There is more than a mere grain of truth to the notion that law is for those requiring it, and Gwen’s acute sensibility for core questions is in the present instance best addressed from this vantage.

Culture is at issue, but Gwen does not distinguish between the relevant modalities. She mentions the culture of greed without mentioning the culture of stewardship or the culture that grounds all of economics as oriented toward markets – the honor-based culture and its subtypes.

Let’s go back in history to a time when economics and business were a marriage in the form of occasional local markets. Businesspeople were essentially sojourners and, though bringing desired goods, were also nonetheless strangers who must be held to standards. Even Plato specifies the need to retain merchants for a period after a market to ensure responsibility for shoddy or dangerous products. Later, where businesspeople came from the communities themselves, the shame element could play its part.

Absent shame, however, the original traveling markets found that localities not infrequently established laws regulating weights and measures. Had the merchants done so themselves either to avoid the penalties accruing from laws or out of professional obligations that we should term stewardship, we would say they had self-policed themselves into a code of ethics, a form of self-policing that tends to work for the very reason that it avoids a still worse prospect. (For the difference between correct and incorrect self-policing, see Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead, ch. 6, “Self-Policing Subverted”.)

The ‘Houston Smith’ view of markets assumes a “cult of honor” in which businesspeople take seriously their trades and the responsibilities to customers that ensure the best success for themselves and their trades. The ideals of the trade are a redux from the general social mores, a slice that is honed, refined, rarefied and then surrounded by a code of conduct and standards necessary to apply, facilitate and preserve these high ideals. The cult of honor is the source not only of the ideals of business but of all the professions, the militaries as well as early forms of aristocracy, to mention only the most obvious.

The correct term to associate with the attitudes and aptitudes necessary and conducive to such ideals is “stewardship”. It is to be preferred over ‘ethics’ both because encompassing what ethics should but generally does not, and because it is analyzable into jural constructs amenable to any and every legal system, something ethics is not if only because being interpreted less as of law than of cultural artifacts serving as quasi-law (e.g., what is politically incorrect, or what sets a bad example or otherwise comes across as naughty or just not really nice -- and, even at the level of a breech more than of etiquette, is taken as a civil infraction rather than as a criminal misdemeanor as the office requires in ALL cases, or as a felony as the context dictates).

One way to discriminate between these ideas is to suggest that ethics is adopted (whether internally or externally) as a means to evade or avert what would be worse punishments upon offense and discovery, whether from legal or social enforcement. Stewardship, on the other hand, while addressing the identical concerns as these ethical regulations, comes forth as felt responsibilities as well as via the principle of ‘enlightened self-interest’ where doing right of one’s own commutes to doing well by the customer as well, and thus one’s earning and standing both in the community and the profession.

From a virtue-ethics viewpoint, ethics defines what is required to prevent untoward consequences for client, grantor, principle or office. But too much of what passes for ethics is actually the collection of wrongs for which a boss can without cause dismiss an employee. Is it not 'unethical' to be too frequently tardy? 'Oh, but that isn't 'ethics',' the esthicist proclaims. Well, dudes, you can't argue both sides and come away with clean hands. Ethics, properly considered, is what I have already described as stewardship, a canopy term embracing not only normative ethics but all other issues pertinent to the theory of office.

A provisional answer to the lead question can already be hazarded: where ethics exists in a comparative absence of stewardship and a lack of legal teeth, it will likely not work, for either the ethics are too narrowly circumscribed, narrowly applied or ways are found to circumvent them in any case. But further is the inherent contradiction when ethics are by practice less than legal, for when they are legal they are fully regulations or “law”, and not ‘ethics’. I don’t care how professional ethicists think themselves to be, I can shoot holes through their poverty of philosophical enlightenment at every turn. Until ethics becomes stewardship or law takes over or both (the two are not inconsistent since stewardship is easily divided however suits any legal formulation) the concept of ethics as actually employed is fatally flawed. A pretty word that gets far more credit than deserved.

As F. Schiller duly noted, offices degrade, the original noble objectives run down by self-serving officials held unaccountable. In typological terms we say that the original cult of honor degrades or devolutes into a cult of dignity (my dignity is better than your dignity, where the least pleasurable or useful aspects of honor-based culture take over and defend the vacuous notion of plenary dignity such that members of the club get the choicest rewards, take advice from no one outside the fold, protect fellow members from detection for evident breech rather than, as theory dictates, keep one another responsible to stewardship, etc, etc.).

