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Robert Phillips. Stakeholder Theory and Organizational Ethics. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2003, 200 pages, $34.95 hardcover.
When our fearless Editor sent this book to me, I was a little worried that he was either trying to improve the woeful ethics of a person willing to run for public office or was trying to get even for some thick tome I had sent him during my tenure as Editor. If the latter was the case, he succeeded. (I don't know if there is a cure for the dysfunctions leading to the decision to run for public office.) This book is a treatise in moral philosophy and pragmatics that attempts to give a solid normative basis for stakeholder theory, and in turn apply it to organizational ethics. Although the examples in the discourse are actually for-profit business organizations, the theory arises from Rawls' political theory, so its application to other organizations may be justified. Though the language is thick, it is short (167 pages of text) and tightly written, so the Editor was merciful in his revenge.
The flyleaf tells us that the author is not degreed in philosophy or science, but teaches at University of San Diego's business school and studied business ethics at University of Virginia. I mention this because the book lacks support from empirical scholarship in management science but appears quite solid in its philosophical foundations. This bent and some passages in the book gave me the impression that it is the latest in a series of attempts by philosophers to justify a place for themselves in business schools, perhaps supplanting the more empirically oriented faculty from fields such as psychology. The pay is better than in psychology or philosophy departments, I suppose. But, at first blush, I have problems...