INTRODUCITION TO BUSINESS

ETHICS

What is meant by ethics?

- Consists of moral principles governing the right and wrongs of human conduct

- Is about the principles of right and wrong accepted by individuals or social groups

- A code of behaviour considered morally correct

- Code of moral principles that guide the action of people and groups

- Ethical behaviour is doing what is morally right

Business ethics

Business ethics are the principles and standards that:

- Define acceptable conduct in business

- Should underpin decision making

An alternative definition is: ”the moral values which govern business behaviour and

restrains companies from pursuing the interest of the shareholder at the expense of all

other considerations”

- Some activities might be profitable and legal but nevertheless are considered to be

unethical

- An ethical decision is one that is both legal and meets the shared ethical standards of the

community

Is ethics the same as the law?

- No - although the law should reflect the ethical views of society there are certain

activities permitted by law which some individual or groups in society or individual

might regard as unethical.

- Ethical considerations are about what is right and what is wrong

- The law is about what is lawful and what is unlawful

The following business activities are legal but might pose ethical dilemmas for

individuals:

Profiting from gambling

Selling goods manufactured by low wage in developing countries

Engaging in the fur trade

Experimenting on animals

Is it the same as corporate social responsibility?

- There is clearly an overlap between CSR and business ethics

- A socially responsible firm should be an ethical firm

- An ethical firm should be socially responsible

However there is a distinction:

- CSR is about responsibility to all stakeholders and not just shareholders

- Ethics is about morally correct behaviour

Ethics - decision models

- When faced with an ethical question, what guides our decision making? There are

different ways of looking at the issue:

Moral principles

- Evaluate decisions on whether it is consistent with accepted moral principles

Utilitarianism

- Looks at decisions from the perspective of who gains

- What is good for the greatest number is right

- The test is whether or not it is consistent with the greatest happiness of the greatest

number?

Justice model

- The test is does it distribute benefits and penalties in a fair and equitable way?

Human rights

- People have fundamental human rights and liberties - consent, privacy, conscience, free

speech, fair treatment, life, safety

- The test is: does it violate human rights?

- An ethically correct decision is one that best maintains the human rights of those

affected

- Decisions that violate human rights are unethical

Individualism

- Is it in the individual’s best interest?

- This is the ethics of self interest

Spectrum of firms

- It would be naïve to believe that all business organisations behave in an ethical, moral

way

- We can classify firms in terms of their ethical stance in the following ways:

The amoral firm

- Seeks to win at all costs

- Anything is acceptable

The legalistic firm

- Will obey the law but no more than that

The responsive firm

- Accepts that being ethical can pay off

- Ethical behaviour is enlightened self interest

The ethically engaged firm

- Wants to do the right thing

- Has a code of ethics

- But ethical behaviour is not fully integrated into the culture

The ethical firm

- Ethics are a core value and permeate the whole organisation

DEFINITION OF BUSINESS

ETHICS

Business ethics can be defined as written and unwritten codes of principles and values

that govern decisions and actions within a company. In the business world, the

organization’s culture sets standards for determining the difference between good and

bad decision making and behavior.

In the most basic terms, a definition for business ethics boils down to knowing the

difference between right and wrong and choosing to do what is right. The phrase

'business ethics' can be used to describe the actions of individuals within an organization,

as well as the organization as a whole.

Types of business ethics

The different forms of business ethics can be categorized into the following types:

General business ethics

These ethics deal with the following issues:

Corporate social responsibility (CSR)

Fiduciary responsibility

Corporate governance

Industrial espionage

Hostile take-overs

Corporate manslaughter

Political contributions

Professional business ethics

The professional business ethics can be categorized into the following types:

Ethics of human resource management (HRM)

