"Two impressive features of this book are its clarity of purpose and the breadth of disciplinary resources to which it appeals." ---Geoffrey Brennan, Professor of Economics, Australian National University "Facing massive evidence that people do not act generally as self-regarding payoff maximizers, economists have become increasingly interested in issues of cooperation, altruism, identity, and morality. Lanse Minkler's contribution is particularly important because of his powerful argument that the evidence of cooperation cannot be explained adequately by a more complicated preference function. A disposition for honesty is not simply a matter of preference---it is an issue of personal integrity, identity, and commitment. This has major implications. In particular we have to reconstruct the theory of the firm from first principles. No economist committed to the pursuit of truth should ignore this volume." ---Geoffrey Hodgson, Research Professor in Business Studies, University of Hertfordshire, United Kingdom, and Editor in Chief of the Journal of Institutional Economics "This is an interesting account of the role of integrity---preference-integrity and commitment-integrity---on economic behavior. While drawing knowledge from traditional subfields of economics, it also includes insights gleaned from psychology and philosophy, showing their effects in varied areas such as political behavior, the employment relation, religion, and human rights. In this exciting volume Lanse Minkler does an excellent job of incorporating various newer concepts of fairness and integrity into economic analysis." ---Ernst Fehr, Professor and Head of the Chair of Microeconomics and Experimental Economic Research and Director of the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics, University of Zurich Social scientists who treat humans as rational beings driven exclusively by self-interest ignore a key factor shaping human behavior: the influence of moral principles. Starting with the elementary principle "lying is wrong," economic theorist Lanse Minkler examines the ways in which a sense of morality guides real-life decision making. Whether one feels committed to specific or general moral principles, Minkler explains, integrity demands consistently acting on that commitment. Because truthfulness is the most basic moral principle, integrity means honesty. And honesty extends beyond truth-telling. It requires good faith when entering an agreement and then standing by one's word. From this premise, Minkler explores the implications of integrity for contracts between buyers and sellers and understandings between employers and employees. He also finds a role for integrity in an individual's religious vows, an elected official's accountability to constituents, and a community's obligation to human rights. Integrity and Agreement reintroduces morality as a factor for economists, sociologists, psychologists, and political scientists to consider in their efforts to comprehend human behavior. Lanse Minkler is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Connecticut.

Managing with Integrity challenges the readers to explore different perspectives on and conceptions of corporate ethics. It is situated within the broader context of the emerging interests of the people of India to eradicate corporate unethical conduct. The massive protest against corporate unethical conduct and public opinion puts leaders, top managers and employees under strong social and political pressure. This book aims at articulating arguments for the necessity of incorporating personal integrity formation along with codes of ethical conduct to reduce unethical corporate activity more steadily and effectively. This book is an ethical guide for managers, employees, politicians, clergy, candidates for priesthood, and business students, equipping them to eradicate corporate unethical conduct from all spheres of life.

Corporate and government scandals continue to deepen our mistrust of leaders. While credibility is the foundation of effective leadership, most leaders struggle, and sometimes fail, to align their words and their actions. Now for the first time, leadership expert Tony Simons has measured the bottom-line value of business leaders who live by their word and actually do what they say they are going to do. In The Integrity Dividend, Tony Simons shows how leaders? personal integrity drives the profitability and overall success of their organization. This groundbreaking book is based in on solid research and reveals that businesses led by managers of higher integrity enjoy deeper employee commitment, lower turnover, superior customer service, and substantially higher profitability. This improved performance is the integrity dividend. Simons conducted dozens of focus groups, surveyed thousands of employees, collected financial and operational numbers, and interviewed over 100 senior executives and executive coaches. The book lays out the research clearly and provides proven tools for managing common integrity challenges. It offers guidance for building individual credibility and for creating an organizational culture of integrity and accountability. Throughout, Simons uses real-world insight and stories drawn from senior executives, line managers, and coaches. The Integrity Dividend is a fresh view of leadership at a time when it is most needed.

How to restore integrity so that social values can be upheld and family welfare strengthened.

Scientific research is often influenced by financial interests, political interests, or personal career interests of the scientists involved. For instance, the pharmaceutical giant Merck manipulated clinical trial data in order to make sure that data confirmed the safety of one of its products, Vioxx, in order to serve the company’s short-term commercial interests. This case is obviously unacceptable. But why exactly is it unacceptable? One way to account for this judgment is on the basis of the ideal of purity. According to this ideal, scientific decision-making should be pure— that is, unaffected by financial interests, political interests, career interests, and so on. Although this ideal is questionable, many people (including philosophers of science) still hold on to it. In Interests and Epistemic Integrity in Science: A New Framework to Assess Interest Influences in Scientific Research Processes, Jan De Winter first argues that it is better to fully abandon the ideal of purity, then proposes an alternative ideal to assess interest influences in science: the ideal of epistemic integrity. He spells out and systematically defends a new concept of epistemic integrity, using it not only to analyze the Vioxx debacle, but also to identify unacceptable interest influences in aerospace science, climate science, and biology, and to explain exactly why these interest influences are unacceptable. These analyses make a compelling case for the new concept of epistemic integrity which will be interesting and useful for philosophers of science, scientists, engineers, science policymakers, and anyone else concerned about the integrity of science.

