Abstract This study redefines Family–Work Balance (FWB) as a relational and ethical condition emerging from the interaction between employee agency and organisational structures, rather than just as an individual coping outcome. Drawing on care ethics and other explanatory perspectives, we develop and empirically test a model examining how organisational cultures, internal market orientation, employee skill development, and personal life activities collectively influence perceived barriers to FWB and overall balance. Survey data from knowledge-intensive service employees indicate that organisational conditions and developmental practices play a crucial role in shaping perceived barriers, which, in turn, significantly affect perceived FWB. Although personal life activities do not directly affect FWB, they have indirect effects through perceived barriers, highlighting the importance of organisational responsiveness for achieving balance. The findings demonstrate that FWB is not ethically neutral but is systematically shaped by managerial choices, cultural norms, and developmental expectations that either create or reduce barriers. By conceptualising FWB as a relational ethical issue rooted in organisational responsibility and lived experience, this research advances discussions on ethical management, internal marketing, and work–life integration, providing implications for managerial accountability and the development of work environments that foster employee dignity and sustainable well-being.

Abstract Purpose-driven ecosystems are built around significant, multifaceted, and wicked societal problems like climate change, access to health services, and waste and resource management. Such ecosystems are collective organizations that rally around a shared moral purpose, enabling ecosystem participants, often for-profit organizations, to proactively address societal expectations. However, given the complexity of the issues addressed and the multiplicity of external expectations, the ecosystem participants often diverge in their views on a coherent moral purpose and the appropriate organizational structures and actions aligned with it. These challenges highlight the importance of building moral legitimacy in purpose-driven ecosystems, which we examine via an in-depth case study of an ecosystem focusing on broad sustainability goals in urban regions. Our findings demonstrate parallel processes of collective narratives and organizational architectures that together drive discursive and performative legitimation in the ecosystem. However, we also reveal major legitimacy struggles as ecosystem participants, both collectively and individually, first build moral legitimacy for a multivocal, higher-order set of purposes but eventually find them difficult to act on. Then, after identifying a disconnect between the collective narrative and concrete on-the-ground action, the ecosystem participants eventually partially rebuild moral legitimacy by finding a consensual narrative and structuring an organizational architecture that establishes a coherent moral purpose-action alignment in the eyes of both internal and external stakeholders. Our study contributes to the nascent literature on purpose-driven ecosystems by demonstrating how they build moral legitimacy through a process that combines deliberate discourse with an organizational architecture that demonstrates performance grounded in that discourse. We show that these two legitimation strategies must be aligned to create coherence between a wicked societal problem and the on-the-ground feasibility of a shared moral purpose.

Abstract This study examines whether green hiring is associated with enhanced firm-level environmental outcomes, using a novel dataset of 19,248,635 job ads for Fortune 100 firms from 2009 to 2022. We find that such hiring is positively associated with environmental performance, particularly through improvements in environmental innovation, supply chain monitoring, resource efficiency, environmental product development, and stakeholder engagement. Cross-sectional analyses reveal that the positive association is stronger when new green hires are distributed across diverse occupations and weaker when concentrated in top-level roles. In addition, green hiring is more strongly linked to outcomes in firms with strong sustainability governance, as evidenced by the presence of dedicated committees, environmental investments, standalone sustainability reports and environmental training. These findings indicate that green hiring’s potential benefits may rely on robust sustainability governance within firms. Such structures may help human capital investments yield measurable environmental performance gains and reduce the risk of green hiring becoming a symbolic gesture rather than a substantive commitment to stakeholders. However, the relationship concentrates only among firms in non-environmentally sensitive industries and larger firms. This study contributes to the environmental performance literature by providing new evidence on how workforce transformation relates to corporate sustainability and informs strategic approaches to building greener organizations.

Abstract Despite their potential significance, bio-ecological determinants of ethical and sustainable business behavior have been largely unexplored in business ethics research. This study examines the impact of pathogen stress—a bio-ecological factor that has been shown to be critical for human attitudes, intentions, and behaviors—on firms’ environmental sustainability practices. Pathogen stress refers to the prevalence of a broad spectrum of infectious agents, including viruses, bacteria, protozoa, and helminths, that threaten human health and survival. We theorize that higher levels of pathogen stress negatively affect firms’ adoption of environmental sustainability practices. Analyzing data from nearly 20,000 firms across 37 countries using the World Bank Enterprise Surveys and a country-level pathogen stress index, we observe that firms in contexts with higher pathogen prevalence are less likely to adopt environmental sustainability practices. To elucidate the underlying causality, we employ an experimental vignette design that identifies two mediating psychological mechanisms: a temporal mechanism (heightened short-term orientation) and a relational mechanism (increased ingroup trust bias). We discuss the implications of the results for business ethics research and suggest several future research avenues to improve the understanding of bio-ecological factors for ethical and sustainable firm decision-making, strategies, and behaviors.

Abstract Stakeholder engagement has become established as pivotal in corporate sustainability. Literature on stakeholder engagement in corporate sustainability has a strong grounding in normative ethics. An issue that has received less attention in this scholarship is context-sensitive responses to tensions stemming from conflicting stakeholder interests in corporate sustainability. Drawing on 65 interviews, we present an in-depth qualitative study of stakeholder tensions in both large incumbent corporations and sustainability-focussed startups actively pursuing corporate sustainability. We present a framework on the outcomes of stakeholder tensions in corporate sustainability, illustrating a potential incrementalism trap in corporate sustainability, where normative and pragmatic stakeholder expectations drive tensions, ultimately limiting sustainability impact. The findings of our study advance theorising on normative ethics and pragmatism in stakeholder engagement in corporate sustainability by grounding ethical evaluation in real stakeholder engagement practice.

Abstract Algorithms increasingly shape access to employment, credit, healthcare, and justice, yet the basis on which they do so is often opaque. A growing literature argues that affected individuals have a right to explanation, grounded in their interest in informed self-advocacy: the ability to understand and respond to decisions that bear on their life prospects. We examine whether this interest can sustain such a right. Explanations that serve self-advocacy must be reliable (truth-tracking) and verifiable (open to independent check). We show that in open-ended decision environments, where evaluative criteria must be discovered rather than stipulated in advance, reliability and verifiability conflict with accuracy. This trade-off arises in human decision-making and has a structural analogue in AI systems. Because requiring thick explanation would systematically reduce the quality of decisions, the self-advocacy interest cannot by itself ground a general right. Where thick explanation is nonetheless owed, it is justified by different grounds: legality, fairness, and trust. We draw out implications for how organisations should structure their obligations.