The objective of this paper is to develop and describe a construct of the ethos of the corporate codes of ethics (i.e. an ECCE construct) across three countries, namely Australia, Canada and Sweden. The introduced construct is rather unique as it is based on a cross-cultural sample seldom seen in the literature. While the outcome of statistical analyses indicated a satisfactory factor solution and acceptable estimates of reliability measures, some research limitations have been stressed. They provide a foundation for further (...) research in the field and testing of the ECCE construct in other cultural and corporate settings. We believe that the ECCE construct makes a contribution to theory and practice in the field as it outlines a theoretical construct for the benefit of other researchers. It is also of managerial interest as it provides a grounded framework of areas to be considered in the implementation in organizations of corporate codes of ethics. (shrink)

This paper examines the implementation, communication and benefits of corporate codes of ethics by the top companies operating in Australia, Canada and Sweden. It provides an international comparison across three continents. It is also based on a longitudinal approach where three national surveys were performed in 2001–2002 and replications of the same surveys were performed in 2005–2006. The empirical findings of this research show in all three countries that large organisations indicate a substantial interest in corporate codes of ethics. There (...) are, however, differences in the ways that the companies in each country implement and communicate their corporate codes of ethics and the benefits that they see being derived from them. The longitudinal comparison between 2001–2002 and 2005–2006 indicates changes in the implementation, communication and benefits of corporate codes of ethics in the three countries. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to examine the ‘Code of Ethics Quality’ (CEQ) in the largest companies of Australia, Canada and the United States. For this purpose, a proposed CEQ construct has been applied. It appears from the empirical findings that while Australia, Canada and the United States are extremely similar in their economic and social development, there may well be distinct cultural mores and issues that are forming their business ethics practices. A research implication derived from the performed (...) research is that the construct provides a selection of observable and measurable elements in the context of CEQ. The construct of CEQ consists of nine measures divided into two dimensions (i.e. staff support and regulation). They should not be seen as a complete list. On the contrary, it is encouraged that others propose and elaborate revisions and extensions. A practical implication of this paper is a structure of what and how to examine the CEQ in a managerial setting. It may assist companies in their efforts to establish, maintain and improve their ethical culture, norms and beliefs within the organization and supporting them in their ethical business practices with different stakeholders in the marketplace and society. The dimensions and measures of the construct may be used as a frame of reference for further research. They may be useful and applicable across contexts and over time using similar samples when it comes to large companies, as small‐ or medium‐sized ones may not have considered all areas nor have the elements in place. This is a research limitation, but it provides an opportunity for further research. (shrink)

This study uses a specific method to analyze the contents of the codes of ethics of the largest corporations in Australia, Canada and Sweden and compares the findings of similar content analyses in 2002 and 2006. It tracks changes in code contents across the three nations over the 2002–2006 period. There were statistically significant changes in the codes of the three countries from 2002 to 2006: the Australian and Canadian codes becoming more prescriptive, intensifying the differences between these and the (...) Swedish codes. The contents of these codes and the nature of the changes they have undergone over time are culturally driven: Australia's and Canada's reflecting their similar cultural profiles and Sweden's reflecting its differences from these countries on organizationally relevant cultural dimensions. The study reveals that corporate codes of ethics are living documents as reflected by the significant longitudinal changes in the frequencies of mention of several of the 60 items underpinning the content analysis of the codes of ethics. Consequently, and in light of their growing prevalence and importance as instruments of corporate governance, they should not be treated as static but as dynamic documents that are subject to various environmental factors. The clear implication of the findings of this study is that for corporate codes of ethics ‘one size does not fit all’ and that these instruments must be carefully monitored and revised to reflect changing conditions. (shrink)

This paper reports the results of a study of the top 500 private sector organizations and the top 100 public sector organizations in Sweden. It is a replication of the study by Svensson et al . (2004) . The aim of the study was to describe and compare the business ethics commitment of organizations across the two sectors. The empirical findings indicate that the processes involved in business ethics commitment have begun to be recognized and acted upon at an organizational (...) level in Sweden. Some support is provided to show that codes of ethics are developing in some of Sweden's largest private and public sector organizations – although this is happening to a lesser extent in the public sector. It is noted that an effect of a code of ethics on the bottom line of the business was acknowledged by respondents in both private and public sector organizations. We believe that the supporting measures of business ethics commitment appear to be underutilized in both private and public sector organizations in Sweden (among those that possess codes of ethics), thus indicating that the commitment to business ethics in Swedish organizations has potential for future development. (shrink)

