ABSTRACT. Over the last twenty years the organi-zation of business activity appears to have shifted froman emphasis on bureaucratic organizations toward anemphasis on market structures. Economic self-interesthas acquired a new social legitimacy, and the forceof traditional moral authorities has waned. In thesecircumstances the work of Emile Durkheim on theproblematics of business ethics and the impact of aculture of self-interest on the stability of society, workthat has hitherto been neglected by the business ethicscommunity, acquires a new relevance. In this paperwe review Durkheim’s problematization of businessethics, establish its relevance for the contemporaryworld, and use it to develop an empirical researchagenda for the contemporary sociology of businessethics.

KEY WORDS: Durkheim, moral practice, neweconomy, sociology of ethics

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Frenchsociologist Emile Durkheim drew attention tothe dangers that might be faced by a society inwhich the industry and commerce were rapidlybecoming the dominant functions. Durkheimwas not a naïve or reactionary moralist. Hebelieved that moral rules were socially con-structed and that they would and should changeas society evolved. But his study of the sociologyof morals had left him convinced that that thehealth of a society depended critically on thepresence of some moral discipline and authority,by which the selfish and ultimately self-destruc-tive desires of its members might be constrained.His studies had also led him to the convictionthat in a complex and differentiated modernsociety such moral discipline was required notonly at the individual and social levels but also,if it was to be effective, at the intermediary levelof the social group or profession. While theestablished professions were all governed by well-defined ethical codes, the realm of businessappeared to Durkheim to lie largely outside themoral sphere and to be characterized by analmost unfettered pursuit of self-interest. His fearwas that this lack of professional ethics wouldeventually destroy not only the function ofbusiness but also, as this function grew more andmore dominant, society itself.

Durkheim’s fears were not immediatelyrealised. In the early part of the twentieth centurythe social organization of business changeddramatically from an entrepreneurial model char-acterised by the individual pursuit of economicself-interest to a bureaucratic model based onlarge scale organizations in which traditionalmoral values held sway. Durkheim’s influencewaned and although his moral writings were a

After Durkheim: AnAgenda for the Sociology of Business Ethics

John Hendry

Journal of Business Ethics

34: 209–218, 2001.© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

John Hendry is Reader in Management at BirkbeckCollege, University of London, a Fellow of GirtonCollege, Cambridge and Adjunct Professor ofInternational Business Ethics at the University of NotreDame. Before moving to Birkbeck in 2000 he servedon the facilities of London Business School, CranfieldSchool of Management and the Judge Institute ofManagement Studies at the University of Cambridge,where he was founder director of the Cambridge MBA.His current and recent research includes projects onagency theory and CEO pay, stakeholder theory, thepolitics of regulation, socio-political aspects of corporategovernance in Korea, and the sociology of business ethics.

seminal influence on the psychology of ethics,the sociology of ethics was largely neglected. Thesociology of management focused on the char-acteristics of bureaucracy rather than on those ofmarkets and was built upon Weberian founda-tions. Business ethics also focused on the problemsfacing managers within business organizations,and addressed these using the pre-Durkheimianresources of traditional moral philosophy.

In the last twenty years, however, the land-scape has changed again. Bureaucracy has goneout of fashion and markets have come in. In thenew world of network organizations and theflexible economy, everybody is an entrepreneurand the pursuit of economic self-interest hascome to characterize not only business enterprisebut management as well. For the first time inhistory, indeed, it seems as if egoism has becomenot just a fact of life but a socially legitimatemoral perspective. Meanwhile, it also appears thatthe institutional support for traditional moralauthority has continued to decay. In this context,we suggest, Durkheim’s analysis is once againextremely relevant. Indeed, if his arguments weresound and if the assumptions he made aboutmoral attitudes and behaviour should turn out tobe accurate – for our time, not for his – we maywell be faced with a very serious problem indeed.

In this paper we shall begin by describingDurkheim’s problematization of business ethics.Surveying very briefly the changing nature ofbusiness from his time to our own, we shall thenseek to establish the current relevance of hiswork, before using his problematization to for-mulate an empirical research agenda for thecontemporary sociology of business ethics.

