symbiosis between corporations that manufacture and sell commodities and media corporations. Both are organisations dedicated to shareholder-value and profit-maximisation. Using the example of the most eminent technological innovation during the post World War period (televison), Bolaño shows how and why capitalism can no longer simply be capitalism but—as a structural imperative—has to rely on the media. With that, even corporate mass media become part of the system of “media capitalism”. Bolaño sets the key tasks of future theory development in the area of capitalism and communication, namely the development of the comprehensive theory of media capitalism