The objective of this study is to test the embeddedness of codes of ethics (ECE) in organizations on aggregated data from three countries, namely Australia, Canada and the United States. The properties of four constructs of ECE are described and tested, including surveillance/training, internal communication, external communication and guidance. The data analysis shows that the model has satisfactory fit, validity and reliability. Furthermore, the results are fairly consistent when tested on each of the three samples (i.e. cross-national validation). This cross-national (...) study makes a contribution beyond previous descriptive or exploratory studies by using confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. Nevertheless, a number of limitations are raised, all of which provide opportunities for further research in refining, extending and testing the proposed ECE model in other cultural and corporate settings. (shrink)

Based on the 'Partnership Model of Corporate Ethics' (Wood, 2002), this study examines the ethical structures and processes that are put in place by organizations to enhance the ethical business behavior of staff. The study examines the use of these structures and processes amongst the top companies in the three countries of Australia, Canada, and Sweden over two time periods (2001–2002 and 2005–2006). Subsequendy, a combined comparative and longitudinal approach is applied in the study, which we contend is a (...) unique approach in the area of business ethics. The findings of the study indicate that corporations operating in Sweden have utilized ethical structures and processes differently than their Canadian and/or Australian counterparts, and that in each culture the way that companies fashion their approach to business ethics appears congruent with their national cultural values. There does, however, appear to be a convergence of views within the organizations of each culture, as the Swedish companies appear to have been more influenced in 2005–2006 by an Anglo-Saxon business paradigm than they have been in the past. (shrink)

This paper proposes a retributive argument against punishment, where punishment is understood as going beyond condemnation or censure, and requiring hard treatment. The argument sets out to show that punishment cannot be justified. The argument does not target any particular attempts to justify punishment, retributive or otherwise. Clearly, however, if it succeeds, all such attempts fail. No argument for punishment is immune from the argument against punishment proposed here. The argument does not purport to be an argument only against retributive (...) justifications of punishment, and so leave open the possibility of a sound non-retributive justification of punishment. Punishment cannot be justified, the paper argues, because it cannot be demonstrated that any punishment, no matter how minimal, is not a disproportionate retributive response to criminal wrongdoing. If we are to hold onto proportionality—that is, proportionality as setting a limit to morally permissible punishment—then punishment is morally impermissible. The argument is a retributive argument against punishment insofar as a just retributive response to wrongdoing must be proportionate to the wrongdoing. The argument, that is, is concerned with proportionality as a retributive requirement. The argument against punishment is set out on the basis of a familiar version of the ‘anchoring problem’, according to which it is the problem of determining the most severe punishment to anchor or ground the punishment scale. To meet the possible criticism that we have chosen a version of the anchoring problem particularly favourable to our argument, various alternative statements of the anchoring problem are considered. Considering such statements also provides a more rounded view of the anchoring problem. One such alternative holds that the punishment scale must be anchored not just in the most severe punishment, but in the least severe punishment as well. Other alternatives hold that it is necessary and sufficient to anchor the punishment scale in any two punishments, neither of which needs to be the most or least severe punishment. A further suggestion is that one anchoring point anywhere along the punishment scale is sufficient, because it is possible to ‘project’ from such a point, so as to determine the correlative punishments for all other crimes, and so derive a complete punishment scale. Finally, the suggestion is considered that one can approach the issue of a punishment scale ‘holistically’, denying any distinction between anchoring and derived (or ‘projected’) punishments. (shrink)

Michael Woods; XIV*—Scepticism and Natural Knowledge, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 80, Issue 1, 1 June 1980, Pages 231–248, https://doi.org/1.