Emile Durkheim and the problematic ofbusiness ethics

Emile Durkheim was probably the first person toaddress the problems of business ethics in termsthat are readily recognisable today. Durkheim’sgeneral concern with the sociology of moralsdominated his teaching at the Universities ofBordeaux and Paris and permeated his majorwritings. As Robert T. Hall (1987) has shown,The Division of Labour in Society, Suicide and The

Elementary Forms of Religious Life can all be seenas part of a lifelong programme of research intowhat he called the science of moral facts.References to the ethics of business crop up inseveral of his writings, but the main discussionsare in The Division of Labour in Society, first pub-lished in 1893 as De la division du travail social,and in Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, aposthumously published work based on thesurviving manuscripts of the lectures on thenature of morals and rights he delivered atBordeaux between 1890 and 1900 and subse-quently at the Sorbonne.1

In the first of these lectures, concerned withprofessional ethics, Durkheim drew attention towhat he called a “crisis” in French societyresulting from the expansion over the previous200 years of the realm of business or economiclife. From being a secondary function of society,business had become arguably its most dominantfunction, eclipsing established professions,science, religion and even the functions of thestate (Durkheim, 1957, p. 11). In contrast to theother functions of society, in the sphere ofbusiness, trade and industry,

no professional ethics exist. . . . If we were toattempt to fix in definite language the ideas currenton what the relations should be of the employeewith his chief, of the workman with the manager,of the rival manufacturers with each other and withthe public – what vague and equivocal formulas weshould get! Some hazy generalizations on theloyalty and devotion owed by staff and workmento those employing them; some phrases on themoderation the employer should use in hiseconomic dominance; some reproaches for any tooovertly unfair competition – that is about all thereis in the moral consciousness of the various pro-fessions we are discussing. Injunctions as vague andas far removed from the facts as these could nothave any great effect on conduct. Moreover, thereis nowhere any organ with the duty of seeing theyare enforced. They have no sanctions other thanthose which a diffused public opinion has at hand,and since that opinion is not kept lively by frequentcontact between individuals and since it thereforecannot exercise enough control over individualactions, it is lacking both in stability and inauthority. The result is that professional ethicsweigh very lightly on the consciousnesses and are

210 John Hendry

reduced to something so slight that they might aswell not be. Thus, there exists to-day a wholerange of collective activity outside the sphere ofmorals and which is almost entirely removed fromthe moderating effect of obligations (Durkeim,1957, pp. 9–10).

Durkheim was far from being the first to noticethis tendency of business and economic life toreplace the discipline of socially imposed moralrules with a combination of economic contractsand an individualistic ethical egoism, but he wasone of the first to explore its problematic. Theclassical economists had argued that the indus-trial system would be self-adjusting and reachstability without any need for constraining forces.The socialists had in effect accepted thisargument, envisaging a socialist State as engagedsolely with the redistribution of economic wealthand not with the moral discipline of economicactivity itself. Herbert Spencer, whose influen-tial views Durkheim was particularly concernedto counter (especially in The Division of Labour),had seen the freedom from moral constraint as apositive development, emancipating the indi-vidual from the coercive constraints of society.For Durkheim, however, this represented aprofound misunderstanding both of industrialsociety, in which he saw the sphere of the socialgrowing and becoming more complex ratherthan shrinking, and of the nature of morality insociety (Durkheim in Bellah, 1973, p. 89ff).

According to Durkheim’s analysis, presentedmost fully in his lectures on Moral Education,morality was essentially a social rather than anindividual phenomenon, characterised by a dis-cipline of a kind that market structures alonecould not provide (Durkheim, 1973). The focusof this discipline, in terms of particular moralrules, varied from society to society and fromperiod to period, but the elements of disciplineand authority were essential to any moral struc-ture and to any viable social structure. As heargued in Professional Ethics and Civic Morals,

It is not possible for a social function to existwithout moral discipline. Otherwise, nothingremains but individual appetites, and since they areby nature boundless and insatiable, if there isnothing to control them they will not be able tocontrol themselves (Durkheim, 1957, pp. 10–11).

In every other sphere of life, apart from that ofbusiness, morality curtailed the appetites of theindividual, and in so doing enabled both indi-viduals and societies to develop in a balanced,healthy and constructive way. In economic life,however, what appeared on the surface to be aharmony of interests concealed a latent conflict:

For where interest is the only ruling force eachindividual finds himself in a state of war with everyother since nothing comes to mollify the egos, andany truce in this eternal antagonism would not beof long duration. There is nothing less constantthan interest (Durkheim in Bellah, 1973, p. 89).

With nothing to restrain the economicallypowerful from crushing the less powerful andreducing them to a state of subjection, andnothing to restrain the subjected from seekingand fighting for revenge, Durkheim argued thatno social order based on economic relationshipscould be anything other than temporary andunstable.2

Lying outside the sphere of morality, then, theeconomic function of society was inherentlyunstable. But that was not all. Economic life didnot just evade moral discipline. It pushed inprecisely the opposite direction, encouragingintemperance, greed and ultimately insatiabledesires, and as the economic function grew inimportance it was the influence this must haveon the rest of society that created the crisis towhich Durkheim referred.

