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Management

The selling of ethics
The ethics of business meets the business of ethics
Marilyn Kleinberg Neimark
Baruch College, The City University of New York, New York, USA
Somebody, presumably Groucho Marx, once offered the following advice: “The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake these, you’ve got it made” (The Economist, 1993, p. 71).

The selling of ethics

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The ethics of business: are we part of the solution or the problem? What is it about the structure of our economic system that so often pits profits against people? And why are the former so regularly the victor? Why is it that our system so regularly produces patterns of behaviour that are not ethical according to even most contemporary standards? Are academics in accounting and other business disciplines contributing to the problem or to the solution when we examine the issue of ethics in our teaching and research? When academics fail to raise these kinds of fundamental questions and instead treat ethics as a problem for individual decision makers operating in a socio-economic vacuum (or in one pre-structured by natural law), and/or as a problem that can be solved through the application of logical rules and codes of conduct, we contribute to the notion that individuals are responsible only for their own behaviour and not for the system itself. To contribute to finding a solution to capitalism’s recurring problems of competing interests, which are at the heart of all contemporary ethical dilemmas, scholars must begin interrogating their own and society’s unexamined assumptions about what constitutes an ethical dilemma and the rules for resolving it, something we rarely do in either our teaching or our research. This article contributes to this interrogation by critically examining the ways in which the boundaries of business ethics are being established in business schools, consulting firms and corporations. The ethics of business: what makes a company socially responsible?...