Conditionals has at its center an extended essay on this problematic and much-debated subject in the philosophy of language and logic, which the widely respected Oxford philosopher Michael Woods had been preparing for publication at the time of his death in 1993. It appears here edited by his eminent colleague David Wiggins, and is accompanied by a commentary specially written by a leading expert on the topic, Dorothy Edgington. This masterly and original treatment of conditionals will demand the attention (...) of all philosophers working in this area. (shrink)

Why do otherwise well-intentioned managers make decisions that have negative social or environmental consequences? To answer this question, the authors combine the literature on construal level theory with the compromise effect to explore the circumstances that lead to seemingly unethical decision-making. The results of two studies suggest that the degree to which managers make high-risk tradeoffs is highly influenced by how they mentally represent the decision context. The authors find that managers are more likely to make seemingly unethical tradeoffs when (...) psychological distance is high (rather than low) and when they are forced to choose between competing alternatives. However, when given the option not to choose, managers better reflect on the consequences of each alternative, and thus become more likely to choose options with less risk of negative consequences. The results suggest that simply offering managers the option not to choose may reduce psychological distance and help organizations avoid seemingly unethical decision-making. (shrink)

BackgroundKinarm Standard Tests is a suite of upper limb tasks to assess sensory, motor, and cognitive functions, which produces granular performance data that reflect spatial and temporal aspects of behavior. We have previously used principal component analysis to reduce the dimensionality of multivariate data using the Kinarm End-Point Lab. Here, we performed PCA using data from the Kinarm Exoskeleton Lab, and determined agreement of PCA results across EP and EXO platforms in healthy participants. We additionally examined whether further dimensionality reduction (...) was possible by using PCA across behavioral tasks.MethodsHealthy participants were assessed using the Kinarm EXO and EP. Four behavioral tasks were performed that quantified arm sensory and motor function, including position sense [Arm Position Matching ] and three motor tasks [Visually Guided Reaching, Object Hit, and Object Hit and Avoid ]. The number of components to include per task was determined from scree plots and parallel analysis, and rotation type was decided on a per-task basis. To assess agreement, we compared principal components across platforms using distance correlation. We additionally considered inter-task interactions in EXO data by performing PCA across all six behavioral assessments.ResultsBy applying PCA on a per task basis to data collected using the EXO, the number of behavioral parameters were substantially reduced by 58–75% while accounting for 76–87% of the variance. These results compared well to the EP analysis, and we found good-to-excellent agreement values between PCs from the EXO and those from the EP. Finally, we were able to reduce the dimensionality of the EXO data across tasks down to 16 components out of a total of 76 behavioral parameters, which represents a reduction of 79% while accounting for 73% of the total variance.ConclusionPCA of Kinarm robotic assessment appears to capture similar relationships between kinematic features in healthy individuals and is agnostic to the robotic platform used for collection. Further work is needed to investigate the use of PCA-based data reduction for the characterization of neurological deficits in clinical populations. (shrink)

The fourth volume of Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy is devoted to essays in honor of Professor John Ackrill on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Contributors include: David Wiggins, Colin Strand, Julius Moravcsik, Lesley Brown, Gail Fine, Julia Annas, David Charles, Michael Woods, Christopher Kirwan, Bernard Williams, Jonathan Barnes, and Richard Sorabji.

Anyone seriously interested in Aristotle's moral philosophy must take full account of the Eudemian Ethics, a work which has in the past been unduly neglected in favour of the Nicomachean Ethics. The relation between the two treatises is now the subject of lively debate. This volume contains a translation of three of the eight books of the Eudemian Ethics - those that are likely to be of most interest to philosophers today - together with a philosophical commentary on these books (...) from a contemporary point of view. Like the other volumes in the series, it is intended to serve the needs of readers of Aristotle without a knowledge of Greek, and the aim in the translation has been to give as accurate an idea as possible of Aristotle's text; but for the benefit of those who are able to read the original there are notes on the Greek text used for problematic passages. In preparing this new edition Michael Woods has made use of the much improved text of the Eudemian Ethics that has recently been published as an Oxford Classical Text, and has taken into consideration recent philosophical work on Aristotle's ethics. The Clarendon Aristotle Series is designed for both students and professionals. It provides accurate translations of selected Aristotelian texts, accompanied by incisive commentaries which focus on philosophical problems and issues. The volumes in the series have been widely welcomed and favourably reviewed. Important new titles are being added to the series, and a number of well-established volumes are being reissued with revisions and/or supplementary material. (shrink)

