Politics, ethics, and the search for a just international order:symposium in honour of Stanley Hoffmann

Published symposium with Stanley Hoffmann (Harvard), Suzanne Berger (MIT), Michael Doyle (Columbia), Peter Gourevitch (California San Diego), Robert Keohane (Princeton), Andrew Moravcsik (Princeton). Ed. James Shields, French Politics, 7 (3/4) 2009, 359-436. ISSN 1476-3419 (print) 1476-3427 (online)

Ethics and social responsibility - do HR professionals have the ‘courage to challenge’ or are they set to be permanent ‘bystanders'?

This paper considers the role of HR in ethics and social responsibility and questions why, despite an acceptance of a role in ethical stewardship, the HR profession appears to be reluctant to embrace its responsibilities in this area. The study explores how HR professionals see their role in relation to ethical stewardship of the organisation, and the factors that inhibit its execution. A survey of 113 UK-based HR professionals, working in both domestic and multinational corporations, was conducted to explore their perceptions of the role of HR in maintaining ethical and socially responsible action in their organisations, and to identify features of the organisational environment which might help or hinder this role being effectively carried out. The findings indicate that although there is a clear understanding of the expectations of ethical stewardship, HR professionals often face difficulties in fulfilling this role because of competing tensions and perceptions of their role within their organisations. A way forward is proposed, which draws on the positive individual factors highlighted in this research to explore how approaches to organisational development (through positive deviance) may reduce these tensions to enable the better fulfilment of ethical responsibilities within organisations. The involvement and active modelling of ethical behaviour by senior management, coupled with an open approach to surfacing organisational values and building HR procedures, which support socially responsible action, are crucial to achieving socially responsible organisations. Finally, this paper challenges the HR profession, through professional and academic institutions internationally, to embrace their role in achieving this. © 2013 Taylor & Francis.

Humanism and instrumentalism in management ethics across seven countries

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Impact of religion on business ethics in Europe and the Muslim world

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Do ethics imply persistence? The case of Islamic and socially responsible funds

We analyse the performance persistence of Islamic and Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) mutual funds. We adopt a multi-stage strategy in which, in the first stage, partial frontiers’ approaches are considered to measure the performance of the different funds in the sample. In the second stage, the results yielded by the partial frontiers are plugged into different investment strategies based on a recursive estimation methodology whose persistence performance is evaluated in the third stage of the analysis. Results indicate that, for both types of funds, performance persistence actually exists, but only for the worst and, most notably, best funds. This result is robust not only across methods (and different choices of tuning parameters within each method) but also across both SRI and Islamic funds—although in the case of the latter persistence was stronger for the best funds. The persistence of SRI and Islamic funds represents an important result for investors and the market, since it provides information on both which funds to invest in and which funds to avoid. Last but not least, the use of the aforementioned techniques in the context of mutual funds could also be of interest for the non-conclusive literature.