This amoral character of public life amounts to apublic danger. The functions of this order to-dayabsorb the energies of the greater part of thenation. The lives of a host of individuals are passedin the industrial and commercial sphere. Hence, itfollows that, as those in this milieu have only a faintimpress of morality, the greater part of their exis-tence is passed divorced from any moral influence.How could such a state of affairs fail to be a sourceof demoralization? (Durkheim, 1957, p. 12)

We should note that Durkheim had nothingagainst business or its practitioners. The problem,as he saw it, was simply that the growth ofbusiness had outpaced the growth of the socialinstitutions that would be needed to accommo-date it as the central function of a stable and

After Durkheim: An Agenda for the Sociology of Business Ethics 211

healthy society. His proposed solution to thisproblem, based on his analysis of the division oflabour in society, was the development of amodern equivalent of the mediaeval guilds: a setof social structures through which competingentrepreneurs, managers and workers mightdevelop professional ethics appropriate to theirparticular trades or businesses in analogy with theethics that already governed professional practicessuch as teaching, law, medicine or the army.These modern guilds, he envisaged, mightprovide the moral discipline necessary for socialsolidarity and stability, stipulating for their com-munities the boundaries of competition, the rulesgoverning the relationships between employersand workers, and so on. They would tailor themorality of society to the needs of economic life,and in so doing they would also help society toidentify how existing moral ideals might needto be changed to cope with the reality of achanging world (Durkheim, 1957, pp. 13–17).

Business ethics in the twentieth century:the preoccupation with bureaucracy

We can perhaps see in the rise of trade associa-tions and chambers of commerce, the latterparticularly influential in Durkheim’s France,some response to the need for social structuresin which the competitive self-interest of enter-prise could be contained within a framework ofmoral discipline. There is evidence in particularthat small companies within a geographic regionsee themselves not merely as competitors but asmembers of a moral community with reciprocalties and obligations (e.g.: Oughton and Whittam,1997). The most significant feature of thedevelopment of business in the twentieth century,however, was one that Durkheim did not predict.The rise of large bureaucratic business organiza-tions served both to avert the crisis he hadidentified and to shift the focus of scholars awayfrom that crisis, to other concerns.

The rise of the modern bureaucratic corpora-tion, well documented by Chandler and others,had nothing to do with ethics (Chandler, 1962,1977; Chandler and Daems, 1980; Lazonick,1991). But it did impact significantly on the

relationship between business ethics and society.For in ethical terms, the corporation had muchmore in common with the society in which itwas located than with the market in which it wasdesigned to compete. The risk to society thatDurkheim identified resulted from a growingproportion of its members living the greater partof their lives according to the rules of marketself-interest. But in the industrial society thatdeveloped in the twentieth century, the greatmajority of its participants spent their lives inorganizations that were, in the main, governedby the traditional norms of mutual obligation andmoral constraint. Whatever the purpose of anindustrial corporation, its employees, from theshop floor to the CEO, were not expected toact according to the dictates of self-interest, butin the communal interests of the firm quasociety.3 Employees were expected to be loyal tothe firm rather than to their private interests, andthe firm in return, through the stewardship ofits senior managers, was loyal to them. The valuesof competitive self-interest, while remainingcentral to the industrial system, were effectivelyconfined to the relatively invisible realm ofcommercial interactions between much morevisible, traditionally moral organizations. Thedangers to which Durkheim had drawn attentionwere held at bay.

The new bureaucratic form of business alsopreoccupied scholars. In general terms, theacademic discipline of management was builtupon a Weberian rather than a Durkheimianfoundation, focusing on bureaucracies rather thanon markets and on issues to do with efficiencyand control rather than on ethics. The disciplineof business ethics focused on the application ofmoral philosophy to the ethical problems facingsenior managers in business organizations, andpaid scant attention to markets (Boatright, 1999).Outside management studies, sociologists gen-erally showed little interest in moral values,presumably because they appeared to be muchthe same from one sector of society to another,while moral philosophers showed no interestwhatsoever in sociology. For them the questionwas not “which ethics”, for everyone seemed tobe agreed on that, but, continuing to employ therationalist approach that Durkheim and his

212 John Hendry

contemporaries, the American pragmatists, hadfound so unsatisfactory, “why ethics”.

