Business, Ethics and Society

Key Concepts, Current Debates and Contemporary Innovations

Business, Ethics and Society is the text that business ethicists need now, as expectations about the role business plays in our globally-connected world evolve and grow. John Cullen is remarkably widely read, and uses a vibrant body of materials to add inimitable grounding to ethics topics. Each chapter begins with essential learning objectives and moves through lively discussions, relevant cases, and examples drawing on diverse sources such as Plato and Freud, the New Testament and the panoply of Greek gods, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, academic writing and short fiction. Cullen has crafted a seamless connection among aspects of ethical leadership that every business student must develop and support: individual moral courage, ethical organizational culture, sustainable business practices, and dignity and inclusion for all organizational members.

John Cullen’s book is firmly rooted in established business ethics theory and debates while also engaging – in an impressive way – with new perspectives and the latest research. With such an impressive and comprehensive scope, making engagement easy for students and effective for educators requires clear signposting, summaries of key learning points, invitations to reflection and interesting case studies that support both discussion and application. This book has it all. Above and beyond that, I particularly admired the interdisciplinary range of the book, the use of psychoanalytic theory to shed new light on key debates, and the multiple ways in which the text supports students in the development of their own position on the most critical and pressing ethical issues of our times. It is easy to recommend such a useful, interesting and engaging book.