'Maskers of the Universe: Generating Transparency Around Antisocial Personality Traits of Executive Leaders in Corporate America' by Nicolette J. Zulli
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One out of every five chief executives is a psychopath who is consumed with playing a game of corporate accomplishment, as he takes inhumane pleasure in violating moral code to ensure his dominance and personal gain over others in the workplace. In fact, there are a growing number of “triadic persons” in the American workforce, who combine three types of antisocial personalities: narcissism, sociopathy, and psychopathy. These individuals are drawn to positions of power and prestige, making corporate America the ideal breeding ground for producing the number one most psychopathic profession: The Corporate CEO. These actors are intrinsic experts at performing a routine of tantalizing charm and believable devotion. Meanwhile, with the absence of an effective mechanism designed to highlight the antisocial tendencies of C-Level leaders in current hiring and promotion processes of publicly-traded companies, these corporations, their employees, and shareholders remain unable to expose the bad actors who are stealthily permeating the fabric of U.S. commercial markets. In order to generate the transparency necessary to afford employers, stockholders, boards of directors, and regulators the opportunity to make informed decisions about America’s corporate leaders, this Note proposes the SEC’s promulgation of an optional Corporate Character and Fitness (“CCF”) Disclosure tool, designed to unmask the antisocial personality traits of executive leaders employed by publicly-traded companies, in order to better gauge their risk propensity.
'Advertising Morality: Maintaining Moral Worth in a Stigmatized Profession' by Andrew C. Cohen and Shai M. Dromi
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Although a great deal of literature has looked at how individuals respond to stigma, far less has been written about how professional groups address challenges to their self-perception as abiding by clear. In this paper, we ask how professional group members maintain a positive self-perception in face of moral stigma.Drawing on pragmatic and cultural sociology, we claim that professional communities hold narratives that link various aspects of the work their members perform with specific understanding of the common good. These narratives allow professionals to maintain a shared view of their work as benefitting society and to perceive themselves as moral individuals. As a case study, we focus on the advertising industry, which has long been stigmatized as complicit in exploitative capitalist mechanisms and cultural degradation. We draw on 9 total months of fieldwork and 74 interviews across three U.S.advertising agencies. We find that advertising practitioners use narratives to present their work as contributing to the common good, depicting themselves as moral individuals who care about others in the process. We analyze three prevalent narratives: the account-driven narrative, which links moral virtue to caring for clients; the creative-driven narrative, which ties caring to the production of meaningful advertisements; and the strategic-driven narrative, which sees caring in finding meaningful relationships for consumers and brands.
