Scalzo, Germán
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Scalzo, Germán
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Scalzo Molina, Germán Roberto
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gscalzo
Scalzo, Germán Roberto
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57189442501
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FQV-2175-2022

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CSR and Virtue Ethics: The common good of firms, markets, and civil society

2021 , Scalzo, Germán

This chapter probes the social responsibility of firms using a virtue ethics approach and the concept of the common good. In particular, it highlights the contrasting assumptions of mainstream approaches and the common good of the firm approach to explaining how the latter—rooted in Aristotelian virtue ethics—provides an original conception of social responsibility. A common good approach to social justice understands social relationships essentially as duties to which one voluntarily adheres; when said justice and commitment to the common good flourishes, community ensues. Finally, a virtue ethics approach to corporate social responsibility establishes three forms of duty and social responsibility to stakeholders, including those who make up the firm, those who maintain a market-based relationship with it, and those who are related to the firm as part of society’s civic sphere.

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Virtue Ethics: A Contribution to Family Firms

2020 , Scalzo, Germán , Ramírez Pérez, Héctor Xavier

This chapter is an exploratory study of business ethics as it relates to family firms; it primarily aims to explore virtue ethics as an alternative proposal for the ethical concerns that family firms face in their management, thus overcoming the limitations of relevant business ethics approaches and integrating them into an overarching paradigm. Ethics can be classified into three main streams: (1) deontology, (2) utilitarianism, and (3) virtue ethics. The former two approaches have been widely used in the realm of business and family firms for many years and they tend to instrumentalize ethics for business purposes. Yet, they are mostly powerless to explain and promote the ethical concerns surrounding the family firm’s culture. Virtue ethics regained philosophical interest in the second half of the twentieth century, shifting the focus of morality from “the right thing to do” to the “best way to live.” By bringing together two consolidated research fields, family firms and virtue ethics, this chapter contributes a rich perspective to current research in both fields and opens up new ways of answering many of the cultural questions that family firms bring to the table. © 2020 Emerald Publishing Limited.

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Prudence as part of a worldview: historical and conceptual dimensions

2016 , Scalzo, Germán , Alford, Helen

As Sison (2015, p. 232) remarks, ‘politics’ in Aristotle could mean at least three different things: (1) a kind of life; (2) a qualifier for the virtues of justice and prudence; or (3) a body of knowledge. As a body of knowledge, its object is happiness (eudaimonia), which is the supreme human good. Happiness ‘is not a mere object of knowledge (gnosis) but action (praxis); in particular it consists in “living or doing well” (NE 1095a), in accordance with the proper function of human beings, which is rational activity (NE 1098a)’ (ibid., p. 233). Aristotle puts particular emphasis on the injunctions of practical wisdom: [H]is ideal of a good man must unite two different kind of virtues: practical wisdom (phronēsis), the intellectual virtue necessary for conceiving of the right decisions of the means and ways to carry them out, and (ii) the moral or character virtues (ēthikē aretē), the habitually acquired, appropriate emotional attitudes towards acting and being affected. (Frede, 2013, pp. 126–7). In order to conceptualize prudence – phronēsis – one must distinguish it from other forms of excellence that reason might acquire according to its different activities. Aristotle identifies three kinds of human activity (energeia) (NE, 1178b): contemplation (theõria), action (praxis) and production (poiēsis), each governed by a different kind of rational excellence (aretē). Thus contemplation is governed by theoretical reason (sophia), action by moral – practical – reason (phronēsis) and production by technical reason (technē) (Murphy, 1993, p. 87). Aristotle does not contrast thought (knowledge) with activity (action), recognizing that all complex human activity is marked by a unity between conception and execution and that, in relation to it, there are three kinds of thought (dianoia) (Metaphysics, II 2 y VII 1): theoretical thought, which speculates on something; practical thought, which works; and productive thought, which makes. ©2016, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd.

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Autonomous Self and Inter-Processual Self: Two Ways of Explaining How People “See” and Live Relationships and the Resulting Dialogue Between Science and Faith

2019 , Orón, José Víctor , Akrivou, Kleio , Scalzo, Germán

The relationship between science and faith is not a given, nor is it objectively defined, but rather depends on personal ways of approaching this relationship. Accordingly, it can be lived as a conflict, i.e. as agency striving to master independent and separate domains or as a process of dialogue or an integral relationship. In this chapter, we suggest that adopting one stance or the other depends on factors that go beyond the rational assessment that a person makes of science or faith. To explain the perspective that people adopt, cross-disciplinary theoretical insights relevant to human beings and their development are decisive. Based on previous research consolidating several theoretical proposals across a diverse disciplinary orientation (mainly philosophy, psychology and neuroscience), we suggest that there are two contrasting paradigms for conceiving of the self and human development, namely, the autonomous self (AS) and the inter-processual self (IPS) (Akrivou K, Orón JV: Challenges of capitalism for virtue and the common good: Inter-disciplinary perspectives. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 2016). We purport here that, depending on which of these two corresponding backgrounds characterises the person, people will ‘see’ and live the relationship—dialogue between science and faith—differently.© 2022 Springer Nature Switzerland AG. Part of Springer Nature.

