Why “Doing Well by Doing Good” Went Wrong: Getting Beyond “Good Ethics Pays” Claims in Managerial Thinking

Abstract

In recent decades a number of voices in managerial scholarship and business ethics have championed conciliatory business strategies capable of achieving both economic and social ends. While these "good ethics pays" or "win-win" approaches have garnered massive attention in both academic and practitioner-oriented arenas, empirical vetting of such strategies has lagged far behind their widespread diffusion. Even more problematic, careful examination of the scholarly work in this area reveals fundamentally different presuppositions about what it means to claim "good ethics pays" and how this claim relates to managerial activity. This article maps out the various "good ethics pays" arguments across the managerial discipline to uncover three competing, divergent, and at times incommensurable frameworks of how such a knowledge claim is constructed. This mapping is followed by examining how disciplinary commitments to parsimonious explanations and stable behavioral patterns utilize “good ethics pays” frameworks to effectively minimize moral agency of actors. This article concludes by laying out a new research approach that foregrounds the varied contingency of how ethics and economics intersect. This approach moves beyond ungrounded confidence in a grand theory of “win-win” convergences to instead investigate the provisional and contextual social mechanisms that reward or sanction ethical action.