Offices are by definition cults of honor, for they employ literal or figurative concentrations of power to effectuate at higher standards what could not otherwise be accomplished, for the purpose of serving vital public interests. There is not office without stewardship, not stewardship without office. When the market came to the medieval town it came as an ad hoc office. Because power invites as much evil as good, the office carries inherent to it an adverse reliance from customer to businesspeople. The latter have knowledge of defects that could be kept from the public, for example. They might, even with laws or ‘ethics’ use false measures that the public would be hard-pressed to identify before it was too late. As with every culture, its customs or laws offer a degree of protection to the reliant in these relationships.

As offices carry oaths, corporations carried charters, for the same jural reasons: power begets benefits at the possible cost of serious collateral damage. The charter compelled the fact of office, whence stewardship, long before the term ‘ethics’ was ever dreamt of in such circumstances. Originally the often very specific instructions and provisions were a matter for the Crown to consider, for it alone gave and took away the liberty or franchise. This was less law than equity, but from the Crown the effect was the same, a rare instance when what we now are pleased to term ‘ethics’ was equivalent to law.

At the final turn we observe today’s market economics and business entities as in many instances having degraded the profession into a cult of dignity that describes, when not defining, the corporate culture. Back in the early days, paying monies to obtain lenient terms from legislation would have been a perfidious breach of trust and stewardship. Today monetized lobbying (it wasn’t always so) is effectively legalized bribery. That is the surest indication of a thoroughgoing cult of dignity -- along with taking monies intended by the public for advance of normative corporate function into political action funds, thus converting the public into private interest.

It is natural for people to instinctively avoid accountability except where stewardship is entered willfully (the original oath of office is a promise not only to act faithfully but to accept in advance that on abuse of office the holder will humbly accept whatever punishment be meted out). Where there is no way for stewardship (whether as law or ethics) to hold power accountable, power assumes to itself the right to avoid all accountability and responsibility for negligence, very often escaping even the long reach of the law. In such an environment the company will happily entertain a whole campaign of ethics if only to demonstrate the purity of their brand. They have no earthly intention of abiding to any but token or face-saving gestures. Where they take to ethics in fact and seriously, it is because they are either at legal risk for existing breeches or they have adopted a stewardship culture on their own. In short, law is for those in need of it.

When I was asked to be the public voice of stewardship for an organization I soon enough discovered that I was being used as a foil. hey wanted the stewardship to brand themselves, and were actually doing no such thing that I could honestly call stewardship. Well, I called them on it. You may guess the result.

The problem here is less what seems should work or not. In fact, Gwen does not in this case ask the ultimate question, which is this: what does it take to elaborate a culture in which ethics as we know it becomes unreasonable for being unnecessary? The short answer is to elaborate a culture of stewardship and treat it as its principles dictate in the translation from jurality to juridicality. Or, what amounts to the same thing, to advance as ‘legal terms of art’ the concepts of office and its stewardship. All that I have heretofor described can be dealt with in terms of the old bailment concepts that ultimated in felonies of conversion of protectable interests. In the last few centuries it has been relegated to narrow confines where in fact its jural substrate was nothing other than the legal office!

So when I say that bailment law is largely detritus, and that the real content of law is not being taught in law schools, I mean precisely these concepts of the office and its stewardship. And I will not lightly accept the facile notion that all is by definition cherries and whipped cream with our powerful professional institutions. The failure to learn real law in school results by degrees in the permanent and serious harm not only to justice but in addition to the health of our private morals and our public professions. The health care system debacle and late worldwide financial strains were owing to law's failure to understand what its students were never taught -- the stewardship duties of the office. These are facts. I do not say they are especially pleasant, but I assert them as facts and will defend them against all comers. And I will also assert that there is an even more sinister reason that they have not been taught, but that is for a different day and topic.

As usual I am in need of apologizing for length, but as usual justify it on account of old ideas newly clothed but not widely known. Fashion can be so tardy!

Thank you, Charles, for the rich content of this reply. I will study it for a couple of days and then post further comments. You're a gem.

Gwen

Gwen I read your presentation and I have a couple of questions. They are not about your content, as that was crystal clear and quite interesting.

