The articles in the special issue of Business Ethics Quarterly (2015), “Normative Business Ethics in a Global Economy: New Directions on Donaldsonian Themes,” were written by a set of outstanding scholars: Margaret M. Blair, Joseph P. Gaspar, Nien-hê Hsieh, Peter L. Jennings, Marietta Peytcheva, Andreas Georg Scherer, Amy J. Sepinwall, Andrew Stark, Danielle E. Warren, and Manuel Velasquez. In this commentary I reply to my colleagues, arranging my reply around the following themes: 1) the corporate moral agent; 2) the idea of a social contract for business; 3) managing ethics within corporations; and 4) values in business. I discuss each in turn. However, I reflect first on my idiosyncratic approach to business ethics.

In this address, I outline a “back to basics” approach to specifying the responsibilities and role of business in relation to society. Three “basics” comprise the approach. The first is arguing that basic principles of ordinary morality, such as a duty not to harm, provide an adequate basis for specifying the responsibilities of business managers. The second is framing the role of business in society by looking to the values realized by the basic building blocks of contemporary economic activity, i.e., markets and firms. The third is making explicit the basic institutions that structure the background against which business operates. The aim is to develop a plausible framework for managerial decision making that respects the fact of value pluralism in a global economy and that fosters meaningful criticism of current business practices while remaining sufficiently grounded in contemporary circumstances so as to be relevant for managers.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been hailed as a new means to address gender inequality, particularly by facilitating women’s empowerment. Women are frequently and forcefully positioned as saviours of economies or communities and proponents of sustainability. Using vignettes drawn from a CSR women’s empowerment programme in Ghana, this conceptual article explores unexpected programme outcomes enacted by women managers and farmers. It is argued that a feminist Foucauldian reading of power as relational and productive can help explain this since those involved are engaged in ongoing processes of resistance and self-making. This raises questions about the assumptions made about women and what is it that such CSR programmes aim to empower them ‘from’ or ‘to.’ Empowerment, when viewed as an ethic of care for the self, is better understood as a self-directed process, rather than a corporate-led strategy. This has implications for how we can imagine the achievement of gender equality through CSR.

This article addresses the nature of the interface between corporate sustainability and corporate identity at both the strategic and instrumental levels. We developed an empirical qualitative study in two countries in Southern Europe addressing retailers who are actively engaged in pursuing corporate-sustainability strategies. Data sources include in-depth interviews, observations, and physical artifacts of identity (digital and printed documents). Findings reveal that, at a strategic level, corporate sustainability is embedded in corporate identity reflecting the company’s strategy. Companies also instrumentally use corporate identity to operationalize corporate sustainability strategies. Organizations show different patterns in the way they bridge corporate sustainability and identity. The contributions of this article are threefold: it reports the symbiotic relationship between corporate sustainability and corporate identity; it scrutinizes how corporate sustainability and corporate identity are integrated at the strategic and operational levels; and it establishes distinct patterns at the interface of corporate sustainability and corporate identity.