A structural injustice approach to business ethics

A structural injustice approach to business ethics

A catered lunch will be available from 11:30 AM and presentation will be starting at 12:00pm.

Description:

Scholarly work in business ethics generally focuses on the voluntary actions of businesses and their culpability for harms resulting from those actions. However, businesses operate in contexts that are in part exogenous to them and generally include background conditions that advantage some while disadvantaging others who experience domination or deprivation. As a result, many of those who experience harm – while others receive concurrent benefit – do so not due to intent or direction by a business, but rather because of pre-existing structural injustices built into law, institutional processes, and social norms and customs. Business culpability and complicity for stakeholder harm, therefore, is broader than organizational policy and practice, and potential solutions are more wide-ranging than changing those decisions and strategies that are directly within their control. In this presentation, I draw on Iris Marion Young’s analysis of structural injustice to develop an approach to business ethics that addresses the culpability for business participation in systems and structures that they do not control but nevertheless benefit from, as well as the nature of their responsibility to act in ways that ameliorate domination and deprivation.

Biography:

Harry Van Buren is the Z. Lupton Patten Endowed Chair of Business Ethics at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s Gary W. Rollins College of Business as well as an honorary professor at Queen’s University Belfast School of Law. His doctorate in business environment, ethics and public policy is from the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Graduate School of Business. He has published more than 70 articles in outlets such as the Academy of Management Review, Business & Society, Human Resource Management Review, Journal of Business Ethics, and Journal of Industrial Relations. His current research interests include business and human rights, preventing human trafficking in global supply chains, business and peace, relational stakeholder theory, and employment ethics. He is the inaugural editor of the business and human rights section of the Journal of Business Ethics, having previously co-edited both the human resource management and religion sections at that journal. He has held leadership positions in the Social Issues in Management division of the Academy of Management and the International Association for Business & Society. He has co-edited a book on business and human rights to be published by Edward Elgar in January 2025 and also will have a forthcoming book on structural injustice and business ethics published by Cambridge University Press in fall 2025.