1. Why are “bonuses tied to quarterly performance results” said to be “the root of many, many evils”? You don't strike me as someone who is, in principle, opposed to profits. I have lived and moved in the corporate world for many years, and found that such bonuses provided motivation to our sales force. Is there something about the MNC structure that makes these bonuses problematic?

2. Based on what you have written, in MNCs, ethics officers are not really ethicists, but they are actually compliance specialists. Speaking as an actual ethicist (that is what my Ph.D. is in), has anyone used the strategy of a corporate team, where you bring an actual ethicist together with company lawyers and accountants in order to have an ethics team? The response which I anticipate is that such ethicists would tend to be academic and theoretical in their approach, and I can see the practical problems associated with that. If an ethicist had real market savvy and was familiar with the work environment, it would seem that he/she could bring a missing dimension of ethical thought and motivation to such a process.

Perhaps I am too idealistic, but I do not find the thought of compliance specialists being called "ethics officers" to be a hopeful thing. My experience of compliance personnel is that some are very ethical (usually these folks are not particularly upwardly mobile in their career) whilst others have figured out how the rules work, and how to make the greatest pragmatic usage of them without regard for the well-being of others. Rules of compliance do not an ethicist make.

A couple points, with thanks for Bill for joining the discussion. Thought for a moment we were in bad odor over here...

First, one needn't have issues with profit-taking to question the wisdom of SOME performance-based bonuses. What is objectionable is not that good work would be remunerated, for that obviously is good, but that work that is sold as passing but is anything but should, as mere window dressing, get center stage on the bonus radar. Take, for example, stock price quarterly evaluations. surely everyone has by now learned what antics, ranging from stupid to obscene, are undertaken to lift earnings, and those responsible are those parachute jumpers we hear about. I know where you are coming from, Bill, but score one for Gwen.

Compliance officers are there to ensure nothing really stupid puts a firm on the wrong side of OSHA, for example. Second, they are there because the codes are a fright and frankly it requires a specialist to ferret through the morass and help the firm get into compliance. I have observed attorneys attending to such matters and I assure you they are anything but pretty absent such a specialist.

Of course, there are serious issues with compliance, but mainly with the term itself, at least amongst a certain group of swagger-type CEOs. For compliance means regulations, the long or deep end of the law strangling business from far away in Washington leftist circles. I have respect for what John Mackey (founder Whole Foods) has tried to do in conservation, in rational salaries (he stopped giving himself one years ago) and the idea that corporations should be stakeholders in their communities and even upon the world stage. (As he does tend to go rather far, however, he brags that industry could literally solve ALL the world's problems. Really, John, get some drugs coursing in thy veins...) I wrote a lengthy piece, available here, on his "conscious capitalism". What he means by this locution is admirable but he doesn't want to call it what it actually is: STEWARDSHIP. Any steward naturally brings precisely that attitude to whatever is in her granted authority (office). But, like compliance, stewardship is taken by too many in the business community as tantamount to compliance from afar, robbing the free will component of business and suffocating the delicate flower of curiosity, innovation, hell, the whole damned capitalistic system. Not to mention the bottom line. Of course I exaggerate, all in hyperbolic fun. What I do not exaggerate is that studies now continually discover that the practice of stewardship actually improves the bottom line as a good generality.

But I score one for Bill in his unenthusiastic response to compliance officers as ad hoc ethicists. Ethics has not only the issues I earlier outlined, but because of the academic caste the discipline is "academic", i.e., (as the uber-cowboy capitalist view matters) worthless gibberish from those ill equipped to understand the practical reality of business. They, ethicists appear too often to apply a carefully rendered version of morals, often their own, rather than principled considerations that can apply generally and that can be gauged with a degree of success both as to implementation, operationalization and outcomes.

Finally there is the confusion introduced by culture and to which I just adverted indirectly. Business is honor-based, many ethicists appear to pack their dignity-based suitcases on their way to the boardrooms. Clearly, the chief task of the ethicist is to marshal what dignity-based elements can assist business without also hindering it. I seriously question whether most have the moxie to understand how to achieve this without the training of a specialist. After all, many companies have hired anthropologists and sociologists to guide them in surfing between the Scylla of embarrassment and the Charybdis of economic ruin when opening plants or stores in foreign parts. The difference between the business culture and the street culture can be every bit as different, requiring in turn a similar specialist.

