Where Business Needs To Step Up On Human Rights In 2024

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Business needs to step up to protect human rights. In an increasingly unstable and polarized world, far too many governments are unwilling or unable to protect their own people, undermining core human rights. As a result, global companies…

Rethinking Ethics: A Vision for a New Framework Aligned with Human Nature

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Ethics may be best advanced by adapting to, rather than trying to change, human nature. As we reported in our September Newsletter, fraud allegations have been raised against one of Ethical Systems’ past collaborators, Francisca Gino.…

How the Sustainability Function in Corporations is Transforming

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In July 2023, our Executive Director Alison Taylor participated on a panel in London, hosted by Salesforce, on how the sustainability function in corporations is transforming.

Banking Culture Reform: Trust, Technology, and The New Workplace

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In this episode of the Bank Notes podcast, from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, host Toni Dechario, a member of the New York Fed’s culture team, speaks with Alison Taylor about her interest in the link between unethical behavior and organizational culture, ethical pressures in finance, the need to do proper behavioral experimental research in real organizations, and more.

EY and KPMG Cheating Scandals Expose Ethical Challenges for Audit Industry

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After getting caught ignoring its employees and cheating on the CPA ethics exam, EY has become the latest example of how industry and company-level mindsets can turn into corporate liabilities.

Doing Away With Cash Bail

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The United States is notorious for having the highest incarceration rates in the world—810 federal, state, and local prisoners for every 100,000 adults, according to one recent study.

The Invention of Incarceration

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Prisons have been controversial since their beginnings in the late 1700s—why do they keep failing to live up to expectations? As a young girl growing up in Northern California, Ashley Rubin dutifully said her prayers each night before…

Compliance Officers as “Ministers for the Future”

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In The Ministry for the Future, science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson draws a truly harrowing picture of the cataclysmic harm that climate change could inflict on our planet in the not-so-distant future. His tale is also about…

The Problem with Risk Assessments

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Like most rituals in health and safety, John Soria's story shows us that risk assessments have become meaningless and misaligned with their purpose. Five years ago, two safety inspectors boarded a ship docked for repairs in Shanghai. It…

Corporate America Has a Caste Problem

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Unwittingly, businesses and civil society in the US may have facilitated the dominant caste practices through preferential hiring of Indians (in reality, they are hiring only higher castes). Silicon Valley's diversity problems are not hidden,…