The sociology of business ethics was notentirely neglected. Melville Dalton’s pioneeringethnographic study of industrial management inthe late 1940s and 1950s, Men who Manage(1959), began to explore some of the moraleffects of business bureaucracy, as managersstruggled to operate effectively within andaround inappropriately rigid rules and proce-dures. In the 1960s, Joseph Bensman (1967)described the moral codes of the advertisingindustry, and in the 1970s Gerald Mars (1982)explored the workplace practices of fiddling andpilfering. Most significantly, in Moral Mazes,researched in the 1980s, Robert Jackall (1988)used semi-structured interviews in two largemature and bureaucratic American manu-facturing corporations to explore further thepractical effects of bureaucracy. Like Daltonbefore him, he found that while the moralrhetoric of business and society might be thesame the practices were very different, as withinthe business corporation moral practice becameinstrumentalized and morality became indistin-guishable from self-interest. This was not,however, the self-interest of the market entre-preneur but that of the anxiety-ridden individualstruggling for survival within the highly politi-cised context of mature and decaying organiza-tions within declining industries, in which theperceived inequities and power struggles con-flicted with the traditional moral values offairness and justice, compassion, loyalty and care.

The flexible economy and the rise ofmarket ethics

In the last twenty years the organization ofbusiness has changed dramatically. Although mostbusiness organizations retain significant elementsof hierarchy and bureaucracy, the type of rigidbureaucracy studied by Dalton and Jackall can nolonger be taken as typical. The balance of orga-nizations has shifted, the problems of bureaucracyhave receded, and those of the market havereturned to the foreground. In the flexibleeconomy of the late twentieth and early twenty

first centuries, the relationships between firmsand their employees, and the relationshipsbetween employees, are increasingly governed,quite openly, by the rules of the market ratherthan by those of traditional moral obligation. TheCEO and senior managers are routinelydescribed as self-interested agents, whose effortson behalf of the organization cannot be assumedbut have to be secured through ever-more-generous incentives aligned to the company’sstock price ( Jensen and Murphy, 1990). Youngermanagers and other employees are still expectedto show some loyalty to the corporation (thepower imbalance between employer andemployed remains) but are offered none inreturn: they too are expected to act as free agents– free to construct their own careers throughlimited tenures in multiple organizations, or tofind themselves unemployed when things gobadly (Bridges, 1995; Peiperl et al., 2000).

It is also possible to argue, moreover, that asDurkheim feared, this marketization of businesslife has also penetrated other aspects of society.In public and political life, in particular, citizenshave come to be treated as consumers andeconomic growth has become an end in itselfrather than a means to some morally desirableend (see e.g. Mintzberg, 1996; see also Marcuse,1961). People have always been selfish but theselfish pursuit of economic gain has now become,for what may well be the first time ever, a sociallylegitimate aim and motivation. To say with the1980s financial entrepreneurs that “greed isgood” may not, in the 2000s, be acceptable. Butthat is only because the word “greed” has goneout of our vocabulary. The practices of WallStreet have not changed – and they have spreadwell beyond Wall Street (Newton, 2000). Freemarkets, fuelled by egoism, are the gods of ourage, and to behave, in all walks of life, as aparticipant in such markets, pursuing one’seconomic self-interest, is seen not merely as themark of an effective entrepreneur but as that ofa rational and healthy person (e.g. Cox, 1999).

The nature, origins and extent of thesechanges are open to debate. But however oneinterprets the situation, the progressive weak-ening of the traditional moral authorities of state,church and family, and the corresponding

After Durkheim: An Agenda for the Sociology of Business Ethics 213

expansion of the accepted sphere of legitimateself-interest, seem incontrovertible. In thiscontext, the arguments and concerns ofDurkheim acquire a new salience. In importantrespects, business and society today stand in muchthe same relationship as they seemed to him todo a century ago. If his analysis is correct, andmarket self-interest proves to be both corrosiveof moral values throughout society and unable,in itself, to support a stable society, then we arefaced with a very serious social problem –arguably, indeed, with the single most importantproblem facing our society today. In theremainder of the paper we shall explore some ofthe research questions to which this possibilitygives rise.

The sociology of business ethics: a research agenda

Durkheim’s problematization of business ethicsraises three important research questions for thesociology of ethics:

1. According to what practical precepts dopeople behave, in moral terms, (a) insideand (b) outside the context of business, andhow is this changing?

2. To the extent that these behaviours differ,are they mutually compatible, or does oneundermine the other?

3. How stable would a society or section ofsociety be, in which behaviour wasgoverned solely by the precepts of self-interest, without the constraining effects ofmoral discipline?

