Who's Who in Business Ethics: The Institute of Business Ethics — Ten Years

One of the best known business ethics resources in Britain is the Institute of Business Ethics, which this month celebrates its tenth anniversary. In wishing the Institute many more years of valuable service to the UK business community, we are indebted to its Director, Stanley Kiaer, for this chronicle of its first decade of activity. The Institute is situated at 12 Palace Street, London SW1E 5JA; tel (44) (0) 171 931 0495; fax (44) (0) 171 821 5819.     

The First European Business Ethics Prize Essay

We are pleased to print here the winning entry for the 1995 European Business Ethics Essay Competition, which was sponsored jointly by the Foundation for Business Responsibilities and London Business School and to which entry was open to students for the MBA or equivalent management degree at any institution in Europe. The author, Mr Nils Elmark, subsequently gained his MSc degree in Public Relations at the Department of Marketing, University of Stirling, and is now with Marks and Brands, St. Kirkstrade 3, DK-1073 Copenhagen, Denmark.     

The International Business Ethics Index: European Union

The present study expands the systematic measurement of consumers’ sentiments towards business ethical practices to the international arena. Data for the Business Ethics Index (BEI) were gathered in three countries of the European Union (UK, Germany, Spain). The Germans were the most pessimistic while the British were the most optimistic about the future ethical behaviour of businesses. John Tsalikis is an Associate Professor of Marketing at Florida International University. His articles have appeared in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Business Ethics, and Psychology in Marketing. Bruce Seaton is an Associate Professor of Marketing at Florida International University. His research interests include the role of national stereotyping in consumer choice and the application of experimental methods to investigate models of business ethics. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Advertising, Journal of Business Research, and Journal of Global Marketing.     

Antitrust, Dynamic Competition, and Business Ethics

The American Antitrust Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank, recently completed a study that concludes that competition law and policy plays little if any role in business ethics courses taught in U.S. business schools. To fill this intellectual void, this article makes a case for the development of a business ethics sub-field of antitrust ethics that is synonymous with the ethics of competitive strategy. After reviewing Paine's Five Principles of Positive Competition and Boatright's and Hendry's views on the Moral Manager Model and Moral Market Model, the need for ethical decision-making in a dynamic, innovative environment is explained through a Federal Trade Commission antitrust case involving the Dell Computer Corporation. The author argues that the contributions of Paine, Boatright, and Hendry provide an initial foundation for further research concerning the moral theories, principles, and rules pertaining to antitrust ethics, especially as it pertains to dynamic competition and "fair and competitive" executive behavior.     

Four Years of EBEN (The European Business Ethics Network)

Who better than Arild Lillebo, Norwegian writer and Editor of the Newsletter of the European Business Ethics Network, to chronicle the early years of EBEN and identify its aims for the future?     

Student experiences with service learning in a Business Ethics course

Service learning provides many challenges and opportunities for the instructor who wishes to test its potential. This paper looks at some of the promise for service learning in the undergraduate Business Ethics course and describes one experience with this project. Quotations from student journals and reflective papers are utilized to present the student's perspective on the project. Some suggestions are offered for insuring effective service learning in courses like Business Ethics.John Kohls is an Associate Professor of Management at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. He teaches courses in Business Ethics; Business, Government and Society; Strategic Planning and Policy, and other areas of Management. He has published a number of articles in these areas. He also conducts Management Development workshops including Ethics, Organizational Culture, and Leadership.     

Teaching Business Ethics: The Role of Ethics in Business and in Business Education

The paper begins with an examination of traditional attitudes towards business ethics. I suggest that these attitudes fail to recognize that a principal function of ethics is to facilitate cooperation. Further that despite the emphasis on competition in modern market economies, business like all other forms of social activity is possible only where people are prepared to respect rules in the absence of which cooperation is rendered difficult or impossible. Rules or what I call the ethics of doing, however, constitute just one dimension of ethics. A second has to do with what we see and how we see it; a third with who we or what I describe as the ethics of being. Of these three dimensions, the first and the third have been most carefully explored by philosophers and are most frequently the focus of attention when teaching business ethics is being discussed. I argue that this focus is unfortunate in as much as it is the second dimension which falls most naturally into the ambit of modern secular educational institutions. It is here that moral education is most obviously unavoidable, and most clearly justifiable in modern secular teaching environments. I conclude by describing the importance of this second dimension for the modern world of business.     

