Buying and Merchandising Management
Assignment
?X Review relevant literature on ethical issues in retailing with particular emphasis on buying and sourcing products.
?X Comment on at least one ethical issue that has arisen in recent history in the context of Irish retailing that links to your literature search.
What is ethics?
For many people, when asked what ethics is about, they find it hard to explain and simply answer that it is the difference between right and wrong. This would seem to suggest that there are potential absolutes of ethical behaviour. However, this is not the case. What constitutes ¡§right¡¨ or ¡§wrong¡¨ in one social or cultural context may not be a case in the other. It is difficult to actually define ethics that is acceptable to everyone; it can be seen as being a set of social and individual guidelines that shape the nature of choices made, decisions taken and responses to them. These guidelines may not be constant and context specific, but provide a lens through which action can be taken and evaluated.
In business, moral dilemmas present themselves, not as differences between right and wrong, but as complex situations often with difficult trade offs, multiple alternatives, possible damage to innocent parties and career threatening or even-life threatening decisions. Often these decisions have a winner and loser, whether it is an increase or decrease in shareholders profits, advantages or disadvantages for the community or the general safety of employees.
Ethics in Buying and Sourcing
One of the most common ethical decisions companies face is - how far to go in buying business? What payments are legitimate for companies to make to win orders ...