Posted: January 27th, 2023
Making in AI refers to the consideration of moral and cultural values in the development and deployment of artificial intelligence systems. This can include issues such as privacy, bias, transparency, and accountability in AI systems, as well as the impact of AI on society and culture. It is an important area of research and discussion as AI technology becomes more advanced and widely used.In your paper,
The Ethics and Cultural Decision Making paper
THOMAS M. JONES WILL FELPS
GREGORY A. BIGLEY University of Washington Business School
We use convergent elements of major ethical theories to create a typology of corporate stakeholder cultures—the aspects of organizational culture consisting of the beliefs, values, and practices that have evolved for solving problems and otherwise manag- ing stakeholder relationships. We describe five stakeholder cultures—agency, corpo- rate egoist, instrumentalist, moralist, and altruist—and explain how these cultures lie on a continuum, ranging from individually self-interested (agency culture) to fully other-regarding (altruist culture). We demonstrate the utility of our framework by showing how it can refine stakeholder salience theory.
Stakeholder theorists view the corporation as a collection of internal and external groups (e.g., shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, creditors, and neighboring communities)—that is, “stakeholders,” originally defined as those who are affected by and/or can affect the achievement of the firm’s objectives (Freeman, 1984). A major theme of stakeholder theory is the nature of the relationships between the firm (typically represented by its top managers) and stakeholders, whose interests often diverge con- siderably not only from those of the firm but also from each other. Early stakeholder theorizing was marked by some conceptual confusion, but Donaldson and Preston’s (1995) three-part taxon- omy—normative (How should the firm relate to its stakeholders?), instrumental (What happens if the firm relates to its stakeholders in certain ways?), and descriptive (How does the firm re- late to its stakeholders?)— helped focus and clarify much stakeholder thinking. The norma- tive questions are particularly important be- cause they differentiate stakeholder theory from other prominent theories in organization sci- ence, such as resource dependence, managerial cognition, and institutional theories.
Although we do not take a normative stance per se, we do focus on the ways that firms man- age relationships with stakeholders and handle
trade-offs among competing stakeholder claims based on the ethical foundations of their corpo- rate cultures. Further conceptual development regarding how firms manage stakeholder rela- tionships seems warranted for two reasons. First, several distinct ethical frameworks have been advanced as potential foundations for managerial decision making with respect to stakeholder matters (e.g., Burton & Dunn, 1996; Evan & Freeman, 1988; Wicks, Gilbert, & Free- man, 1994), raising questions about how these ethical frameworks might be used jointly to in- form a more general model. Second, whereas the focus of attention in stakeholder theory mainly has been on top managers, understood as relatively autonomous decision makers, these managers are often profoundly influenced by the organizational context in which they are embedded (Daft & Weick, 1984; Katz & Kahn, 1978; March & Simon, 1958). This suggests a need to identify organization-level factors that could help us predict how firms manage stakeholder relationships.
Our paper addresses these two points. We first review the diverse ethical theories that have been applied to business and identify a convergent theme—a concern for the interests of others, as opposed to self-interest. We note that managers often feel tension between these two sentiments when they make stakeholder-related decisions, a tension frequently linked to and emanating from stakeholder attributes: power and legitimacy. Next, we describe an ethically
We gratefully acknowledge constructive comments on earlier versions of this paper by Robert Phillips, Shawn Berman, and three anonymous AMR reviewers.
� Academy of Management Review 2007, Vol. 32, No. 1, 137–155.
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based organization-level construct—stake- holder culture—that, we argue, helps resolve this tension and, more generally, influences managerial thinking and behavior with respect to stakeholder relationships. We then develop a punctuated continuum of five stakeholder cul- tures, ranging from fundamentally amoral cul- tures based on individual self-interest to limited morality cultures based on the advancement of shareholder interests and then to broadly moral cultures based on concern for the interests of all stakeholders. We explain how ethical theory might be linked, conceptually if not semanti- cally, to the ethical frameworks commonly un- derstood by corporate managers and, thus, to stakeholder cultures. Finally, to illustrate the value of the stakeholder culture construct, we show how it would alter the predictions yielded by Mitchell, Agle, and Wood’s (1997) stakeholder salience model.
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