The number of workers with a chronic disease is steadily growing in industrialized countries. To cope with and to give meaning to their illness, patients construct illness narratives, which are widely shared across patient societies, personal networks and the media. This study investigates the influence of these shared illness narratives on patient's working lives, by examining the impact of reading a positive work story versus negative work story on patients' sustainable employability. We expected that this relationship would be mediated by positive emotions and the extent to which the story enhanced awareness of desires future selves, and moderated by identification with story character. An online field experiment with 166 people with Inflammatory Bowel Disease in The Netherlands showed that while reading a positive story of a patient with the same condition significantly increased positive emotions, these emotions did not influence sustainable employability. However, reading a positive story was related to higher sustainable employability when patients became more aware of their desired possible future work selves. Finally, identification with the story character moderated the impact of story type on sustainable employability. This study showed that personal engagement with a positive work story of a fellow patient is related to higher sustainable employability. Findings can be helpful for health professionals to empower employees with a chronic disease. OPEN ACCESS Citation: Brokerhof IM, Ybema JF, Bal PM (2020) Illness narratives and chronic patients' sustainable employability: The impact of positive work stories. PLoS ONE 15(2): e0228581. https://doi.org/ 10.

Can business humanize its stakeholders? And if so, how does this relate to moral consideration for stakeholders? In this paper we compare two business orientations that are relevant for current business theory and practice: a stakeholder orientation and a profit orientation. We empirically investigate the causal relationships between business orientation, humanization, and moral consideration. We report the results of six experiments, making use of different operationalizations of a stakeholder and profit orientation, different stakeholders (employees, suppliers, labor unions), and different participant samples. Our findings support the prediction that individual stakeholders observing a stakeholder-oriented firm see the firm’s other stakeholders as more human than individual stakeholders observing a profit-oriented firm. This humanization, in turn, increases individual stakeholders’ moral consideration for the firm’s other stakeholders. Our findings underscore the importance of humanization for stakeholders’ moral consideration for each other. This paper contributes to a deeper understanding of the firm as a moral community of stakeholders. Specifically, we move away from a focus on managers, and how they can make business more moral. Instead we direct attention to (other) stakeholders, and how business can make these stakeholders more moral.

Moral subjectivity (e.g., reflexivity, perspective-taking) is a necessary condition for moral development. However, widely used approaches to business ethics education, rooted in conceptualizations of ethical development as objective and quantifiable, often neglect students' subjective involvement in moral matters. In this case study we investigated subjective aspects of moral development of MBA students in a business ethics course using an alternative pedagogy based on world literature as course material. The findings elucidated that the use of literary narratives stimulated the development of "moral muscle," a dynamic moral capability that needs to be developed through regular reflection and practice. Additionally, the development of moral muscle during the course showed heterogeneity among students, with different starting positions, learning routes, and end states of their moral development. The findings contribute to a new theoretical understanding of moral development as a dynamic processas moral musclewith different individual change trajectories, and shed new light on how the use of literary narratives in business ethics education can stimulate this development.

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