Editor-in-Chief

Professor & Chair HR/OB and Associate Dean, International Relations,

BML Munjal University, India

We are delighted to launch the Journal of Business, Ethics & Society (JBES) with this inaugural issue. JBES is an inter-disciplinary, peer-reviewed journal that publishes both theoretical and empirical research on a broad range of topics with regard to business management, business ethics and societal well-being. Broadly JBES focuses on the intersectionality of ethics and businesses, ethics and civil societies, and also on topics such as corporate social responsibility, social entrepreneurship and power dynamics.

XLRI, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand, India

Currently, NASA and several outer space industry multi-billionaire entrepreneurs (e.g. Elon Musk (Space X), Jeff Bezos (Blue Origin), Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic)), are actively engaged in outer-space research that reports innovative advances such as, outer space: mining, tourism, medicine labs, terraforming Mars and the Moon, and altering celestial bodies and terrestrial humans to enhance extra-terrestrial survivability. All these advances unearth serious ethical concerns of human identity and cosmic sustainability that we address here. Further, the current understanding of sustainability development (SD) is highly anthropocentric (i.e., the earth is meant solely for man’s use), and limited in scope as a terrestrial, temporal, economic and pro-human project. We expand SD to include trans-terrestrial, trans-temporal, trans-economic, and trans-human developments. We view this complex problem by distinguishing anthropocentric (nature is for man) versus non-anthropocentric (man is for nature) modern views of natural sustainability; Each view can be made to include either natural outcomes / processes of nature, or industrial uses and outcomes of nature to provide a four-fold framework of Natural Sustainability within which we explore ethical implications of outer space advances (OSA). We discuss managerial implications and limitations and suggest directions for future research.

Management and Organization Department, Ramon V. del Rosario College of Business,

De La Salle University, Phillipines

Employee participation plays an important role in the success of corporate social responsibility programmes, but there are limited studies that understand the drivers of employee volunteerism in the Philippines. Clary and Snyder’s functional motivation theory was drawn upon in determining the six kinds of volunteer motivations in this study conducted on employees from Pilipinas Shell Petroleum Corporation and SM Investment Corporation. The respondents were divided by gender, age group, and volunteer experience to see whether these factors would significantly affect motivation; only volunteer experience emerged as significant in the findings. Another interesting finding is that employees are more inspired to volunteer when they can learn something new, and furthermore that women are more motivated by the social motive than men and are thus more likely to volunteer when their friends do so.

Saybrook University, USA

2020 was replete with complex leadership lessons. Multi-level societal experiences and ethical issues emerged with unprecedented speed. The global health pandemic known as COVID-19 was followed by the racial awakening – a response to the underlying pandemic of systemic racism. Amid this chaos, there was a weekly gathering throughout 2020 with the intention of creating a safe space for group reflection, dialogue, ethical inquiries and support. An opportunity for a PAUSE was created, informed in part by the work of Otto Scharmer. Leadership roles became an object of inquiry in congruence with their humanity. The method of convening, Circle, framed the support for the engagement and inquiry processes. This article describes how a group of professionals examined their leadership and sought to apply learnings while supporting one another – an adaptive leadership response that changed and strengthened their ethical leadership capacity.

Artificial intelligence today continues to assimilate into our modern service industry occupations such as business, economics and health care. It is predicted that AI will continue to develop exponentially as a business staple and will follow a similar path to The Internet and Social Media in terms of growth opportunities and also the criticality to business. The concern for many, including Dr. Tae Wan Kim, associate professor of ethics at Carnegie Mellon University, is how the ethics of AI will affect individuals and society. In his recent book review, Machines Like Me, Kim writes on the varied ethical systems potentially used in AI training as he discusses the character development of the text. Whether a deontological approach or a consequentialist approach, AI is only as good as the training and the data provided. In this interview he says that to really address ethics issues in AI, much more funding should be given to moral philosophy and applied ethics.