Discrimination issues

Strike breaking or union busting

Drug testing

Workplace surveillance

Whistle-blowing

Occupational safety and health

Employment law

Indentured servitude

Ethics of accounting information

Kickbacks

Creative accounting

Earnings management

Misleading financial analysis

Insider trading

Securities fraud

Bucket shop

Forex scams

Executive compensation

Bribery

Facilitation payments

Ethics of production

Harmful, addictive, or defective products

Environmental ethics

Pollution

Carbon emissions trading

Health

Mobile phone radiation

Genetically modified food

Product testing ethics like animal testing and animal rights

Ethics of sales and marketing

Pricing: Price discrimination, price fixing, price skimming

Anticompetitive practices

Particular marketing strategies: Greenwash, shill, bait and switch, spam

(computer), viral marketing, pyramid scheme, and planned obsolescence

Advertisement contents: Attack ads or promos, sex in advertisements, and

subliminal messages

Marketing in schools

Grey markets and black markets

Ethics of intellectual property, skills, and knowledge

Patent infringement, trademark infringement, copyright infringement

Patent misuse, patent troll, copyright misuse, submarine patent

Employee raiding

Biopiracy and bioprospecting

Industrial espionage

Business intelligence

International business ethics

Transfer pricing

Fair trade pricing

Cultural imperialism

Globalization

Child labor

Objective of bussness ethics

Why Study Ethics?

Even granting that business ethics is important, many seem to believe that there is no

point in studying the subject. Ethics is something you feel, not something you think.

Finance,

marketing, operations, and even business law lend themselves to intellectual treatment,

but ethics

does not.

The idea that ethics has no intellectual content is odd indeed, considering that some of the

most famous intellectuals in world history have given it a central place in their thought

(Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas, etc.). Ethics is in fact a

highly

developed field that demands close reasoning. The Western tradition in particular has

given rise

to sophisticated deontological, teleological and consequentialist theories of right and

wrong. No

one theory explains everything satisfactorily, but the same is true, after all, in the natural

sciences.

Even when they grant that ethics has intellectual content, people often say that studying

the field will not change behavior. Character is formed in early childhood, not during a

professor’s lecture.

If the suggestion here is that college-level study does not change behavior, we should

shut down the entire business school, not only the ethics course. Presumably the claim,

then, is

that studying finance and marketing can influence one’s conduct, but studying ethics

cannot.

This is again a curious view, since ethics is the one field that deals explicitly with

conduct.

Where is the evidence for this view? The early origins of character do not prevent finance

and

marketing courses from influencing behavior. Why cannot ethics courses also have an

effect?

7

Ethics courses have a number of features that seem likely to influence behavior. They

provide a language and conceptual framework with which one can talk and think about

ethical

issues. Their emphasis on case studies helps to make one aware of the potential

consequences of

one’s actions. They present ethical that theories help define what a valid ethical argument

looks

like. They teach one to make distinctions and avoid fallacies that are so common when

people

make decisions. They give one an opportunity to think through, at one’s leisure, complex

ethical

issues that are likely to arise later, when there is no time to think. They introduce one to

such

specialized areas as product liability, employment, intellectual property, environmental

protection, and cross-cultural management. They give one practice at articulating an

ethical

position, which can help resist pressure to compromise.

None of this convinces one to be good, but it is useful to those who want to be good. It

may also improve business conduct in general. How many of the recent business scandals

would

have occurred if subordinates had possessed the skills, vocabulary and conceptual

equipment to

raise an ethical issue with their coworkers?

Ethics not only should be studied alongside management, but the two fields are closely

related. Business management is all about making the right decisions. Ethics is all about

making

the right decisions. So what is the difference between the two? Management is concerned

with

how decisions affect the company, while ethics is concerned about how decisions affect

everything. Management operates in the specialized context of the firm, while ethics

operates in

the general context of the world. Management is therefore part of ethics. A business

manager

cannot make the right decisions without understanding management in particular as well

as ethics

in general. Business ethics is management carried out in the real world.

LITERATURE REVIEW Business ethics has only existed as an academic field since the 1970s. During the 1960s,

corporations found themselves increasingly under attack over unethical conduct. As a

response to this, corporations - most notably in the US - developed social responsibility

programmes which usually involved charitable donations and funding local community

projects. This practice was mostly ad hoc and unorganised varying from industry to

industry and company to company. Business schools in large universities began to

incorporate ‘social responsibility’ courses into their syllabi around this time but it was

mostly focused on the law and management strategy.

Social responsibility has been described as being a pyramid with four types of

responsibility involved - economic (on the bottom level), then legal, ethical and finally

philanthropic. Ethical issues were dealt with in social issues courses however, and were

not considered in their own right until the 1970s when philosophers began to write on the

subject of business ethics

1) Business ethics provided an ethical framework for evaluating business and the

corporate world.