Addendum: Please note the correction in the next to last para of my last post where the "uber.." is parenthetically added to correct what may have amounted to a very serious miscomprehension better stated as a poorly expressed thought. And to reiterate the matter, it has been the crop of non-legal academic professional community (again with few exceptions) which has exposed infinitely more relevant data than the press, but which has been taken far too lightly by legal and political types who apparently have too much at stake in the status quo. Apart from two maverick federal judges, the most I have seen from a legal academic is the complaint that the system seems to curry favor from the status quo. Wow, them are fighting words (not) coming from a discipline taking high marks for insularity and a dignity cult demeanor - again with some few notable exceptions who are not listened to any more than are any other academics.

And for the record, my sharp criticisms of academe are limited to dignity cult extravaganzas, to political correctness at a level that obfuscates truth, and to a woefully deficient attitude to alternative methodologies even against the advice of other academics (Bourdieu, Peirce, Whitehead, Weiss and Hartshorne), and which is led by of all people those who should be best equipped to know better, namely, my own peers in philosophy, whose chief claim to infamy is their studied avoidance of the greatest advances in methodology since Aristotle, all adumbrated in the 1900s.

In short, academe is our last bastion as against the harms of the status quo; but for it to work best on our behalf it were wise that they reform where necessary or even the public will not be listening when academics finally beg to have a public platform owing to the desperate situation - they presently take to microphones either because asked or to find groupies, only rarely to do the "service" requirement in addition to teaching and research (again, with few obvious exceptions as for instance open letters of complaint/advocacy to societies and governments). It ought to be simple ethics, but obviously it isn't, ergo it is what it was always supposed to be, a matter of the stewardship inherent to a professional office).

Whoa Charles! "...whose chief claim to infamy is their studied avoidance of the greatest advances in methodology since Aristotle, all adumbrated in the 1900s." Of whom do you speak? I know Hartshorne is a person whose thought you revere, and I personally hold Peirce in high regard, but I'm not sure whose thought, in particular, you have in mind. I enjoyed some of Hartshorne's work, however I don't know as I would characterize it as being one of the greatest advances since Aristotle. I have my heroes in philosophy, but what I tend to assume is that the reason why other philosophers do not find them as persuasive as myself is because they don't share my presuppositions. When someone chooses to disregard Plantinga, MacIntyre, Anscombe, Goldman, Hampton, Polanyi, or Peirce (some of my favorites) I don't tend to question their philosophical integrity. Is this hyperbole or do you truly believe that this is genuinely a studied avoidance?

I not a big fan of analytic philosophy in general, and tend to lean more toward Continental thought. My peers at Birmingham in the U.K. were ALL analytical philosophers. I attributed this to my tendency to lean more toward realism and their tendency to lean more toward empiricism. It never occurred to me to question their character on the basis of their philosophical stance.

I digress from Gwen's original question by asking this of you, and I do, by the way, appreciate your response to the questions I asked above.

Hi Charles & Bill,

Thank you for giving attention to this question. I have not posted because I have just been diagnosed with Shingles and am experiencing much discomfort. The doctor says the medication should have me back to normal late next week.

Gwen

I have had shingles before Gwen. It is decidedly unpleasant. I hope your recovery as quick as your doctor has indicated. Best Wishes.

Oh my, so sorry to hear of the medical problems. Bill reminds me how common this is. Please get better soon!

Thanks, Bill, for your observations. Though off topic, my guess is we can spare a digression that has relevance backwards into ethics/stewardship.

So, excellent, I got through to someone. Yes, I meant what I said, and I guess I owe a longer explanation (that ordinarily would not be allowed given "ethical" constraints in these threads). And a misconception: analytic philosophy, as I think you infer from your reading, isn't necessarily reflective of the word itself, but hews toward a school of philosophic thought stressing, as you note, realism/empiricism. In fact, it seems a throwback to Kant's difficulties with Swedenborg or, as some might have it, with metaphysics in particular and in general.

In sum, latter day (since the Enlightenment) thought has tended to dismiss metaphysics as "speculative". Well, geez. I mean, duh. Seemingly intelligent people can't comprehend that "speculation" can be done EITHER well and wisely OR poorly and discreditably? Leave it to academic philosophers to screw up common words in many ways. I was fifteen years into my studies of philosophy before allowing the term to be used referentially. In academe a stupe can teach what others thought and become a philosopher. Unbelievable. The misconceptions surrounding what I do are many and serious.

