Views of Business Ethics & Managerial Accountability
What is the fundamental purpose of a company? Different people have different answers. Some argue that a company should maximize its returns for its shareholders; while others disagree, saying that company should take the interests of employees and customers into consideration. Meanwhile, most people involved in business—whether functioning as a small business owner, employee, or chief executive officer of a multinational company—eventually face ethical or moral dilemmas in the workplace. Some dilemmas are very complex, for they force the person making the decision to weigh the benefits that various business decisions impart on individuals and groups with the negative repercussions that those same decisions usually have on other individuals or groups. Actually, business ethics is a very board concept. In my point of view, it takes even more than a person’s life to learn it, because of the globalization trends and changing business community.
Lucky enough, we have chances to learn how to view business ethics issues and what kind of tools we can use to deal with them in the class. We talked about the philosophy of business, the corporate social responsibility, the fiduciary responsibility, the corporate governance, the misuse of corporate ethics policies as marketing instruments and so forth. For me, as an international student, I learnt much in class about the international business ethics, including the varying global standards, such as environmental standards and labor criteria, and the cultural imperialism arising from globalization.
The varying global standards explain the origin of business ethics issues. For example, the environmental standards changes from different countries. Som ...