Critical Management Ethics – By Thomas Klikauer

• Date: 01 May 2011
• Author: Timothy L. Fort
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8683.2011.00849.x
• Published date: 01 May 2011

Book Reviewcorg_849290..291

Thomas Klikauer, Critical Management Ethics, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, Hampshire,

UK, 2010, ISBN-13: 978-0230238251

In baseball, a.500 batting average is sensational.And while

“sensational” is too laudatory an adjective for Thomas

Klikauer’s Critical Management Ethics, he does pull off a

worthy .500 average. On the plus side, Klikauer provides a

bracing message that ethics should not be subservient to

management and profit. It is its own body of scholarship and

the entire practice of management is subject to its critique. In

fact, Klikauer provides a very impressive history of philoso-

phy demonstrating the critical edge philosophy has to

examine the ends as well as means of management. This

work, ranging from virtue approachesto Kantian and Hege-

lian philosophy and Kohlbergian theories of moral develop-

ment, provides a terrific primer for anyone in the field to see

what is really at stake – and what resources are present – to

critique business.

Indeed, not only is this one of Klikauer’s key points, but it

is ironically one shared by those suspicious of having ethics

in business schools at all. My former colleague at the Uni-

versity of Michigan, Aneel Karnani, raised a bit of a ruckus

in 2010 by claiming that business schools do not need ethics.

Social capital, environmental sustainability, quality – they

could all be explained through sound management prac-

tices. While it seems to me that without ethics, traditional

management tends to be blind to issues such as sustainabil-

ity and quality, Karnani – like Klikauer – has a point that if

the bottom line is that “ethics pays” then ethics either has

lost its own, autonomous relevance (Klikauer) or it is just

another management tool that might be substituted with

management theories (Karnani).

While Klikauer’s reminder is welcome, it does seem that

his depiction both of what people are like in business and

what the field of business ethics has offered as critique could

use some development. With respect to the former, the late

Robert Solomon, a highly regarded philosopher inside of

business ethics and outside as well, explicitly noted how

businesses are human institutions and Aristotelian virtues

could be found prominently in it just as they are in any other

human institution. That has been true in my own 25 year

career teaching business ethics. I have begun every one of

my MBA ethics classes with an assignment that asks stu-

dents to identify an action they personallywitnessed in busi-

ness that they thought was good (or ethical – at the

beginning of class, I am not so concerned with the difference

between the two). The stories I get are remarkable not so

much in the presentation of intractable dilemmas, but in the

commonness of genuine human interaction of helping

others when in personal crisis, standing up for principles of

accountability and honesty even if it costs the company

money, and reaching out to those in need outside of the

corporation. In working with the head of the human rights

program of a Fortune 50 company, I was shocked when he

told me that what helped him bring human rights issues to

the fore in his company was not cost-benefit analysis, but the

genuineness of the human story of someone who had been

harmed. Those stories moved his bosses whereas “anyone

who wants to oppose me can come up with better numbers

than I can.” Whole Foods CEO John Mackey has written that

every entrepreneur starts a business for a reason in addition

to making money. It may be that the person wants a form of

self-actualization or simply to show that he can develop a

new business just as successfully as his sibling rival. In short,

money is always in the business picture, but it is not always

the whole picture. And so, the depiction of people in busi-

ness as rather robotic pursuers of profits needs nuancing.

In addition, Klikauer’s presentation of the field of busi-

ness ethics also needs amplification. For instance, he makes

much of the – in his view – distortion of Kant by Norm

Bowie and John Boatight (the latter in a textbook). Assum-

ing, without necessarily agreeing that Klikauer’s criticisms

of Bowie and Boatright are on the mark, if I – and I believe

many ethicists share my view – had to select the central,

defining theories of business ethics today, they would cer-

tainly include the work of Ed Freeman’s and Patricia Wer-

hane’s use of Kantian and other rights-based theories;

Robert Solomon’s and Edwin Hartman’s application of

Aristotelian virtue theory; and Thomas Donaldson and

Thomas Dunfee’s blend of Rawlsian justice with pragmatic

jurisprudence. Yet, none of them are referenced in Klikau-

er’s book; this is a missed opportunity.

Ironically, the reasons that I think Klikauer makes a very

helpful contribution to the field is: 1) he reminds us of the

centrality of ethics principles in evaluating business behav-

ior rather than submitting to monetary gain as proof of their

concepts (just as do the scholars mentioned in the previous

paragraph); and 2) Klikauer’s ethics councils are a neat idea.

The latter brings his batting average back to .500.

290

Corporate Governance: An International Review, 2011, 19(3): 290–291

© 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

doi:10.1111/j.1467-8683.2011.00849.x