Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Concern about business ethics, or the lack thereof, seems to be a historical phenomenon that recurs with remarkable regularity through periods of prosperity and hard times. Yet the conventional wisdom has it that with some exceptions, most businesses are honest and law abiding. The challenge for us, however, is to find some explanatory and predictive variables that would help us understand why, and under what circumstances, corporations and their executives are prompted to engage in unethical and even illegal conduct. Equally important, this approach would provide a direction that we might take to contain these circumstances and thus curb unethical conduct. The extensive prevailing literature in business ethics primarily views the issue in individual‐personal terms (i.e. corporate executive and the employee) and suggests that making corporations more ethical involves changes in executive behavior. While this approach has strong intellectual roots in moral philosophy and religion, it fails to explain the persistence of unethical and illegal behavior among corporations of all sizes, financial health, competitive market conditions, and level of individual executive compensation. As economic activity increases in complexity and technological orientation, it slips from its mooring in individual actions. Large‐scale economic activity invariably requires collective action, where each individual ... log in or subscribe to read full text