Durkheim’s analysis embodied answers to allthree questions. For all his emphasis on thescientific aspect of sociological method, however,and on the determination of moral “facts” (seee.g. Durkheim, 1973, 1982), these answers wereessentially theoretical rather than empirical. Theywere also framed in the context of late nine-teenth and early twentieth century France, andmay well not be applicable to the emergingglobal society of the early twenty first century,with its strong American influence.

If we are to engage with the problematic of

business ethics in contemporary society, the firstquestion we must address is how people behavein a business context. Durkheim, for whom thetypical businessperson was the individual entre-preneur, assumed that in business, people behaveas rational economic actors, pursuing theireconomic self-interest within the framework ofthe law and of contractual relationships, but withlittle or no regard to any moral precepts. He didnot suggest that they were in any way immoral,but he argued that within the competitive realmof business such moral discipline as might existin other realms of life was of little moment. Thischaracterization ties in with more moderncharacterizations of business as an amoral or“ludic” arena, in which people willingly set asidetheir domestic mores and play instead by theegoistic rules of the game, and may well be anapt description of contemporary business practice(Carroll, 1987). But beyond anecdote andinformal experience and observation, we havelittle evidence of that.

There has in fact been remarkably little recentresearch on moral values in business. Theevidence we have, based partly on interviews butmainly on surveys, paints a consistent picture ofmanagers and employees espousing traditionalmoral values but feeling themselves underconstant pressure, in a business setting, to com-promise those values – either as in Jackall’s studyin the interests of survival or, more generally, tomeet the economic performance targets imposedon them ( Jackall, 1988; Baumhart, 1968; Lincolnet al., 1982; Posner and Schmidt, 1987; Jones andGautschi, 1988). However, the bulk of thisevidence predates both the rise of networkorganizations and the flexible economy and thesingle-minded focus on economic performanceand value added that emerged from the severecompetitive environment of the 1980s and early1990s.

Drawing on the theoretical resources of criticaltheory, Stanley Deetz (1992) has argued that thepower-knowledge relations and financial imper-atives of modern business organizations inevitablydrive out value considerations from manageriallife, with the implication that what begins as apressure to compromise moral values ends up bysuppressing them completely. Even in a bureau-

214 John Hendry

cratic business organization, it is suggested, thepeople who survive and prosper will, in thelonger run, be precisely those who espouse theethics of economic self-interest, and not thosewho go along with it reluctantly. RichardSennett’s empirical study of the participants inthe flexible economy, The Corrosion of Character(1998), suggests that while the rhetoric of moralobligation is retained, the values associated withit are not. Contemporary organizations proclaimthe virtues of teamwork as well as those of self-interest, but Sennett found in the teamwork ethicnothing more than a shallow fiction, with asurface veneer of cooperation masking a realityof intense internal competition. Sennett’s con-clusions are provocative, but his sample was smalland very selective. Deetz’s arguments are entirelytheoretical. If we ask how people behave morallyin business today – what values they espouse intheory and what values they honour in practice– the honest answer must be that we simply don’tknow.

We do know a little more about moral atti-tudes in general, but even here our knowledgeis effectively restricted to one (sub-)society, thatof suburban middle-class U.S.A. Sociologicalresearch in the late twentieth century has tendedto focus either on specific settings (the sociologyof education, of the family, of the inner city, andso on) or on issues of social stratification,deviance, gender and role, and for the most partDurkheim’s “moral facts” have been treated onlyas secondary (and largely uninteresting) aspectsof these primary concerns. The one exceptionto this is in American studies of suburbanization,in which ethical values have been a centralconcern. These studies, including Robert Bellahand associates’ best-selling Habits of the Heart(1985), M.P. Baumgartner’s Moral Order of aSuburb (1988) and Alan Wolfe’s more recent OneNation after All (1998), tell a consistent story ofthe continuing belief in traditional moral valuesaccompanied by an increasing preoccupationwith the self and a progressive weakening of thesocial ties through which moral values areenforced and upheld. The lasting image fromHabits of the Heart is of people assiduouslypursuing their economic self-interest through abusiness career, realising in middle age that there

must be more to life, and switching to the equallydevoted pursuit of self-discovery through therapyand related activities – while all the timeupholding their belief in traditional morality.Wolfe characterizes the situation in the mid-1990s by the phrase “morality writ small”.Though middle-class Americans still believed intraditional moral values and lamented theapparent decline in these values, as indicated onone hand by rising crime and divorce rates andon the other hand by increasing discrepanciesbetween rich and poor and a growing obsessionwith monetary gain, they were very reluctant toassert their values in public or impose them onother people.