Part of the misconception is at least understandable, if only because it is counter-intuitive to believe that a binary (hot-cold, short-long, honor-dignity, yin-yang) should be able to uncover the foundation of complex matter and process. Of course the Chinese came up with their binary as yes-no answers to divination, then extended it to four (to better interpret and explain the spirit answers), then to eight, which is where I Ching picks up the story. Now their way of expressing these eight is through three-tiered line-dash relationships which, as maximizing static combinations of 2 yields two-cubed, or eight. The full I Ching then went out to 64, whereat it became speculative in a bad way instead of good. In short, the early Chinese took a binary and extended it to help account for reality -- which is a huge part of philosophy's chore, no? I developed a paradigm that takes a binary and gives patterned grammatical meaning to the eight-fold I Ching, only mine actually does examine reality for reasons to be offered anon. The Jewish mystics began with a binary and from it elaborated the Sefiroth, which apparently was way too much for the orthodox to swallow, and Kabbalism is to this day shirked among them.

You may be wondering if I think that metaphysics is all about binaries and little else. Yes and no. There are two branches in metaphysical thought: the probative and the analytical. The religious philosophers and theologians do the former, I do the latter, and I make a special point to do it in full agreement with the meaning of the term employed. Using words correctly is, in philosophy, a very important point of stewardship, whence I do complain loudly when it is violated. Hartshorne pretty much restricted himself to the probative but borrowed from analytics the probative logic to demonstrate his theses, even to the point of using formal logic (largely useless in philosophy but for some heuristic parts that get lost in the forest of symbols, to borrow a phrase from Turner the anthropologist). Weiss used both parts equally, and Whitehead, though concerned to illustrate a role for a god, leaned quite a bit to the analytic. Though a Christian apologist, Peirce was totally analytic.

The 'anon' is now in play, for we can mention Eckhart and Sankara, each of whom explained core mystic tenets from a binary, but it was a dynamic one, which implied intercalation with a second binary. This is an early application of the correct modality. Curiously, each denied they used metaphysics, so clearly was "speculaton", even upon scholastic logic, abhorred even then. In fact, they utilized metaphysics better than any academic till Peirce. See Otto's Mysticism East and West and my paper on 'Fourthness as Necessity' available here.

The specific role of metaphysics within the philosophic ambit is to develop rational arguments to explicate reality. The rest of philosophy debates reality in light of these structures. Analytic philosophy is properly concerned with nothing but paradigms (I pronounce the 'i' short much as Nietzsche had 'i' for 'o' in part of his own binary - which didn't fair so well in his hands, btw). It is from experience, both with sources and personal work in the area that I contend that binaries are the core ingredient in any effective paradigm. I will not be proved wrong, and i have already demonstrated the ability of these tools in several disciplines. If I were wrong, others would have done long ago what I am doing.

A casual look at reality informs of intercalating binaries: electromagnetism, north-south and positive-negative; in circular motion, clockwise-counterclockwise, up-down, as well as centrifugal-centripetal. It would be cavalier in the extreme to avoid these fundamentals just because they are obvious or "simple". Einstein said to look for threads of simplicity within complexity. He was on target.

The normative paradigm starts with two intercalating binaries. The hard part was assigning the archetypal four values that would enable a fully principled yet flexible structure. This is what Peirce was the first in the world to achieve. Do I need to repeat that or do you want a few more pages of gibberish? Problem: Perice had a weak spot for the wrong sort of speculation. He dabbled in threes on the strength of Hegel and of the transitive property and the syllogism. And he was wrong. Weiss, who with Hartshorne edited his papers, saw this and added the fourth, which Aristotle had correctly surmised way back when in his four-causation theory. Which ought by itself to suggest how broadly one can apply so simple a thing as a dual binary (I added Hartshorne to the list of worthies because he allowed for off-brand methodologies, one of which he utilized to famous results).

