WHY "DOING WELL BY DOING GOOD" WENT WRONG: GETTING BEYOND "GOOD ETHICS PAYS" CLAIMS IN MANAGERIAL THINKING

In recent decades, numerous voices in managerial scholarship and business ethics have championed conciliatory business strategies capable of achieving both economic and social ends. While these "good ethics pays" or "win-win" approaches have garnered significant attention in both academic and practitioner-oriented arenas, empirical vetting of such strategies has lagged far behind their widespread diffusion. Even more problematic, careful examination of the scholarly work in this area reveals fundamentally different presuppositions about what it means to claim "good ethics pays" and how this claim relates to managerial activity. This article maps out the various good ethics pays arguments across the managerial discipline to uncover three competing, divergent, and at times incommensurable frameworks. This mapping is followed by examining how disciplinary commitments to parsimonious explanations and stable behavioral patterns utilize good ethics pays frameworks to effectively minimize the moral agency of managerial actors. This article concludes by laying out a new research approach that foregrounds the varied contingency of how ethics and economics intersect. The approach moves beyond ungrounded confidence in a grand theory of win-win convergences to instead investigate the provisional and contextual social mechanisms that reward or sanction ethical action.