These studies tell us a lot about the complex-ities of American individualism and the effects ofsuburbanization, but they do not explicitlyaddress the relationship between moral values andparticipation in business and they tell us nothingabout the values of other cultures. Statistics oncrime, divorce, illegitimacy and other indicatorsof moral practice are more widely available, andthese show convincingly that in so far as tradi-tional moral discipline can be measured in theseways it is in sharp decline (for a concise summarysee Fukuyama, 1999). However some of theindicators may be more plausibly interpreted asa reflection of evolving morals than as anindication of moral laxity, while others have littleif anything to do with the moral values of societyat large. As with the moral practices of business,our empirical knowledge of the moral beliefs andpractices of everyday life is still extraordinarilylimited.

Providing empirical answers to the first of ourquestions must surely be the first priority for acontemporary sociology of business ethics. If itshould turn out that the realm of business hascome to be characterised by economic egoismand an absence of traditional moral concerns, andthat while life outside business may still begoverned by traditional moral values the institu-tional support and authority for those values iscontinuing to weaken (all of which seems quitelikely though it has yet to be demonstratedempirically), we shall then need to address thesecond question. How compatible are the codesof economic self-interest and traditional moral

After Durkheim: An Agenda for the Sociology of Business Ethics 215

duty? Can they exist side by side in the individualpsyche or social consciousness, each applicable toits own area of activity? Or is there a chance,perhaps even a likelihood that the continuedpervasiveness of economic self-interest will indue course undermine what is left of traditionalmoral values and result, as Durkheim feared, ina further demoralization of society?

It is certainly possible for people to live by twoquite different conflicting moral codes, if thecircumstances under which each is applicable areclearly defined. Primitive tribes, for example,may have quite different moral codes for theinteractions between kin and non-kin,4 andthroughout history societies have limited theapplicability of moral obligations by treatingselected social or racial groups as “non-people”.The Wall Street trader whose work is conductedthrough the impersonal medium of prices on acomputer screen may have no difficulty abidingby different morals at work and at home,remaining quite untroubled by any potentialmoral consequences of his trading actions. Evenhere, however, the example of Ivan Boeskyreminds us that Durkheim’s observations on thesocial repercussions of a realm of activity inwhich no limit is placed upon human greedcannot be completely ignored (Singer, 1997).When we turn to managers, whose work revolvesaround relationships with other people (col-leagues, reports, customers and so on), theseparation of distinct realms of activity becomesharder. On one hand, the economic pressures andthe emerging cultural norms of business bothdemand that we treat people in a business contextas moral non-people, as mere means with whichto achieve selfish economic objectives. On theother hand, the most deeply embedded moraltraditions of society demand that we treat allpeople, whether at work or at home, as Kantianends and not as mere means. Though there hasnot, as yet, been any research on this topic, itwould seem reasonable to suppose that thisconflict must give rise to some measure ofcognitive dissonance, and the only escape fromthis dissonance – given the economic and polit-ical pressures of the business environment –might well be to treat everybody as a means toone’s own ends, at home as well as at work.

We cannot say how great a risk this is withoutcareful and detailed research into the dynamicrelationships between work and home ethics. Towhat extent do the “moral” practices of businessinfluence those of family and social life, orvice-versa? On what does any influence depend?It may well depend, in part, on the culturalsetting. Weber’s thesis on capitalism and theprotestant work ethic may now be discredited,but the researches of Bellah and associates (1985)and Wolfe (1998) suggest that many middle classAmericans, with an individualistic conception ofmorality, have no difficulty reconciling thismorality with economic self-interest. In a highlyindividualistic culture moral discipline takes onan individualistic aspect and morality and self-interest quite readily become one and the same.Their identification depends, as Jackall’s workdemonstrates, on a benign view of humannature. When self-interest appears in a form thatis evidently not benign, as in the politicalmanoeuvring of a decaying bureaucracy, psy-chological conflict ensues ( Jackall, 1988). TheAmerican presumption, however, is that indi-vidual self-interest, properly pursued, acts in theinterests of all. In the European and Asiancontexts, in contrast, self-interest is routinelyviewed with suspicion.5 Historically, this has beenreflected in different forms of corporate gover-nance and employee motivation, in which thepursuit of self-interest has played a relativelyminor role (Charkham, 1994). As Americanpractices, imposed by the need for Americancapital, become increasingly influential, however,the forces of economic self-interest and moralduty cannot but come into conflict (see, forexample, Froud et al., 2000).

