A Survey on Virtue in Business and Management (1980-2011)

Virtue ethics is generally recognized as one of the three major schools of ethics, but is often waylaid by utilitarianism and deontology in business and management literature. Focusing on publications in the Thomson-Reuters Journal of Citation Report between 1980 and 2011, we use EBSCO and ABI databases to look for articles containing the keywords “virtue ethics”, “virtue theory” or “virtuousness” in the abstract together with “business” or “management” in the text. We refined our search to draw lists of the most prolific authors, the most cited authors, the most cited articles and the journals with the most virtue ethics publications. This information allows us to chart how virtue ethics articles have evolved through the decades and establish clusters of authors as well as clusters of themes. These findings also provide a foundation for future study of the meanings of virtue ethics and the achievement and potential of different persuasions within virtue ethics research. We believe this will make a significant contribution to business ethics scholarship and management education by supplying both with a solid philosophical and anthropological mooring.