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Virtuous work and organizational culture: how Aristotelian practical wisdom can humanize business

2021 , Pinto, Javier , Ferrero, Ignacio , Scalzo, Germán

This chapter aims to overcome the rationalistic and mechanistic paradigm of organizational theory redefining the nature of organizations as a community of work. We sustain that Aristotelian practical wisdom deepens our understanding of organizations by incorporating different features of personal work in organizational contexts, such as meaning, interpretation, ambiguity, conflict, context-dependence, productivity and reflexivity. In this chapter, we will explain (i) how the organization aimed to excellence is better defined as a community of work, and (ii) how practical wisdom in an organization must be defined in light of work as a deliberative and participative production. Thus, the goal of the chapter is twofold: first, it seeks to introduce a concept of work into the Aristotelian organizational theory; second, it aims to show the potential of Aristotelian practical wisdom for deepening our understanding of organizations by integrating an Aristotelian definition of the community of work and common good into organizational theory.© 2021 Routledge.

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Virtues, the Common Good, and Business Legitimacy

2020-09-10 , Scalzo, Germán , Akrivou, Kleio

When it comes to contributing to the wider society’s common good, organizations’ considerable ethical failures have weakened overall trust in business firms. Mainstream legitimacy theory fails to address normative issues on the ethical responsibilities of management toward and the role of business in society. This chapter reviews the main approaches to business legitimacy linked with institutional theory in light of the virtue ethics tradition to show how a virtuous management paradigm can enable a better relationship between the firm and its stakeholders, promoting their well-being and contributing to the common good of society as a whole. To facilitate a richer and more nuanced understanding of virtue ethics’ concerns, it applies key terms from Aristotelian virtue ethics to discussion of the role of management and ethical communication in the context of business legitimacy. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.

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Power, Authority, and Leadership: A Proposal for Organizational Theory in the Post-Bureaucratic Era

2022 , Ciardi, Lucía , Scalzo, Germán

Organizations are privileged structures in contemporary society given that they contain and manage a large part of individuals' activities. This is so much so that a company's success depends on an adequate organizational structure. As such, this chapter studies the depths of organizations' political dimension with a conceptual, philosophical-political, and historical investigation on the development of the relationship between power and authority within organizational theory. It does so with the aid of Spanish author Juan Antonio Perez Lopez's organizational management framework. Starting from the crisis of the modern bureaucratic model, in which rationalization continually increases, and power is separated from authority, this chapter maintains, to the contrary, the hypothesis that, in the post-bureaucratic era, a new paradigm for organizational theory is needed for studying the relationship between power and authority. This paradigm has the advantage of reflecting a healthy way of governing organizations focused on human development. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022. All rights reserved.

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Management education and interpersonal growht: a humanist transcendental-personalist perspective

2022 , Akrivou, Kleio , Fernadez Gonzalez, Manuel Joaquín , Scalzo, Germán , Murcio Rodriguez, Ricardo

This chapter critically addresses the direction toward which management education (ME) should evolve in the future. Drawing from transcendental personalist anthropology, it explores what constitutes us as human beings and argues that future ME should address students’ moral selfhood and their disposition toward interpersonal growth to construct a better future with others. After a critical exploration of current humanist proposals in ME and their philosophical bases, we argue for a renewal of anthropological foundations of humanistic ME in light of three personalist principles: (1) the person's intimacy and dignity, (2) the transcendence of human beings, who grow as persons through free and caring interpersonal relations, and (3) a view of human action as the manifestation of the person's intimacy and transcendence, and as her arena for interpersonal, virtuous development. The last section explains how these three personal dimensions could be addressed in future ME, namely by fostering future managers’ moral selfhood through self-reflection, by proposing an interpersonal pedagogy of the gift, and by promoting personalist practical wisdom. These practices constitute possible paths toward renewed ethical management education that goes beyond traditional “know-what” and “know-how” content to include ethically informed “know-why” and “know-for-whom” knowledge. Ultimately, they facilitate future managers’ disposition for interpersonal growth. © Chinnapong and 2022 selection and editorial matter, Martin R. Fellenz, Sabine Hoidn, and Mairead Brady; individual chapters, the contributors.

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Three Rival Versions of Work and Technology: Smith, Marx, and MacIntyre in Discussion

2022 , Pinto-Garay, Javier , Scalzo, Germán , Ferrero, Ignacio

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, characterized by the wide introduction of automation in industry, brought about many changes in work and in the possibility of replacing workers with machines that are threatening the future of work. This chapter delves into the conflictive relationship between modern work and technology. We will depart from two main paradigmatic representatives of the eighteenth-century economic approach to work, namely Adam Smith and Karl Marx, mostly considered intellectual antagonists. Besides their differences, we sustain that both failed to give a sustainable and realistic account of the meaning of work and its contribution to individual flourishing and the common good, mainly because of their reductionist anthropological assumptions. Hence, we will analyze their understandings of the work-technology relationship in light of the thought of MacIntyre, a prominent critic of both Marx and Smith. By rehabilitating the idea of a practice, MacIntyre offers a more realistic and robust approach to understanding the way technology might negatively affect work, but also recognizes it as an opportunity for excellence in modern corporations. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022. All rights reserved.

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Balancing Work, Family, and Personal Life in the Mexican Context: The Future of Work for the “COVID-19 Generation”

2021 , Scalzo, Germán , Terán-Bustamante, Antonia , Martínez Velasco, Antonieta Teodora

Intergenerational talent management—i.e., attracting and retaining employees across generations and with different motivations—is one of companies’ greatest challenges. The expectations that recent generations bring with them have pushed culture in the direction of work-family balance, which is now seen as a key tool for human resources departments in charge of creating support mechanisms to attract and retain the next generation of workers. This trend has been reinforced by the changes brought about in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Responding to this shift, and inspired by the challenges that our “new normal” posits, this chapter presents research results from a survey conducted in Mexico with respondents from generations Y and Z. The survey results offer important insight into how these generations perceive work-life balance, as well as the expectations that young Mexicans between the ages of 18 and 30 hold in terms of family and work.

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