2) It allowed critical analysis of business and development of new and different methods.

(This also made business ethicists unpopular in certain circles.)

3) Business ethics fused personal and social responsibility together and gave it a

theoretical foundation. In this way, business ethics had a somewhat broader remit than its

predecessor (the social issues course) and was a good deal more systematic and

constructive. Business ethics also recognised that the world of business raised new and

unprecedented moral problems not covered by personal systems of morality. Common-

sense morality is sufficient to govern judgments about stealing from your employer,

cheating customers and tax fraud. It could not provide all the necessary tools for

evaluating moral justification of affirmative action, the right to strike and whistle-

blowing.

By 1990, however, the climate was changing. An oil spill that found its

way into the Monongahela River cost Ashland Oil $2.5 million, and under

a new set of federal sentencing guidelines that became law just a year

later, the fines could have amounted to between $30 million and $50

million. In publishing this reportage, Ethikos was not trying to tell its

readers to establish some kind of defensive system to protect their cash

position. The purpose was to demonstrate the value of raising ethical

levels throughout the corporate structure—from the executive suite to the

mid-management sector and the work floor as well.

In earlier times, Ethikos discussed many of the ramifications of a

continuing discussion about whether or not proper ethical conduct could

improve company profitability. In doing so it set forth the views of Milton

Friedman in the “Self-Interest Model of Business Ethics,” who argued that

the corporate responsibility was simply to return a profit.

It followed up with part of a transcript of a debate between T. Boone

Pickens and James Burke of Johnson & Johnson about where the company

shareholders ranked in importance. To Pickens: First. To Burke: Last.

There was coverage of the hotline set up by the National Association of

Accountants—to offer guidance to its 100,000 members who work within

businesses as controllers or budget officers. There queries were and still

are familiar: A business owner modernizes his personal residence and

orders his accountant to put the cost on the company’s books. Another

makes a business trip and takes friends along at company expense. A

positive sign back then noted that companies were reporting huge write-

offs that in earlier times firms had once tried to hide.

There were interviews with prominent executives commenting on their

personal experiences with the problems of facilitating payments, the

acceptance of gifts and favors and the giving as well. DuPont pegged the

limit of both at $25.

In its very first issue, Ethikos sought opinions from a number of teachers

in graduate schools of business throughout the country. This came in the

wake of a $30 million gift from John Shad, a former chairman of the SEC

to support a program on ethics at Harvard Business School. Having

donated most of the money, he gave his reasons. Among them: “I’ve been

very disturbed recently with the large numbers of graduates of leading

business schools who have become convicted felons.”

Ethikos makes no claim to prescience. Still, familiarity with the

complexities of the past does help to focus on the problems and concerns

of the future. Ethikos aims to present them with clarity and timeliness.

In this broad sense ethics in business is simply the application of everyday moral or

ethical norms to business. Perhaps the example from the Bible that comes to mind most

readily is the Ten Commandments, a guide that is still used by many today. In particular,

the injunctions to truthfulness and honesty or the prohibition against theft and envy are

directly applicable. A notion of stewardship can be found in the Bible as well as many

other notions that can be and have been applied to business. Other traditions and religions

have comparable sacred or ancient texts that have guided people's actions in all realms,

including business, for centuries, and still do.

If we move from religion to philosophy we have a similar long tradition. Plato is known

for his discussions of justice in the Republic, and Aristotle explicitly discusses economic

relations, commerce and trade under the heading of the household in his Politics. His

discussion of trade, exchange, property, acquisition, money and wealth have an almost

modern ring, and he makes moral judgments about greed, or the unnatural use of one's

capacities in pursuit of wealth for its own sake, and similarly condemns usury because it

involves a profit from currency itself rather than from the process of exchange in which

money is simply a means.1 He also gives the classic definition of justice as giving each

his due, treating equals equally, and trading equals for equals or "having an equal amount

both before and after the transaction."2

In the West, after the fall of Rome, Christianity held sway, and although there were

various discussions of poverty and wealth, ownership and property, there is no systematic

discussion of business except in the context of justice and honesty in buying and selling.

We see this, for instance, in Thomas Aquinas's discussion of selling articles for more than

they are worth and selling them at a higher price than was paid for them3 and in his

discussion of, and, following Aristotle's analysis, his condemnation of usury.4

Nonetheless he justified borrowing for a good end from someone ready to lend at interest.

