Selected Articles Published or Under Review
Federated Corporate Social Responsibility: Constraining the Responsible Corporation
Published 2022
Academy of Management Review
Coauthored with Matthew Caulfield
Corporate responses to social ills are often not evaluated in terms of expanding corporate power and overreach. This article explores a "federated" vision of CSR built from older institutional approaches to corporate power, paying particular attention to the division of moral labor in society and how CSR affects the larger social ecosystem.
Why “Doing Well by Doing Good” Went Wrong: Getting Beyond “Good Ethics Pays” Claims in Managerial Thinking
Published 2020
In recent decades, numerous voices in managerial scholarship and business ethics have championed conciliatory business strategies capable of achieving both economic and social ends. This article reviews how these “good ethics pays” or “win–win” claims generally rely on poor or incomplete conceputalization while not standing up to empirical testing.
Ethics, Economics, and the Specter of Naturalism: The Enduring Relevance of the Harmony Doctrine School of Economics
Published 2020
This article revisits the "harmony doctrine" school of economics (1835–1860) and its distinctive understanding of how ethics and economics intersect. Harmony doctrine thinkers staked out a “natural” understanding of economic phenomena that in many ways fused the classical political economy of Adam Smith with the earlier French Physiocratic School.
MacIntyre, Managerialism, and Metatheory: Organizational Theory as an Ideology of Control
Published 2017
While many approaches to organizations focus on technical processes and resource allocation, this article examines the metatheoretical underpinnings of organizational theory that may distort our understanding of the conflicts and power at play. At the center of such distortions are objective or "scientific" portrayals of human behavior that inform organizational techniques of control.
[Title Redacted] On Stakeholder Theory
Submitted 2023
Currently Under Review
While stakeholder capitalism has generated new enthusiasm as a paradigm for navigating ethics and economics, many accounts of the paradigm remain vague in their proposal for reforms. This article draws on a close reading of stakeholder theory to capture diverging strands within the stakeholder conversation. This analysis suggests it is voices on the margins of this conversation that are advancing the most robust accounts of reforming or "fixing" economic behaviors or institutions.
[Title Redacted] On Manipulation and Meaningful Work
Submitted 2022
Currently Under Review
While scholars have long drawn interest in the settings that make work and labor meaningful, these inquiries often omit any account or definition of manipulation. This paper seeks to construct a more developed account of how scholarship undertaken in this field can speak to questions of power, control, and manipulation while also honoring the humanistic desires for meaningful and enjoyable work.
Articles In Progress (Available on Request)
Organizing Good Work: The Separate but Equal Problem in Dual-Purpose Organizations
Both employers and workers desire values-driven work settings, but these values can fall in conflict with economic goals of competitive advantage, growth, and profit. This article examines several organizations with unusual governance structures to gain new insights on how dual purpose or hybrid organizations develop, enact, and preserve values and mission to extra-economic goals.
CSR & Racial Justice: Revisiting Public-Private Targeted Hiring Programs, 1960-1973
Many corporations have today assumed expanded responsibilities in addressing racial and structural injustices, often attaching such efforts to CSR, ESG, and DEI initiatives. This article reviews an earlier era in corporate social action that pursued similar objectives. A reconstructed historical account of these efforts explores familiar tensions between public versus private initiatives, benevolence versus justice orientations, and social versus economic objectives.
Ethical Egoism and its Limits
This paper provides a historically and philosophically informed overview of the notion of "good ethics pay" that dominate discussions of CSR, ESG, and DEI initiatives. After tracing back these ideas to Puritan and Deistic understandings of good behavior yielding personal reward, this paper examines three limits or blindspots within the modern ideas around self-rewarding virtue or ethical action. While such thinking certainly serves as a valuable component of strategic thinking, this paper draws out the need for far broader moral logics to guide economic enterprises.