On Getting to the Future First
本文讨论美国企业工作任期的不确定性、工资不平等，以及雇主与雇员之间建立新社会道德契约的挑战，指出商业伦理研究因忽视历史而未能察觉管理思想的危险趋势。
This paper will discuss the uncertainty of job tenure, inequality of wages in American business, and the challenges for a creating a new social and moral compact between employer and employee. I begin by arguing that business ethics scholars missed some of the disturbing trends in management thinking because they often focused on current problems in business rather than questioning some of the basic assumptions about the way businesses are managed. As Rochefoucauld observed (albeit in a different context) we were overtaken by the evils of the present and I would argue, this was because we didn’t pay attention to the past. Business ethics research, like management research, is often ahistorical and hence tells only part of the story. If we don’t know how we got to a certain problem, it’s really difficult to see where the present problem and our solutions to it might lead us.