Business Student Ethics: Selected Predictors of Attitudes Toward Cheating

This research addresses the frequently reported finding that business education reduces the ethical sensitivity of students. It presents evidence that supports the view that much of the prior research has relied upon a narrow set of explanatory variables as well as dependent measures of ethical reasoning that often lacked external validity. This research proposes instead, a dependent measure based on students' attitudes toward academic dishonesty and the use of two additional independent variables, locus of control and personality type. In an empirical study,both locus of control and personality type were found to significantly influence students' attitudes to academic dishonesty. Students who studied business however, were no more tolerant of academic dishonesty than students in other programs. Nor did they have a different locus of control or personality-type. Locusof control and personality type were however,significantly correlated. Findings also support the predictive utility of using cheating to understand ethical attitudes in general.     

Personal Ethics and Business Ethics: The Ethical Attitudes of Owner/ Managers of Small Business

To date, the study of business ethics has been largely the study of the ethics of large companies. This paper is concerned with owner/managers of small firms and the link between the personal ethics of the owner/manager and his or her attitude to ethical problems in business. By using active membership of an organisation with an overt ethical dimension (for example, a church) as a surrogate for personal ethics the research provides some, though not unequivocal, support for the models of Trevino and others that suggest a link between personal ethics and business ethics.     

Business Ethics Research As Dialogue: A European Perspective

Britain's Economic and Social Research Council offered criteria for excellence in research which appear to express a shared basic idea of research–as–dialogue. This approach does not appear to be met very well by business ethics research in the USA or the UK, but it was seen to be impressively present in some of the German contributions to the European Business Ethics Network conference held in Frankfurt last year. Dr Collier analyses the conditions which may underlie this difference of approach and considers the contribution of modern "discourse ethics to the process of dialogue, concluding that dialogue "is an essential characteristic of research excellence", and that without it we therefore fail to meet both our own standards and the needs of the business community". Dr Collier is Lecturer in Management Studies the Judge Institute of Management Studies at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College.     

Business Ethics in The Philippines

The plurality of languages and ethnicities, the geographic fragmentation, the predominant Roman Catholic religion, together with the still relatively short experience in nationhood account for a very peculiar understanding of "business ethics" in the Philippines. The rapid growth and liberalization of the economy, coupled with the inequitable distribution of wealth, the destruction of the environment and corruption are the main ethical concerns. Businesspersons and the academe endeavor to find creative solutions for these unique challenges.     

The Separation of Technology and Ethics in Business Ethics

The purpose of this paper is to draw out and make explicit the assumptions made in the treatment of technology within business ethics. Drawing on the work of Freeman (1994, 2000) on the assumed separation between business and ethics, we propose a similar separation exists in the current analysis of technology and ethics. After first identifying and describing the separation thesis assumed in the analysis of technology, we will explore how this assumption manifests itself in the current literature. A different stream of analysis, that of science and technology studies (STS), provides a starting point in understanding the interconnectedness of technology and society. As we will demonstrate, business ethicists are uniquely positioned to analyze the relationship between business, technology, and society. The implications of a more complex and rich definition of ‘technology’ ripple through the analysis of business ethics. Finally, we propose a pragmatic approach to understanding technology and explore the implications of such an approach to technology. This new approach captures the broader understanding of technology advocated by those in STS and allows business ethicists to analyze a broader array of dilemmas and decisions.     

Business Ethics: A European Review: Change and Continuity

As was announced at the beginning of this volume of Business Ethics: A European Review , the current editor is retiring from the editorship at the end of this year. It gives him great pleasure to announce that he will be succeeded as Editor of the Review by Dr Jane Collier, of the Judge Institute, Cambridge. In this invited article Dr Collier offers some reflections on how she envisages the future of the Review.     

The Ethics of European Transition

The President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development examines three major ethical problems in the transition from post-Communist Europe to a market economy and spells out the only real option for Western Europe. He delivered this address, which is reprinted with permission, at a Conference on Business and Moral Standards in Post Communist Europe held in London in November last year under the auspices of the Archdiocese of Westminster and sponsored by the Sedgwick Group and KPMG Peat Marwick.     

Ethics in Business

The concept of ethics in business is presented through an examination of ethnical theories and through the application of the theories to several case incidents. A set of guidelines and implications for management, intended to stimulate ethics in the practice of business, are presented and discussed.     

Using Student Generated Codes of Conduct in the Classroom to Reinforce Business Ethics Education

This paper presents four different contexts in which students practiced implementing business ethics. Students were required to develop Codes of Conduct/Codes of Ethics as a classroom exercise. By developing these codes, students can improve their understanding of how and why codes of conduct are developed, designed, and implemented in the workplace. Using the three-phase content analysis process (McCabe et al.: 1999, The Journal of Higher Education 70(2), 211–234), we identify a framework consisting of 10 classifications that can be used to assess learning outcomes in embedded ethics education. By analyzing the different content within each classification, instructors were able to gain a better understanding of differing application of ethical principles. This analysis indicates that there needs to be more research on codes of conduct for smaller units within an organization and more integration of work group codes of conduct into the business curriculum.