Durkheim feared that if the market moralityof economic self-interest were to underminetraditional moral ideals and leave us with a puremarket society, that society would be intrinsicallyunstable, and it is this rather frightening possi-bility that prompts our third question. Unlike thefirst two questions, however, this one cannot beanswered empirically. We do know something ofsmall-scale market societies. The anthropologistMary Douglas identified primitive African tribesin which the dominant ethic was that of marketegoism.6 But we have no knowledge or experi-

216 John Hendry

ence of a market society existing on a large scale.In the modern context, entrepreneurial activityhas always been linked to a traditional moralsociety, with entrepreneurs either licensed bysociety to pursue their self-interest withinstipulated constraints, when this was consideredto be of benefit to the society concerned (incor-poration consisted until relatively recently of thegranting of such a license), or operating parasit-ically and exploiting the structures and weak-nesses of a moral society for their own ends. Eventoday, despite the recent collapse of moralauthority and the new legitimacy of self-interest,the mores of business have not yet completelycolonized the societies in which businessesoperate. These societies, which both support andsustain business activity and take care of thesocial, economic and emotional consequences ofcompetitive failure, are still based upon afoundation – albeit perhaps a weakening one –of traditional moral values.7

Conclusion

Even though the third question may be empiri-cally intractable it serves as a useful reminder ofthe social significance of questions 1 and 2.Business ethicists, like moral philosophersgenerally, have taken it for granted that traditionalmoral values are both absolute and “normal” andthat selfish behaviour is both evidently wrong andthe exception rather than the rule, even withinthe realm of business. A century after Durkheimand the pragmatists, however, and in the wakeof studies such as Foucault’s History of Sexuality(1978–1986), to assume uncritically that moralvalues are absolute and not socially created seemsextraordinarily naïve. At a time when enterpriseis thriving and managers everywhere are beingencouraged to behave as economic agents, todismiss such behaviour as exceptional orabnormal seems extraordinarily blinkered. Evenin Durkheim’s social constructionist world thereis a still an important role for moral philosophy,as the discursive medium through which futuremoral codes are discussed and debated. But thatdiscussion and debate will be futile if it is notbased upon an appreciation of moral facts. The

time has come to find out empirically whatmoral values people really do espouse and enact,in business and elsewhere.

Notes

1 The clearer and more fully developed discussion isto be found in Professional Ethics and Civil Morals.However, this discussion relies in several places onarguments developed in greater detail in The Divisionof Labour.2 This conclusion, which is presented as more or lessself-evident in Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, restsin The Division of Labour in Society on a detaileddiscussion of the differences between organic andcontractual solidarity (Durkheim, 1933, pp. 200–209).3 According to Mary Douglas’s cultural typology(Douglas, 1973), the firms took the form of hierar-chies and not markets.4 For a useful review of the anthropology of ethicssee Howell (1997).5 Individual economic success is also viewed muchless positively by Europeans than by Americans: seefor example Lamont (1992).6 Douglas, Natural Symbols. Douglas’s original termfor these societies was “Big Man” societies, but in herstandard typology they are referred to as marketsocieties.7 Free market advocates generally recognize the needfor some kind of moral or legal framework, ensuringfor example that people stick to the contracts theymake, but tend to overlook the dependence of theAmerican market system on other aspects of a moralsociety, providing for example some welfare safety netfor those who cannot compete. See Wolfe (1989).

References

Baumgartner, M. P.: 1988, The Moral Order of a Suburb(Oxford University Press, New York).

Baumhart, R. C.: 1968, An Honest Profit: WhatBusinessmen Say About Ethics in Business (Holt,Rinehart and Winston, New York).

Bellah, R. N. (ed.): 1973, Emile Durkheim on Moralityand Society (University of Chicago Press, Chicago).

Bellah, R. N. and Associates: 1985, Habits of the Heart:Individualism and Commitment in American Life(University of California Press, Berkeley).

Bensman, J.: 1967, Dollars and Sense: Ideology, Ethics,and the Meaning of Work in Proft and NonprofitOrganizations (Macmillan, New York).

After Durkheim: An Agenda for the Sociology of Business Ethics 217

Boatright, J. R.: 1999, ‘Presidential Address: DoesBusiness Ethics Rest on a Mistake?’, Business EthicsQuarterly 9, 583–592.

Bridges, W.: 1995, Jobshift: How to Prosper in aWorkplace without Jobs (Nicholas Brealy, London).

