Since seminal meta-analytical work in 2006 we have witnessed burgeoning research on ethical climates. This article offers a comprehensive review of literature examining the antecedents and outcomes of ethical climates over the last decade, as well as moderators of the relationship between ethical climates and other variables. Based on the review, an agenda for future research is also presented. In addition to highlighting the potential for incorporating alternative theoretical perspectives such as situational strength theory, trait-activation theory, social information processing theory, and institutional theory to better our understanding of ethical climates, this article highlights the need for future research to incorporate a dynamic perspective to study ethical climates, examine the curvilinear effects of ethical climates on work outcomes, extend the study of ethical climates to different levels of the organization, and examine the effects of culture on ethical climates.

We extend the behavioral ethics literature to examining emotional labor as an antecedent to unethical behavior. We hypothesize that surface acting is positively associated with unethical behavior. In contrast, we produce competing hypotheses for the relationship between deep acting and unethical behavior. In Study 1, with a field sample of 123 full-time employees, surface acting was positively associated with unethical behavior, and emotional inauthenticity explained some of this relationship. In contrast, deep acting was not associated with unethical behavior. In Study 2, with a field sample of 117 full-time employees, we replicated the effect of surface acting in Study 1 and found a positive relationship between deep acting and unethical behavior via emotional inauthenticity. In Study 3, using a two-wave design, we replicated the results in Study 2 and found perceived fairness strengthens the relationship between surface acting and unethical behavior through emotional inauthenticity.

This article reviews a conversation between business ethicists and feminist scholars begun in the early 1990s and traces the development of that conversation in relation to feminist theory. A bibliographic analysis of the business ethics (BE) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) literatures over a twenty-five-year period elucidates the degree to which gender has been a salient concern, the methodologies adopted, and the ways in which gender has been analyzed (by geography, issue type, and theoretical perspective). Identifying significant limitations to the incorporation of feminist theory in these literatures, we discuss how feminist scholarship relating to behavior (through psychology and related fields), organizations (through feminist organization studies), and economics (through feminist economics) could be integrated. We suggest that a better integration of feminist theory would strengthen BE/CSR research, and point to new research directions and agendas arising from our approach.

Programs aimed at increasing women’s entrepreneurship are a rapidly proliferating class of CSR initiatives across the globe with participation by many of the world’s largest corporations. The gendered nature of this phenomenon suggests that feminist approaches to CSR may offer a particularly salient mode of their analysis. In this article, I argue that insights from feminist economics regarding the historically prevalent—but narrow and gendered—definition of work, which artificially separates production from reproduction, provide fruitful tools for theory building when conceptualizing gender through the lens of CSR. I demonstrate that the gendered separation of production and reproduction is typically taken as given in entrepreneurship, and that mainstream CSR research has not sufficiently challenged this perspective. I present a conceptual framework of what is to be gained by examining the CSR, entrepreneurship, and feminist economics literatures in combination, and demonstrate how researchers might use this framework for future research.

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.