Joan Fontrodona
professor
Business Ethics
IESE Business School Universidad de Navarra
Spain
Biography
Joan Fontrodona Felip is professor and chairman of business ethics and academic director of the IESE Center for Business in Society. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy and an MBA in Management. The Center for Business Ethics (Bentley College), Harvard Business School and Universidad Francisco Marroquín (Guatemala) have all welcomed Prof. Fontrodona as a visiting scholar/fellow. He is the Chairman of Etica, Economía y Dirección (the Spanish branch of the European Business Ethics Network), and member of the executive committee of the Association of Spanish Entities adhering to the United Nations' Global Compact (ASEPAM). He also serves on the academic board of the European Academy of Business in Society (EABIS). He is a member of Forética, as well as associate researcher at the Enterprise and Humanism Institute of the University of Navarra. He also serves on the Commission for Social Responsibility of the Board of Auditors Censors of Catalonia (Colegio de Censores Jurados de Cuentas de Catalunya).
Research Interest
Areas of Interest * Corporate social responsibility * Business ethics policies and practices * Anthropological and ethical foundations for management * Ethics in decision-making * Business and society relations
Publications
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This paper introduces 'Virtue and Virtuousness: When will the twain ever meet?' a special edition of Business Ethics: A European Review. The Call for Papers invited contributions that could inform the relationship between organisational virtuousness, as conceptualised by positive organisation studies, and the classical conception of virtues pertaining to individual women and men. While the resources of particular virtue traditions -- Aristotelian, Catholic, Confucian, and the like -- could inform their own debates as to whether virtue extends beyond individuals, the debate between virtue traditions and positive organisation studies has a different dimension. The question is whether the claims of positive social sciences as such are compatible with those of any virtue tradition. We argue that positive social science and virtue traditions are indeed rivals such that adherence to the claims of the one precludes adherence to the other. Resolution to such conflicts requires that one tradition is able to resolve questions that exhaust the resources of the other. This paper suggests that at least one area of incoherence in the findings of positive social sciences can be resolved by virtue traditions, and introduces the remaining papers in the special edition.
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Christian ethics applied to economics and business has a long tradition. This dates back at least to the thirteenth century, with noteworthy developments in the four following centuries and again in the last century. Christian faith and reason intertwine to bring about principles, criteria, and guidelines for action and a set of virtues with relevance for economic activity. Christian spirituality, with 2000 years of history, has been embedded in Christianity from its beginning, but the application to modern business activity is relatively recent. This article introduces a special issue which, we hope, will make its own small contribution to the developments of both Christian ethics and spirituality in the leading business organizations. After a short historical overview and a consideration of the current situation of Christian ethics and spirituality in business, we introduce the papers selected for this issue.
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In light of the recent crisis and its aftershocks, it becomes crucial to reflect on the relationship between finance and accounting and on how to integrate ethics and efficiency, as well as on how to motivate and empower practitioners in the world of finance to commit to justice, fairness and enhanced understanding, and to improving their personal integrity. This article, written as an editorial introduction to a special issue includes works related to control measurement and ethical behavior, misbehaviors in finances and accounting, professionalism in accounting, ethical investing and corporate reporting. We conclude by suggesting further research for a better integration of technical aspects of accounting and finances into business activity-human activity actually-and an for understanding of ethics not limited to rules, but as a mutual and interdependent system of values (human goods), virtues, and principles.