Carroll, A. B.: 1987, ‘In Search of the MoralManager’, Business Horizons 30 (March-April),7–15.

Chandler, A. D. and H. Daems (eds.): 1980,Managerial Hierarchies: Comparative Perspectives on theRise of Modern Industrial Enterprise (HarvardUniversity Press, Cambridge, MA).

Chandler, A. D.: 1962, Strategy and Structure: Chaptersin the History of Industrial Enterprise (HarvardUniversity Press, Cambridge, MA).

Chandler, A. D.: 1977, The Visible Hand: TheManagement Revolution in American Business(Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA).

Charkham, J.: 1994, Keeping Good Company: A Studyof Corporate Governance in Five Countries (OxfordUniversity Press, Oxford).

Cox, H.: 1999, ‘The Market as God’, The AtlanticMonthly (March), 18–23.

Dalton, M: 1959, Men Who Manage: Fusions of Feelingand Theory in Administration ( John Wiley & Sons,New York).

Deetz, S.: 1992, Democracy in an Age of CorporateColonization (SUNY Press, Albany, NY).

Douglas, M.: 1973, Natural Symbols: Explorations inCosmology, 2nd edition (Routledge, London).

Durkheim, E.: 1933, The Division of Labour in Society(Free Press, New York), partly reprinted in Bellah(1973).

Durkheim, E.: 1957, Professional Ethics and CivicMorals (Routledge, London).

Durkheim, E.: 1973, Moral Education (Free Press, NewYork).

Durkheim, E.: 1982, The Rules of Sociological Method(Free Press, New York).

Foucault, M.: 1978–1986, The History of Sexuality(Pantheon, New York).

Froud, J., C. Haslam, S. Johal and K.Williams (eds.):2000, ‘Shareholder Value and the PoliticalEconomy of Late Capitalism’, Economy and Society29, 1–178.

Fukuyama, F.: 1999, The Great Disruption: HumanNature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (FreePress, New York).

Hall, R. T.: 1987, Emile Durkheim: Ethics and theSociology of Morals (Greenwood Press, Westport,CT).

Howell, S. (ed.): 1997, The Ethnography of Moralities(Routledge, London).

Jackall, R.: 1988, Moral Mazes: The World of CorporateManagers (Oxford University Press, New York).

Jensen, M. C. and K. Murphy: 1990, ‘CEO Incentives– It’s Not How Much You Pay But How’, HarvardBusiness Review 68(3), 138–153.

Jones, T. M. and F. H. Gautschi: 1988, ‘Will theEthics of Business Change: A Survey of FutureExecutives’, Journal of Business Ethics 7, 231–248.

Lamont, M.: 1992, Money, Morals and Manners: TheCulture of the French and American Upper and MiddleClasses (University of Chicago Press, Chicago).

Lazonick, W.: 1971, Business Organization and theMyth of the Market Economy (Cambridge UniversityPress, Cambridge).

Lincoln, D. J., M. M. Presley and T. Little: 1982,‘Ethical Beliefs and Personal Values of Top LevelExecutives’, Journal of Business Research 10,475–487.

Marcuse, H.: 1961, One Dimensional Man (Routledge& Kegan Paul, London).

Mars, G.: 1982, Cheats at Work (Allen & Unwin,London).

Mintzberg, H.: 1996, ‘Managing Government,Governing Management’, Harvard Business Review74(3), 75–83.

Newton, L. H.: 2000, ‘Millennial Reservations’,Business Ethics Quarterly 10, 291–304.

Oughton, C. and G. Whittam: 1997, ‘Competitionand Cooperation in the Small Firm Sector’, ScottishJournal of Political Economy 44, 1–30.

Peiperl, M., M. Arthur, R. Goffee and T. Morris:2000, Career Frontiers (Oxford University Press,Oxford).

Posner, B. Z. and W. H. Schmidt: 1987, ‘Ethics inAmerican Companies: A Managerial Perspective’,Journal of Business Ethics 6, 383–391.

Sennett, R.: 1998, The Corrosion of Character (Norton,New York).

Singer, P.: 1997, How are we to Live: Ethics in an Ageof Self-Interest (Oxford University Press, Oxford).

Wolfe, A.: 1998, One Nation After All (Viking, NewYork).

Wolfe, A.: 1989, Whose Keeper? Social Science and MoralObligation (University of California Press,Berkeley).

Department of Management,Birkbeck College,

University of London,Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX,

U.K.E-mail: j.hendry@bbk.ac.uk

218 John Hendry