Luther, Calvin, and John Wesley, among other Reformation figures also discussed trade

and business and led the way in the development of the Protestant work ethic.5 R. H.

Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism6 argues persuasively that religion was an

essential part in the rise of individualism and of commerce as it developed in the modern

period. The modern period, however, sought the divorce of the religious from the secular

and politics from religion. In the process, economics and economic activity were

similarly divorced from religion and joined with politics to form what was known as

political-economy.

John Locke developed the classic defense of property as a natural right. For him, one

acquires property by mixing his labor with what he finds in nature.7 Adam Smith is often

thought of as the father of modern economics with his An Inquiry into the Nature and

Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Smith develops Locke's notion of labor into a labor

theory of value. In modern times commentators have interpreted him as a defender of

laissez-faire economics, and put great emphasis on his notion of the invisible hand. Yet

the commentators often forget that Smith was also a moral philosopher and the author of

The Theory of Moral Sentiments. For him the two realms were not separate. John Stuart

Mill, Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel all wrote on economic matters and just distribution.

Karl Marx, however, stands out as the most trenchant critic of capitalism as it had

developed up through the Nineteenth Century, and Marx's critique in one form or another

continues up to today, even when not attributed to Marx.

Marx claimed that capitalism was built on the exploitation of labor. Whether this was for

him a factual claim or a moral condemnation is open to debate; but it has been taken as a

moral condemnation since 'exploitation' is a morally charged term and for him seems

clearly to involve a charge of injustice. Marx's claim is based on his analysis of the labor

theory of value, according to which all economic value comes from human labor. The

only commodity not sold at its real value, according to Marx, is human labor. Workers

are paid less than the value they produce. The difference between the value the workers

produce and what they are paid is the source of profit for the employer or the owner of

the means of production. If workers were paid the value they produced, there would be

no profit and so capitalism would disappear. In its place would be socialism and

eventually communism, in which all property is socially (as opposed to privately) owned,

and in which all members of society would contribute according to their ability and

receive according to their needs. The result would be a society (and eventually a world)

without exploitation and also without the alienation that workers experience in capitalist

societies.

Marx's notion of exploitation was developed by Lenin in Imperialism: The Highest Stage

of Capitalism, in which he claims that the exploitation of workers in the developed

countries has been lessened and the workers' conditions have improved because the worst

exploitation has been exported to the colonies. His criticism has been adapted by many

contemporary critics who claim that multinational corporations derive their profits from

the exploitation of workers in less developed countries.

Marx appealed to the workers of his time and helped start the labor movement, which

improved the situation of the workingman. Marx's collaborator, Frederich Engels, saw

the world as divided between those who follow Marx and those who follow religion, and

the Marxists sought the hearts and minds of the workers. Refusing to yield the moral high

ground, Pope Leo XIII in 1891 issued the first of the papal encyclicals on social justice,

Rerum Novarum. As opposed to Marx, it justified private property, while seeking the

answer to exploitation in the notion of a just wage, which was one sufficient "to support a

frugal and well-behaved wage-earner," his wife and his children.8 Later popes followed

Leo's example. Pope Pius XI in 1931 wrote Quadragesimo Anno, which morally attacked

both Soviet socialism and laissez-faire capitalism, a theme continued by Pope John Paul

II in Laborem Exercens (1981) and Centesimus Annus (1991). The U. S. Catholic

Bishops in 1984 issued a Pastoral Letter on the U.S. Economy along the same lines,

although more open to the U. S. free enterprise system. The aim of the encyclicals was

not to propose any particular economic system but to insist that any system should not be

contrary to Christian moral principles and should improve the conditions of the masses of

humanity, especially of the poor and the least advantaged. Hence although the popes

were critical of existing economic structures, the emphasis in the pulpits was still

primarily on individuals living up to the demands of morality, including the giving of

charity to those in need.

The same is true of the Protestant tradition as of the Catholic, even though there is no

central authority to issue documents such as the encyclicals. Perhaps the most influential

protestant figure in this regard was Reinhold Niebuhr whose trenchant critique of

capitalism in Moral Man and Immoral Society9 became the basis for courses in

seminaries and schools of theology. In 1993 the Parliament of the World's Religions

adopted a Declaration of a Global Ethic10 that condemned "the abuses of the Earth's

ecosystems," poverty, hunger, and the economic disparities that threaten many families

with ruin.