Peirce's error was at least forgivable, and at his death he still knew there were serious problems with his concept of thirdness, which appeared somehow schizophrenic. Indeed, it was doing the duty of thirdness and fourthness together. Weiss figured out several permutations, the best of which had essence, action, existence and god, in that order, around a triad where the center is the fourth (an easy way to explicate things, not the one he relied on, though Hartshorne did and taught it in his classes). Working prior to any knowledge of Peirce, Weiss or Hartshorne, I elaborated essence, being, existence and reality. It has stood the test of time and is far superior in other ways from the progenitors. Needless to say, Hartshorne was stunned, though he has been about the only one, since it is apparently a rare sight to see anyone with the moxie to appreciate such things.

Even students of Peirce haven't the sense god gave geese, and they gravitate spontaneoulsy to the glyphs rather than to the cardinal feature, the cornerstone, the paradigm. The late Joseph Ransdell, who very aptly saw Peirce's structure as recursive (what Aristotle's was not, nor Hegel's), assumed that I had enumerated an entirely new way to interpret Peirce. He, too, was a three-man, but graciously backed my proposal to NIH (I proved insufficiently academic).

So folks can say, well, Charles, we have to take all of this on your word. Yep. Were academe able to do its stewardship of community scholarship and publish (appropriate journals, not penumbral) good independent work I would not have to admit that it's my word or nothing. I mean, who the hell is going to read about a thousand pages of material (all listed here)? No one, that's who. But had the core elements appeared in headline journals, none of this would require the slightest explanation. Well, almost none. And so we end on the stewardship note again.

But yes, Bill, I meant it. In one of my student's classes in metaphysics he mentioned Hartshorne to the instructor, who -- laughed. And this is where Hartshorne taught for 25 years. His idiosyncrasies stood out, meant more, than his serious scholarship. What does that say? Peirce and Whitehead are pretty much universally considered (qua metaphyscis) as impossible to understand. That is only because there is an attitude deficit in academic philosophy. Sorry, but it isn't rocket science. If people who have good minds can't see what there is to see, I have little to say. Metaphysics isn't easy, gets highly conceptual really fast. But rocket science it is not. So, no excuses for the philosophical community. There is need of paradigm-crashing, Kuhnian-style.

The Monist offered to Peirce (at the time an independent) a three article overview of his metaphysics. They could do a whole lot worse offering the same to me, who, unlike Peirce, has no fatal logical difficulties and a fair amount of success to sport. Harvard offered a lecture to him, perhaps on the strength of attachment to his famous mathematician father, Benjamin, who taught there. But to this day not only is there a poor view of independents, but scholars generally, and academic philosophy in particular, have a problem with binaries and off-brand methods. It's all just craziness. Part of the reason the Benedict-Mead shame-guilt thesis was torpedoed was the binary aspect. Mead had to, even back then, note specifically the Benedict never claimed to have a "typology". The political correctness is as stupid as stifling. From this one point of view more than most others, academe needs to gets its house in order. And read a lot more Barzun.

?

Thanks, Graham. Reading your comment was a great way to start my day. It is heartening to know the truth still holds of the axiom, "You can fool some of the people some of the time; but not all of the people, all of the time."

Incidentally, it may interest you to know that many places where I buy coffee-to-go don't even have the courtesy of asking about filling the cup 3/4ths full, so I make a point of saying right-off-the bat, "I take it black so please fill my cup to the brim."

Gwen

Dear Gwendolyn,

With regard to Graham's comment on Starbucks: the firm really stresses ist fair trade policy towards suppliers from third world countries, which, no doubt, evidences business ethics. But on the other hand, it was involved in a messy tax avoidance dispute with UK tax authorities back in 2012 / 2013, which is, no doubt, not ethical at all. To bring the tax controversy to an end, Starbucks voluntary agreed to pay a certain amount of tax, which it was not obliged to under the (legal) tax models it used to avoid UK taxes. Well, Starbacks pronounced the payment, but the voluntary character of the paymanet caused an even greater public outcry. The public was wandering, why Starbucks did not give up its tax avoidance technics, but regarded taxes as a voluntary contribution. To sum up, business ethics is not an easy topic with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde going hand in hand.

Paul    

Thank you, Graham -- I enjoy answers with a humorous turn.  Gwen

Dear Graham,

Some days ago I came across this paper: Jones, C.L.& Roberts, A.. (2006) Management of Financial Information in Charitable Organizations: the Case of Joint-Cost Allocations. The Accounting Review, 81(1), 159-178.

Well, charities also engage in earnings management... I am wondering whether the donors are aware of this...

Paul