Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Journal of Business Ethics https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04317-2 EDITORIAL ESSAY Thematic Symposium Editorial: Virtue Ethics Between East and West Miguel Alzola 1  · Alicia Hennig 2  · Edward Romar 3 © Springer Nature B.V. 2019 Abstract Virtue ethics is widely recognized as one of three major approaches in contemporary moral philosophy and arguably the most infuential normative theory in business ethics. Despite its rich pedigree in Western and Eastern philosophy, most work in contemporary virtue ethics is part of the Western tradition. The purpose of this Thematic Symposium is to foster dialogue between Western and Eastern conceptions of virtue in business and engage them with questions about the nature, justifcation, and content of the virtues in each tradition. This Editorial ofers a brief introduction to the problem, a summary of Western and Eastern varieties of virtue ethics, an overview of the six articles included in this Thematic Symposium, and a section with fve common themes for further exploration and future collaborative research (namely, the centrality of rites and rituals, the normative status of social relationships and organizations, role modeling, the analogy of families and com- munities to defne the business corporation, and the defnition of social responsibilities). Keywords Virtue · Character · Ethical theory · Roles · Rituals · Social relationships Introduction The study of the virtues has been recently reinvigorated in philosophy (Annas 2011; Slote 2015; Swanton 2015), psy- chology (Peterson and Seligman 2004; Haidt 2006) and man- agement scholarship (Cameron and Spreitzer 2011). Business ethicists acknowledge the importance of character and appre- ciate the virtue approach, according to which ethics is primar- ily about the person and her character and only secondarily about the acts that character causes. In the early nineties, Solo- mon (1992) began to argue for virtue as a way into business. Virtue ethicists have gained recognition in the feld in the last two decades to the point that today it is recognized as the most popular normative theory in terms of the number of articles published in business ethics journals (Alzola 2018). However, most work on the virtue tradition in business ethics can be categorized as part of Western varieties of virtue. Only a few scholars have attempted to bridge the gap between diferent accounts of virtue and disparate cultures of the East and West (Rosemont 2004; Keown 2007; Chen 2010). Only a handful of articles in academic business ethics explore the ethics of virtue these cultures share (e.g., Hack- ett and Wang 2012; Du 2013; Koehn 2013; Lu and Koehn 2015). Only a few authors in the feld explore the way West- ern versions of virtue ethics may resemble that of Eastern thinkers or whether it makes sense to defne such Eastern traditions as varieties of virtue theory. Business ethicists, as well as businesspeople, have good reasons to consider the convergences and discrepancies between Eastern and Western varieties of virtue not only for the sake of mutual understanding but also as a way to enrich business practices and as a tool for character building and moral education in diferent cultures. Ultimately, whether it is accurate to understand, say, Confucian ethics as an ethics of virtue (or whether it is misconstrued and imperialistic) requires examining the question of what it is to be a person and what ethics is about. Despite a recent interest in Western scholarship for the role of Confucianism in economic development (Hofstede and Bond 1988), corporate management and governance (Low and Ang 2013), consumer behavior (Ackerman et al. 2009), and corporate social responsibility (Wang and Juslin 2009), and the unique contributions of Confucian thought to the feld of business ethics (e.g., Romar 2002; Lam 2003; Woods and Lamond 2011), mainstream Western business ethics has addressed it only cursorily. * Miguel Alzola alzola@fordham.edu 1 Fordham University, New York, NY, USA 2 Southeast University, Nanjing, People’s Republic of China 3 University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, USA