Business Ethics And Care In Organizations

Care is a human ability we all need for growing and flourishing. It implies considering the needs and interests of others, and the quality of how we relate to each other is often defined by care. While the value of care in private life is widely recognized, its role in the public sphere is contested and subject to political debates. In work organizations, instrumentality frequently overrides considerations for colleagues’ and co-workers’ well-being, while relationships are often sacrificed in the service of performance and meeting organizational targets. The questions this volume attempts to address concerns the organizational conditions that make care flourish and how a caring organization functions in practice. Specifically, we examine what it means to care for each other and what enhances caring behaviours in organizations. The volume ultimately focuses on how caring relations can contribute to making organizations better places. In this perspective, care involves the recognition of, and the limitations of, work as a key aspect of personal and social identity. Because care exceeds the sphere of individual intimacy, the book will also centre on the necessity for building caring institutions through a political process that considers the needs, contributions, and prospects of many different actors. This book aims to contribute to academic discussions on care in organizations, care work, business and organizational ethics, diversity, caring leadership, well-being in organizations, and research ethics. Managers, consultants, policy-makers, and students will find reflections about the goodness of care in organizations, and guidance about the ethical and practical difficulties of pursuing the project of building caring organizations.

Applying Care Ethics to Business is a multidisciplinary collection of original essays that explores the intersection between the burgeoning field of care ethics and business. Care ethics is an approach to morality that emphasizes relational, particularist, and affective dimensions of morality that evolved from feminist theory and today enjoys robust intellectual exploration. Care ethics emerged out of feminist theory in the 1980's and the greatest contribution to moral analysis among Women' Studies scholars. Today, feminists and non-feminist scholars are increasingly taking care ethics seriously. Applying care to the marketplace is a natural step in its maturity. Applying Care Ethics to Business is the first book-length analysis of business and economic cases and theories from the perspective of care theory. Furthermore, given economic turbulence and the resulting scrutiny of market practices, care ethics provides fresh and timely insight into ideal business values and commitments. In many ways, care ethics’ emphasis upon connection and cooperation as well as the growth and well-being of the other make it appear to be the antithesis of the corporate character. Nevertheless, many contemporary theorists question if traditional moral approaches based on autonomous agents is adequate to address a shrinking and interconnected world—particularly one that is marked by global markets. Applying Care Ethics to Business offers a unique opportunity to rethink corporate responsibility and business ethics.

The ethical aspects of the operation of healthcare organizations (HCOs) are central to the delivery of health care. Organization Ethics in Health Care begins by assessing the shortcomings of clinical ethics, business ethics, and professional ethics as a basis for solving problems that have emerged in healthcare delivery systems since the advent of managed care. The text focuses on the meaning of the developent of the HCO in our society and what its present status is. The authors point out that moral parameters endorsed by society have guided previous shifts in the relationships among important HCO stakeholders, but that these parameters have been unclear or missing altogether during the past tumultous decade. Finally, they describe the key elements for the successful implementation of a fully functioning healthcare organization ethics program and what it can mean to the institution, its associated clinicians and employees, its patients, and its community. Moving from theory to practical application, this book will serve as an excellent student text, a professional guide, and a reference work.

The author offers perspectives that can assist healthcare managers in achieving the highest ethical standards as they face their roles as healthcare providers, employers, and community service organizations. He also examines how to comply with relevant laws and regulations, provide high quality patient care with limited resources, and more.

In giving an account of what is ethical, we can begin by describing the community that accommodates the good life; to be ethical, then, is to be a contributor to that sort of community. We live in political communities as well as in communities built around families, neighborhoods, churches, and other associations. But for many of us the community that will afford the good life that is the purpose of morality is the organization that employs us. Aristotle claimed tht the greatest ethical questions are political ones; today we have reason to believe that the greatest ethical questions are organizational ones. In Organizational Ethics and the Good Life, Edwin Hartman contends that, as ethics is about the good community, a great part of business ethics is about the good organization. He argues that a large and complex organization has the characteristic of the "commons" studied by game theorists, and that it is the task of management to preserve the commons in the long-term interests of all its members, principally by creating an appropriate corporate culture. A good corporate culture not only serves the interests of the participants but makes the organization a place in which they can develop interests that are compatible with both autonomy and good corporate citizenship: that is, they can develop a sense of the good life that is appropriate to the moral person. Hartman opposes the standard view that the study of organizational ethics is a matter of considering how certain foundational ethical principles apply in organizational settings; instead, he argues, business ethicists should consider how free and rational people arrive at a consensus on practical ethical principles in a morally good organization that leaves room for moral progress. And what makes an organization morally good? In discussing justice, loyalty, and other features of a morally good organization, Hartman draws largely on the work of Rawls and Hirschman. In describing the good life as one in which well-being and morality overlap, Hartman proposes a new version of an idea as old as Aristotle, who taught that human beings are rational but also irreducibly communal creatures.

Color print. Business Ethics is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of the single-semester business ethics course. This title includes innovative features designed to enhance student learning, including case studies, application scenarios, and links to video interviews with executives, all of which help instill in students a sense of ethical awareness and responsibility.

This discussion considers ethical questions in health care as they arise on the business or organizational level. It provides an ethical analysis of decision-making in the management of health care organizations.

Shows how managers can approach the ethical dilemmas they face in an uncomfortably complex world.