Dr. Kapteina organises panel on business ethics in times of democratic backsliding

From 29 July to 1 August 2026, Dr. Benedikt D. S. Kapteina, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Chair of Business Administration, esp. Responsible Management, at TU Dresden's International Institute (IHI) Zittau, attended the annual conference of the Society for Business Ethics at the Sonesta Hotel in Philadelphia. He organised a panel on business ethics in times of democratic backsliding, chaired the session, and presented a paper of his own elsewhere in the programme.

Significance of the conference

The Society for Business Ethics is the central international scholarly association in business ethics and publishes Business Ethics Quarterly, one of the leading journals in the field. It accepts no corporate sponsorship; travel support for doctoral students and for scholars from underrepresented regions is funded by academic centres, non-profit organisations and individuals. The society traditionally meets immediately before the Academy of Management, so that both conferences follow one another in the same city.

The 2026 programme combined paper sessions with panels, formats for early career researchers, book discussions in the "Coffee with an Author" format, a joint keynote with the Social Issues in Management division of the Academy of Management, and the annual awards ceremony. The opening keynote was given by Scott J. Shapiro (Yale University), professor of law, philosophy and computer science.

The 2026 conference returned to Philadelphia after the society had met in Europe for the first time in 2025, and was moved forward by one day. Alongside the scholarly sessions, the programme offers dedicated formats for early career researchers, including the Emerging Scholars programme with mentoring and waived registration and a network for junior scholars. Dr. Kapteina’s panel was scheduled in the Friday morning block, in parallel with sessions on moral judgment in organisations, value pluralism and business in a governmental role; later the same day came the joint keynote with the Social Issues in Management division and the annual awards ceremony.

The panel

On 31 July, Dr. Kapteina organised the panel "Business Ethics in Times of Democratic Backsliding", chaired the session and took part in it himself. The panel brought together Eric Orts (Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania), Joanne Ciulla (Rutgers Business School), Andreas Georg Scherer (University of Zurich), David Silver (Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia), Alessio Salviato (Wharton School) and Michael Posner (NYU Stern School of Business), combining legal, philosophical, organisational and human rights perspectives on the same question: what companies and their leaders can and should do when democratic institutions come under pressure.

His own contribution

On 1 August, in the session on corporate engagement, Dr. Kapteina presented the paper "Drawing the Line: Democratic Orientation in Corporate Electoral Engagement", written with Iwan Alijew (University of St. Gallen). It examines how companies act politically around elections when disinformation and polarisation attack the epistemic conditions of democratic will formation. The empirical basis is corporate engagement around the 2019 European Parliament elections, analysed through document analysis and thirty-one interviews with senior managers, complemented by interviews with representatives of interest groups.

Conceptually, the paper proposes democratic orientation as an evaluative lens, with four dimensions: outcomes, reflection, publicity and neutrality. Neutrality emerges as the most fragile of these: even formally non-partisan measures such as turnout appeals or counter-disinformation initiatives can be read as partisan or elitist under polarised conditions. The paper was presented as work in progress, explicitly inviting discussion of the scope and limits of the concept.

What the research shows

Dr. Kapteina studies how companies act politically when democratic institutions come under pressure, and when such action has an effect. Under the concept of Corporate Democratic Action he sets out the conditions under which companies act as democratic actors: what matters is less the visibility of a commitment than its anchoring in structures, responsibilities and routines. The policy paper on CEO activism, written with the German Economic Institute (IW) in Cologne, accordingly shows that publicly visible positioning by senior executives is limited in its effect. Earlier stages appeared in the Academy of Management Proceedings 2024 as "Decoding Corporate Support for Democracy: A Study in Eastern Germany" and in 2025 as "Redefining Corporate Responsibility: The Role of Companies in Supporting Democracy"; an early version of the argument appeared in the LSE Business Review. Further work, including a review article on the creation of private governance in the Journal of Business Ethics, is listed in the publication list. The line of research was most recently translated into practice at the Schmalenbach workshop on Corporate Democratic Action.

This field is studied at the Chair of Business Administration, esp. Responsible Management at TU Dresden's International Institute (IHI) Zittau as a team, together with, among others, Prof. Dr. Markus Scholz and PD Dr. Eckhard Burkatzki.