The idea of ethics in business continues until the present day. In general, in the United

States this focuses on the moral or ethical actions of individuals. It is in this sense also

that many people, in discussing business ethics, immediately raise examples of immoral

or unethical activity by individuals. Included with this notion, however, is also the

criticism of multinational corporations that use child labor or pay pitifully low wages to

employees in less developed countries or who utilize suppliers that run sweat shops.

Many business persons are strongly influenced by their religious beliefs and the ethical

norms that they have been taught as part of their religion, and apply these norms in their

business activities. Aaron Feuerstein is a prime example of someone whose actions after

fire destroyed almost all of his Malden Mills factory complex kept his workers on the

payroll until he could rebuild. He has stated often and publicly that he just did what his

Jewish faith told him was the right thing to do.

This strand of the story is perhaps the most prominent in the thinking of the ordinary

person when they hear the term business ethics. The media carries stories about Enron

officials acting unethically and about the unethical activities of Arthur Andersen or

WorldCom, and so on, and the general public takes this as representative of business

ethics or of the need for it. What they mean is the need for ethics in business.

Business Ethics as an Academic Field

Business ethics as an academic field, just as business ethics as a corporate movement,

have a more recent history.

The second strand of the story that I shall tell has to do with business ethics as an

academic field.

The 1960s marked a changing attitude towards society in the United States and towards

business. The Second World War was over, the Cold War was ever present, and the War

in Viet Nam fostered a good deal of opposition to official public policy and to the so-

called military-industrial complex, which came in for increasing scrutiny and criticism.

The Civil Rights movement had caught the public imagination. The United States was

becoming more and more of a dominant economic force. American-based multinational

corporations were growing in size and importance. Big business was coming into its own,

replacing small and medium-sized businesses in the societal image of business. The

chemical industry was booming with innovation, and in its wake came environmental

damage on a scale that had not previously been possible. The spirit of protest led to the

environmental movement, to the rise of consumerism, and to criticism of multinational

corporations.

Corporations, finding themselves under public attack and criticism, responded by

developing the notion of social responsibility. They started social responsibility programs

and spent a good deal of money advertising their programs and how they were promoting

the social good. Exactly what "social responsibility" meant varied according to the

industry and company. But whether it was reforestation or cutting down on pollution or

increasing diversity in the workforce, social responsibility was the term used to capture

those activities of a corporation that were beneficial to society and usually, by

implication, that made up for some unethical or anti-social activity with which the

company had been charged. The business schools responded by developing courses in

social responsibility or social issues in management—courses which continue to thrive

today. For the most part, in the 1960s such courses put an emphasis on law, and the point

of view of managers prevailed, although soon that of employees, consumers and the

general public were added. The textbooks paid no systematic attention to ethical theory,

and tended to be more concerned with empirical studies than with the development or

defense of norms against which to measure corporate activity. The history of the social

responsibility movement is a story in itself and one that different people are writing

somewhat differently. One version, by Archie Carroll, describes social responsibility as a

pyramid that encompasses the four types of responsibility that businesses have: At the

bottom is economic, then legal, then ethical and then philanthropic. And although some

representatives of corporate social responsibility claim that they did business ethics

before business ethics became popular and although some claim that what they do is

business ethics, that is not the story of business ethics I am going to tell today.

Business ethics as an academic field emerged in the 1970s. Prior to this time there had

been a handful of courses called by that name; and a few figures, such as Raymond

Baumhart, who dealt with ethics and business. For the most part ethical issues, if they

were discussed, were handled in social issues courses. Theologians and religious thinkers,

as well as media pundits continued writing and teaching on ethics in business; professors

of management continued to write and do research on corporate social responsibility. The

new ingredient and the catalyst that led to the field of business ethics as such was the

entry of a significant number of philosophers, who brought ethical theory and

philosophical analysis to bear on a variety of issues in business. Business ethics emerged

as a result of the intersection of ethical theory with empirical studies and the analysis of

cases and issues.