This volume explores the value of business integrity and ethics as a "best practice" model in business strategy. The authors define business integrity, explore areas in which integrity is often absent or discredited, and provide a framework and tools to help build better business ethics and corporate social responsibility. The volume aims to reveal that beyond the immediate economic effect, corruption can ruin entire countries by destabilizing key economic and political players, warping their vision for state development. Against the backdrop of global financial and ethical crises, the authors argue that integrity in business is a key component for long-term success. Integrity includes the ability to be consistent with one’s moral values and principles and places society’s wishes at the center of business decision-making. The cornerstone upon which a culture of integrity is built within a certain business is the ethics code. It explicitly states the values and principles to which a company adheres. The continuous promotion, support and communication of the ethics code stipulations provide the basis upon which integrity in business is built. Featuring case studies from countries such as Sweden, Great Britain and France and companies such Starbucks, Nike, PSEG, and Anglo-American PLC, this volume provides a comprehensive study of business integrity and social responsibility that will be of interest to students, scholars, professionals and policy-makers from around the world.

In this book, a teacher educator examines her practice as a way of learning about teaching as well as challenging teacher education. It is about how one teacher educator sought to transform the perspectives of her student teachers, in order to better prepare them to teach diverse populations of students, while challenging her own beliefs about how best to do that. The author seeks integrity in her practice, defined as her ability to enact what she teaches preservice teachers to do. In particular, this book is a self-study that contributes to understanding the broader question: How much can one affect and change the discourse within education when one also inhabits the characteristics that are privileged by the institution? The teacher education literature supports the need to study this type of self-reflection. Other researchers have pointed out that the role of teacher educators’ cultural identities in reforming education has been largely ignored in the literature. This book offers a unique perspective on the analogous relationship involved when a teacher educator teaches teachers how to examine the impact of their own identities on their teaching while examining that herself.

There are things that can be done and are done to life on earth (whether it be human, animal or plant life) which, even if they do not involve or produce any suffering, are still considered morally wrong by a large proportion of the public. Such things include changing the nature of living beings by means of genetic engineering in order to enhance their health, or, more likely with animals and plants, their utility, or impairing their ability to live autonomously, or unduly instrumentalizing them. Yet many scientists are puzzled about the unwillingness of the public to feel much enthusiasm about a technology that, in their view, promises great benefits to humans and does not seem to cause more harm to animals than other practices which most of us do not question at all. In this book Michael Hauskeller takes public fears seriously and offers the idea of 'biological integrity' as a clarifying principle which can then be analyzed to show that seemingly irrational public concerns about genetic engineering are not so irrational after all and that a philosophically sound justification of those concerns can indeed be given.

When discussing relationships within the Christian life and in all levels of Christian leadership, one cannot help but focus on two aspects of relationships--the relationship between the believer and the heavenly Father and the relationship between believers and others. In this book, readers will review characteristics that influence the way people live out and react in their Christian lives or ministry. The message focuses on the fact that for Christian life and ministry to be possible and effective, the individual Christian's relationships and his or her walk with the Lord must be a top priority.

Facility Integrity Management: Effective Principles and Practices for the Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Industries presents the information needed to completely understand common failures in the facility integrity management process. By understanding this more comprehensive approach, companies will be able to better identify shortcomings within their respective system that they did not realize existed. To introduce this method, the book provides managers and engineers with a model that ensures major process incidents are avoided, aging facilities are kept in a safe and reliable state and are operating at maximum levels, and any gaps within the integrity management system are identified and addressed, such as the all too common fragmented reliability programs. The book approaches oil and gas facility management from a universal perspective, effectively charting out existing oil and gas facilities and their associated work processes, including maintenance, operations, and reliability, and then reconstructs them in order to optimize the way integrity is managed, creating a synergy across the various elements. Easy to read, packed with practical applications applied to real process plant scenarios such as key concepts, process flow charts, handy checklists, real-world case studies and a dictionary, provides a high quality guide for a breakdown free facility, maximizing productivity and return to shareholders. - Helps readers gain a practical and industry specific approach to facility integrity management supported with real-world case studies from oil, gas, and petrochemical facility locations - Presents a facility integrity excellence model, a holistic approach for oil and gas companies to drive towards integrity assurance unit monitoring, creating a failure-free environment - Identifies and addresses failure of facility processes and equipment before the onset of performance degradation, keeping equipment maintenance costs low and reliability high