Kristian Alm

The Fragility of Responsibility : Norway’s Transformative Agenda for Research, Innovation and Business p. 215-244 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111397719-010

This chapter examines the modern evolution of whistleblowing legislation and practice in Norway and its implications for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Our discourse analysis spans legal provisions, scholarly research, and national surveys and reports on whistleblowing. A finding is that the whistleblowing institution is tied to a power inter-est in encouraging employees to speak out, predominantly to prevent severe public interest damage to the population and economy. Yet, we have found that the law’s broad whistleblowing concept has led to the predominance of commonplace personal-related cases within organisations’ whistleblowing channels. Our analysis further aimed to dis-cern whether this prevailing broad understanding of whistleblowing serves the public interest or rather prioritises individual grievances at its expense. Both organisations’ whistleblowing routines and research surveys exploring the landscape of whistleblowing tend to be based on or are bound by the broad whistleblowing concept in the legislation. Consequently, we have limited tools for assessing whetherwhistleblowing serves the public interest and is an efficient mechanism for detecting when CSR fails. We examine recent research indicating an increase in retaliation against whistleblowers. However, the broad whistleblowing concept makes it difficult to discern whether this increase targets public interest reporting, individual grievance reporting, or both. Consequently, our ability to assess the effectiveness of whistleblowing to restore CSR is impaired. The Norwegian Supreme Court recently interpreted the whistleblowing provisions, solidifying a low threshold for what constitutes whistleblowing. A dissenting minority highlighted the provisions’ intent: whistleblowing in the public interest. Against this background, we conclude by providing suggestions for improving the whistleblowing institute and its potential as a CSR mechanism.

Universitetsforlaget Doi: https://doi.org/10.18261/9788215073521-25

Journal of Business Ethics 182 p. 1-18 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-021-04973-3

The paper addresses an understudied but highly relevant group of people within corporate organizations and society in general—the marginalized—as well as their narration, and criticism, of personal lived experiences of marginalization in business. They are conventionally perceived to lack traditional forms of power such as public influence, formal authority, education, money, and political positions; however, they still possess the resources to impact their situations, their circumstances, and the structures that determine their situations. Business ethics researchers seldom consider marginalized people’s voices and experiences as resources to understand their lives, as demonstrated through a review of 7500 articles published in the Journal of Business Ethics and Business Ethics Quarterly (2000–2019). Only 78 studies included aspects of marginalized groups. 69 of those studies discussed the topic of marginalized groups of people, but without integrating their explicit voices into the text. Only 9 of the 78 articles featured marginalized people’s explicit voices about their marginalization experiences incorporated into the text as a source for exploration. None of the identified studies discussed the potential for theorizing based on such voices. This paper contributes to business ethics theory by developing four theoretical possibilities vis-à-vis the critical voices of marginalized people’s experiences in business: (a) marginalized theory on critical agency and freedom of speech; (b) the gatekeeping role of academia; (c) primary sources; and (d) a participative perspective. Discussing the theoretical potential of quoting the above voices can enrich business ethics research in terms of the theoretical understanding of marginalized groups in business.

Handbook of Business Legitimacy. Responsibility, Ethics and Society Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68845-9_18-1

The aim of this chapter is to provide a theory of activist whistleblowing for justice and dignity as the framework for detecting injustice and human rights abuses in business and organizations. This is important for trust and business legitimacy. We suggest that whistleblowing is an important field of human rights in business and essential for creating public awareness of human rights abuses and democratic engagement in promoting human rights in business. In order to develop such a theory, we use the activist work and controversial life of the German journalist and writer Günter Wallraff based on a confrontation with the dominant concepts of whistleblowing in relation to business and human rights.

Journal of Business Ethics Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-020-04474-9

In his political philosophy, John Rawls has a normative notion of reasonable behaviour expected of citizens in a pluralist society. We interpret the various strands of this idea and introduce them to the discourse on stakeholder dialogue in order to address two shortcomings in the latter. The first shortcoming is an unnoticed, artificial separation of words from actions which neglects the communicative power of action. Second, in its proposed new role of the firm, the discourse of political CSR appeared to offer a promising synthesis of deliberation and action. However, the discourse has been criticized for its shortcoming in failing to provide a regulatory environment for corporation—stakeholder dialogue. Through our interpretation of Rawls’ notion of reasonableness in citizens, the article makes two important theoretical contributions to the debate on stakeholder dialogue. First, we transfer Rawls’ injunction in insisting that dialogues between business corporations and their weaker stakeholders must be understood as consisting of both verbal exchanges and actions. Second, we propose that the coercive power of government ought to provide a necessary context for stakeholder dialogue, and that by doing so, it can provide a way forward for the discourse of political CSR. We illustrate the usefulness of this contribution from Rawls in an analysis of BP’s behaviour towards thousands of victims following the Deepwater Horizon blowout in 2010.