Norman Bowie dates the birth of business ethics as November 1974, with the first

conference in business ethics, which was held at the University of Kansas, and which

resulted in the first anthology used in the new courses that started popping up thereafter

in business ethics.12 Whether one chooses that date or some other event, it is difficult to

identify any previous period with the sort of concerted activity that developed in a short

period thereafter. In 1979 three anthologies in business ethics appeared: Tom Beauchamp

and Norman Bowie, Ethical Theory and Business; Thomas Donaldson and Patricia

Werhane, Ethical Issues in Business: A Philosophical Approach; and Vincent Barry,

Moral Issues in Business. In 1982 the first single-authored books in the field appeared:

Richard De George, Business Ethics; and Manuel G. Velasquez, Business Ethics:

Concepts and Cases. The books found a ready market, and courses in business ethics

both in philosophy departments and in schools of business developed rapidly. As they

did, the number of textbooks increased exponentially.

The field developed very similarly to the field of medical ethics, which had emerged ten

years earlier in the 1960s, and the name paralleled that of the earlier field—although even

whether the term "business ethics" should be adopted was discussed among the relatively

small group that was engaged in starting what has become a field. The seminal work of

John Rawls in 1971, A Theory of Justice, had helped make the application of ethics to

economic and business issues more acceptable to academic philosophers than had

previously been the case. Whereas most of those who wrote on social issues were

professors of business, most of those who wrote initially on business ethics were

professors of philosophy, some of whom taught in business schools. What differentiated

business ethics as a field from social issues in management was 1) the fact that business

ethics sought to provide an explicit ethical framework within which to evaluate business,

and especially corporate activities. Business ethics as an academic discipline had ethics

as its basis. While social responsibility could be and was defined by corporations to cover

whatever they did that they could present in a positive light as helping society, ethics had

implicit in it standards that were independent of the wishes of corporations. To that

extent, 2) the field was at least potentially critical of business practices—much more so

than the social responsibility approach had been. If we take Archie Carroll's pyramid,

those in business ethics did not see ethics as coming after economics and law but as

restraints on economic activity and as a source for justifying law and for proposing

additional legal restraints on business when appropriate. As a result business ethics and

business ethicists were not warmly received by the business community, who often

perceived them as a threat—something they could not manage, preaching by the

uninformed who never had to face a payroll.

The development of the field was far from easy, and those academics working in it

initially also found a cool reception both from their colleagues in philosophy departments

and from those in business and in business schools. The former typically did not see

business as a philosophically interesting endeavor, and many of them had an anti-

business mind-set. The latter questioned whether philosophers had anything of interest to

bring to business. The initial efforts were tenuous, and more and more people entered the

field who were often ill-informed, or who, in fact, adopted polemical attacks against or

positions in defense of business. Many observers dismissed business ethics as a fad that

would pass. Many misunderstood its aims and envisioned it as providing justification or a

rationale for whatever business wanted to do. It took a number of years for the field to

define itself, incorporate standards of scholarship and rigor, and become accepted.

As a field, business ethics covered the ethical foundations of business, of private

property, and of various economic systems. 3) Although the field was concerned with

managers and workers as moral persons with responsibilities as well as rights, most

attention was focused on the corporation—its structure and activities, including all the

functional areas of business, including marketing, finance, management, and production.

Related issues, such as the environmental impact of business actions, were included in

most courses and texts, as were, with increasing attention, the activities of multinational

corporations. As a field, business ethics included a good deal, but not all, of what was

covered in social issues courses and texts, as well as giving structure to discussions of

ethics in business. As it emerged by the middle of the 1980s it was clearly

interdisciplinary, with the lines between philosophy and business research often blurred.

Initial discussions of business ethics introduced students to two of the basic techniques of

moral argumentation, that used by utilitarians (who hold that an action is right if it

produces the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people), and that used by

deontologists (who claim that duty, justice and rights are not reducible to considerations

of utility). Other approaches were soon introduced including natural law, virtue ethics

(based on Aristotle), and the ethics of caring (often associated with a feminist approach to

ethics). An initial philosophical discussion that arose concerned the moral status of

corporations and whether one could appropriately use moral language with respect to

them, or whether the only proper objects of moral evaluation were human beings and

their actions. That controversy has not completely subsided, but most authors take into

account the fact that most people do attribute actions and policies to corporations as well

as to the individuals within them.

