ETHICS IN THE CORPORATE WORLD TODAY

Ethics in the Corporate World Today



Ethics in the Corporate World Today

Introduction

Ethics in corporate can be defined in several ways: conceptually, operationally, officially, and actually. Conceptual arguments about the definition of organizational ethics focus on questions of stakeholder status and are defined by two theories, stakeholder theory and social contracts theory. Operational approaches to increasing ethical behavior in organizations may be more or less proactive and are structured around organizational mission and legal compliance. Official ethical standards articulated by organizational leaders may include ethical codes, but they are arguably less important than actual ethical expectations, which are closely intertwined with organizational culture (Bolman & Deal, 2005). Each of these approaches to understanding corporate ethics will be addressed in turn, followed by discussion of cultural differences in values that undergird ethical norms and codes of conduct. Social influences and organizational practices that may affect ethical behavior unintentionally or without reference to formal ethical controls will also be considered.

Ethics in the Corporate World Today: A Discussion

Scholarship in corporate ethics falls into two general disciplines: moral philosophy and social science. Moral philosophers approach corporate ethics by outlining ideals for how corporations and their managers should behave. Prescriptions for moral action and policy are the substance of this approach. That is, moral philosophers try to articulate the principles that organizations should adopt (Bolman & Deal, 2005), regardless of the actual effectiveness of one or another approach. The social scientific approach, on the other hand, attempts to describe the social and psychological variables associated with moral action and, to a lesser extent, the effectiveness of ethical actions and policies. Synthesizing the larger, long-standing tensions between prescriptive and descriptive approaches, recent discussion among management scholars has attempted to combine these approaches.

Moral philosophy generally focuses on stakeholder theory, an outgrowth of classical social ...