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Linda Klebe Trevino and Gary R. Weaver. Managing Ethics in Business Organizations: Social Scientific Perspectives. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford, 2003, 364 pages, $45.00 hardcover.
For the reader looking for a simple how-to book on the popular topic of how to encourage or assure ethical decision making and behavior within organizations, Managing Ethics in Business Organizations: Social Scientific Perspectives is not the book. This book represents a decade of work by the authors, who extensively report not only their own scholarship, but also the scholarship of numerous researchers and writers in the fields of philosophy and social science. The first chapter (Business Ethics/Business Ethics: One Field or Two?), for example, includes approximately 75 references to works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (Hume, 1739); and the final chapter, (Unfinished Business Ethics), concludes with references from some thirty plus works, including several of the authors' own publications from 2001.
The book begins with a discussion of the dichotomy between the philosophical and social science approaches to the study of business ethics, including the use of language and terms such as "ethical behavior," as well as how the normative and empirical approaches to business ethics might be conceptualized, as parallel, symbiotic, and integrative. After identifying the barriers and boundaries separating these approaches, the authors offer...