Introduction
“The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits “(Friedman, 1970)
Ethics are of huge relevance to the world of work today and are becoming increasingly relevant to almost any business. However ethics are one of the most complicated aspects of business to study and who can say what really is right or wrong? To answer this question fully I intend to examine examples of good and bad ethical behaviour and the impact of that upon those companies. Is the above statement made by famous economist Milton Friedman still relevant in the context of business today? More specifically I am going to concentrate on the issue of diversity but first it’s important to have an overview of some of the key issues.
Ethics
An important aspect of the ethics debate is cultural relativism. Cultural relativism is where there are no governing universal standards of ethics. Ethics only become relevant within the culture that they are applied to. This thinking is adopted by many businesses as the norm (Wood, 1995). There are many examples of where this becomes relevant, for example Multinational organisations have been criticised for relocating their factories to third world countries to exploit the cheap labour resources. However the minimum wage that we would demand in this country and the style of living that we are used to would be dramatically different from those of a worker in an economically less privileged society than ours. This poses an ethical debate of what should the company pay that employee? In society today the spread of information is so readily available and the consumerist society that we live in means those companies can no longer afford to turn a blind eye to facts like this. This has lead to corporate socia ...