Formal Ethics, Content Ethics and Relational Ethics: Three Approaches to Constructing Ethical Sales Cultures and Identities in Retail Banking
研究了全球金融危机后三家零售银行如何构建道德销售文化，提出以“应答自我”为核心的关系伦理词汇，强调道德开放而非价值一致。
Abstract Following the global financial crisis, banks have become more regulated to advance ethical sales cultures throughout the sector. Based on case studies of three retail banks, we find that they construct the ‘appropriate advisor’ in different ways. Inspired by Bakhtin’s work on ethics, we propose a vocabulary of relational ethics centered on the ‘answerable self.’ We argue that this vocabulary is apt for studying and discussing how organizations advance ethical sales cultures in ways that instead of encouraging value congruence and alignment allow for ethical openness. In such cultures, employees—as moral agents—are morally questioning, critically self-reflexive, and answerable for their own actions toward others in their social relationships. Our paper makes three theoretical contributions, namely, problematizing the idea of cultural alignment and value congruence, demonstrating that identity regulation can both comprise and support the ‘answerable self,’ and advancing our understanding of the interdependence of ethical openness and ethical closure in fostering ethical sales cultures.