Legal reasoning requires identification through search of authoritative legal texts (such as statutes, constitutions, or prior judicial opinions) that apply to a given legal question. In this paper, using a network representation of US Supreme Court opinions that integrates citation connectivity and topical similarity, we model the activity of law search as an organizing principle in the evolution of the corpus of legal texts. The network model and (parametrized) probabilistic search behavior generates a Pagerank-style ranking of the texts that in (...) turn gives rise to a natural geometry of the opinion corpus. This enables us to then measure the ways in which new judicial opinions affect the topography of the network and its future evolution. While we deploy it here on the US Supreme Court opinion corpus, there are obvious extensions to large evolving bodies of legal text (or text corpora in general). The model is a proxy for the way in which new opinions influence the search behavior of litigants and judges and thus affect the law. This type of “legal search effect” is a new legal consequence of research practice that has not been previously identified in jurisprudential thought and has never before been subject to empirical analysis. We quantitatively estimate the extent of this effect and find significant relationships between search-related network structures and propensity of future citation. This finding indicates that “search influence” is a pathway through which judicial opinions can affect future legal development. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kafka’s China and the Parable of ParablesMichael WoodI should like to begin and end this essay with a parable; one that is both dizzying and familiar; all the more dizzying perhaps for being so familiar. What happens in between my beginning and my end will be not so much an interpretation of the parable or a commentary on it as an unravelling of it, an exploration of one of (...) the spaces the parable opens up. We could see the parable, even with all the vertigo it offers, as a seamark, or known face, a remembered gesture: we look at it, we go away, we travel (to China), we come back. It has not changed, but perhaps we have. The parable is about parables, but then, as has been shrewdly said, all parables are. 1 It is by Franz Kakfa, probably written in 1922–1929, first published in 1931.Many complain [the parable says] that the words of the wise are again and again only parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says, “Go over,” he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which we could just about do if the result was worth the journey; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something he too cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least. All these parables really set out to say only that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter.Thereupon a man said: Why are you so reluctant? If you followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that free of all your daily cares.Another said: I bet that is also a parable.The first said: You have won.The second said: But unfortunately only in parable.The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost. 2 [End Page 325]We might call the space this parable opens up—one of the spaces, the space I want to explore—the space of reading. Reading as a habit, an addiction to understanding and bewilderment; and if we did our topic would then be, in Geoffrey Hartman’s phrase, the fate of reading. There is of course an interesting double meaning in this haunting phrase. It is not only that reading has a fate, that things happen to it, that it occurs in history; it is also that reading is a fate, one lives it as an adventure, a form of happiness or a form of risk, even a form of damage. It is not something other than life, it is life, or a piece of it. No one has understood this better than Hartman: “It is almost a mode of life, something you cannot shake off, something that follows and pursues you. Reading is fate: we are like characters in a certain kind of mystery story, who are drawn unwillingly into a plot that we alone, rather than the official investigator, can unriddle.” 3 My essay attempts to build on this understanding, particularly on Hartman’s paradoxical sense that the habit of reading leads to an interest in unreadability—where the unreadable is quite different from the unread, or the brutally misread, or the incomprehensible.First, a few remarks on the narrative form and tilt of the parable—in the spirit of Hartman’s principle that an attention to form is not the worst way of getting beyond formalism. 4 The parable is a fully dramatized piece of work: there are speakers but no detachable authorial voice beyond those of the speakers: there are the many, then a one [einer], then another [ein anderer]. There are three positions here—at least three—but no position outside them, no position that is not caught up in the play of meanings in front of us. Or rather, there is a position outside them, but it seems to me blinder than any position needs to be or ought to be. Attending to the play of meanings, as we are about to do, is of course... (shrink)

(1999). Sponsorship, academic independence and critical engagement: A forum on shell, the Ogoni dispute and the royal geographical society (with the institute of British geographers) Philosophy & Geography: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 228-233.