The Role of Business Ethics Today

Business and IT students spend the majority of their time at university learning about

economics, business development, software engineering and computer programming.

This is all valuable and necessary knowledge to prepare them for the demands of

employment in the business/IT sector. However, running or working in a business will

raise many difficulties that are completely unrelated to the skills or knowledge gained in

university.

How do you evaluate such problems as hiring the more qualified candidate for a job

when she has a disability requiring costly adaptations to the work environment,

outsourcing production materials from countries where child labour and sweatshops are

prevalent etc.?

In recent years there have been several business scandals that caused serious damage to

the credibility of the companies involved, occasionally the entire industry in which they

operate, and the numerous stakeholders of the business. One such example is the collapse

of Barings Bank - the actions of one rogue trader incurred losses of almost US$1 billion.

It has been discovered that many high profile people (at home and abroad) are involved

in tax-evasion, insider trading and fraud, Charlie Haughey and Martha Stewart are two

such examples of people with considerable wealth and public standing who have been

involved in questionable business dealings. At this stage in your course, you are well

equipped with knowledge of your subject, and this will be built on when you go into the

workplace due to on-going training and other such practices. But it is fair to say that

some of you may have never had the chance to think of the ethical issues entailed in

business and IT . During this course on business ethics it is hoped that you will be given

such an opportunity and attain a working knowledge of the different theoretical

frameworks that can be applied to business

Research methodology

As far as research is concerned the data can be collected in only two formi i.e primary

data or secondry data . in this research work secondary data has been used .

Secondary dataIn research, secondary data is data collected and possibly processed by people other than

the reseasrcher in question. Common sources of secondary data for social science

Include censuses, large surveys, and organizational records . In sociology primary data is

data you have collected and secondary data is you mhave gathered from primary to create

a new research . In terms of historical research, these two terms have different

meaning . A primary source is a book or a set of archival records . A secondary source is

summary of a book or set of records.

Secondary data analysisThere are two different types of sources that need to be established in order to conduct a

good analysis , The first type is a primary source which is the initial material that is

collected during the research process. Primary data is the data that the researcher is

collecting themselves using methords such as surveys , direct ovservationas , interviews,

well as logs(objective data sources). Primary data is a reliable way to collect data because

the researcher will know where it came from and how it was collected and analyzed

since they did it themselves . Secondary sources on the on the other hand are sources that

are based upon the data that was collected from the primary source. Secondary sources

take the role of analyzing, explaining, and combining the information from the primary

source with additional information.

Secondary data is analysis commonly kown as second-hand analysis. It is simply the

analysis of preexisting data in a different way or to answer a different question than

originally intended. Secondary data analysis utilizes the data that was collected by

someone else in order to furher a study that you are interested in completing .

Common sources of secondary data are social science surveys and data from government

agencies, including the bureau of the census, the Bureau of the census, the Bureau of

labour Statistics and various other agencies. The data collected more often collected via

surveys research methords. Data from experimental studies may also be used.

LIMITATIONS

Due to non availability of the concerned persons questions remained unanswered.

Turnover were not given

Biasness is the most serious limitation.

Retailers behavior are not accessed correctly.

Realibility of data is dependen on their honesty.

Ethical problems– Ethical standards change over time

– Human reasoning is imperfect

– Ethical standards and principles are not always

adequate to resolve conflicts

c CONCLUSION

• establishing organizational values

• nurturing individual responsibility

• providing leadership & oversight

• relating decisions to stakeholder interests

• developing accountability

• relating consequences

• auditing & improvement

making in the organization?

• culture, values & programs

• compliance & leadership

• recognition of the role of co-workers &

managers

• balancing stakeholder interests

• management of situational pressures

• rewards beyond short-term performance

– business ethics is often “squeezed out” of

the core & is not fully represented in the

curriculum development process

– faculty members trained in traditional

business disciplines often feel they lack the

training & expertise

– different cultural & historical perspectives

make it difficult to define & teach

Bibliography

www. itc portal.com

Ethics Resource Center at http://www.ethics.org/

International Business Ethics Institute at http://www.business-ethics.org/

BOOKS

 

Title:Business Ethics at Work

Author:  Elizabeth Vallance

Publisher:  Cambridge University Press