Who Will Have the Last Word? Legalist and Non-Legalists in the Formalization of Business Ethics

This paper explores the formalization of business ethics in corporations through an inductive analysis. Despite its incomplete and loose definition, business ethics is turned into formal ethical tools. Previous research on business ethics has focused on the efficacy of these tools. As a result, little is known about these tools' political nature, neither about how they embody a conception of business ethics. This paper addresses this gap. Our findings reveal a conflict between two ways of conceptualizing the regulation of business ethics: That of the non-legalists, who approach the topic of business ethics through values, and that of the legalists, who favor approaching business ethics through rules, procedures, and penalties. The latter approach dominates in the corporations studied and more broadly illustrates how corporations regard business ethics and the actors associated with it. On the whole, our results provide new insights into the limited efficacy of ethical tools and explains why the compliance approach to ethics has gained such power in the previous years.