A partnership model of corporate ethics

The stock market crash of 1987 had a profound effect on corporate Australia and the Australian community in general. The fall-out revealed that some of our most respected business figures had not been as ethical, or even as lawful, as we would have hoped. This impropriety produced in Australia an awakening to business ethics. Whilst many companies endeavoured to introduce ethical practices into their corporations, they perceived ethics as a way of minimising damage to the corporation and in some cases as a means of competitive advantage. What was lost was the reason that one should embark on business ethics; and that is to make the society and corporate Australia a more ethical place in which to exist.This paper proposes a model based on 2 factors: commitment and partnerships, as a means of enabling corporate Australia to refocus attention on the main purpose of being inherently ethical in all that we do. This ethical model requires a commitment to partnerships with all stakeholders both internal and external in an attempt to enhance the level of ethical business practices that are contemplated and pursued within corporate Australia. Whilst the research agenda and the information collected is Australian-based, it is hoped that the ideas contained within this paper will have a wider appeal to corporations in similar cultural settings.

Corporate ethics and new technology: an exploratory investigation of advertising activity and world wide web usage

This study explores the ethical standards and behaviour of Australian advertisers and their usage of new technologies. Although corporate ethics has been an issue in the established media of television advertising for some time, there is little research about how companies are adapting in terms of ethics to the new communication technologies. The consumers’ “right to know” was used as a device to assess the ethical standards and behaviour of companies. Findings suggest that the WWW is not used as a means of communicating corporate ethical standards. Results indicate that the method of communicating requests for information does not influence the likelihood of receiving a response from a company. The results also show differences between the ethical standards and the ethical behaviour of those companies who do use the WWW to communicate ethical statements.

Corporate ethics and trust in intra-corporate relationships, an in-depth and longitudinal case description

Theoretically, a contribution of this article is the pinpointed connection between corporate ethics and trust in intra-corporate relationships. Furthermore, it contributes to a conceptual framework that distinguishes between the constructs of business ethics and corporate ethics. The authors also provide a grounded conceptual framework of corporate ethics and trust. The principal dyadic determinants of corporate ethics in intra-corporate relationships are interpreted to be management behaviour versus employee perception of that behaviour. Empirically, the contribution is an in-depth and longitudinal case description that underpins the topic and the discussion provided in the article.

Corporate ethics in TQM: management versus employee expectations and perceptions

Purpose – The objective of this research is to develop and describe a conceptual framework of corporate ethics in total quality management (TQM).

Design/methodology/approach – The research is based on a summarised in-depth and longitudinal case illustration. The summarised case describes corporate ethics in an intra-corporate relationship.

Findings – TQM requires human resources and failing to care for them will affect accordingly the success of TQM. The case description illustrates the evolution of management versus employee expectations and perceptions of corporate ethics. It has an emphasis on the human resources of a company that strives towards TQM. As the quality of corporate ethics decreases the outcome of TQM is also affected (i.e. directly or indirectly). The case is initialised in an atmosphere of management and employee optimism and positivism of corporate ethics, which is a requisite from both parties in order to ensure prosperous TQM. The successive change towards pessimism and negativism of corporate ethics in the intra-corporate relationship concludes the in-depth case description.

Research limitations/implications – Four parameters of corporate ethics are used to incorporate corporate ethics into TQM, namely management versus employee expectations and perceptions. Internal corporate quality management should always be regarded as dependent upon the achieved equilibrium between management and employee perceptions. It is also dependent upon the derived equilibrium between management and employee previous expectations.

Practical implications – An important insight of this research is that TQM requires the continuous attention to the management versus employee expectations and perceptions inherent in corporate ethics of internal business operations. Furthermore, corporate ethics is complementary to business ethics.

Originality/value – The case description has shown that TQM may be running well and accomplishing the hard goals. However, TQM is not only about figures, profits and costs. It is also a business approach that should penetrate all activities inside and outside that are related to the company, including the soft issues.

Top Taiwanese and Turkish companies and their engagement with corporate ethics

The objective of this paper is to describe and compare the current, emerging Taiwanese and Turkish interest in corporate ethical engagement. This paper is based upon a survey amongst the top companies operating in Taiwan and Turkey. There are major differences between the top Taiwanese and Turkish companies, where the Turkish companies appear to be more ethically engaged than the Taiwanese companies which came as a surprise to the researchers as Taiwan is a more substantially developed economy than Turkey and one may have assumed therefore more engaged with ethical practices.

Comparing codes of ethics among the top companies in Australia, Canada and the USA

In the twentieth century, industrialized economies around the world enacted legislation to protect free and fair trade. These legislative initiatives were often precipitated by exposure to unethical business practices. With the fairly recent corporate business scandals around the world, ethics is once again at the forefront of concerns about commercial exchanges. This situation has become more complex with the globalization of commercial trade. Subsequently, there have been various attempts by international organizations to regulate the conduct of global corporations. One key technique to try to regulate the conduct of corporation is the use of codes of ethics. This study examines corporate codes of ethics and the measures in place to communicate the ethos of the codes to both internal and external stakeholders in three countries. A questionnaire that was non-sponsored and unsolicited was sent to the top companies operating in the private sector within Australia, Canada and the USA. Nine key areas of corporate ethics are examined and they are divided into two categories as follows:

Regulation
Consequences for a Breach
Ethical Perfonnance Appraisal
Conduct Ethical Audits

Staff Support
Support of Whistle blowers
Guide to Strategic Planning
Ethics Committee
Ethics Training Committee
Staff Training
Ethics Ombudsman.

Ethical structures and processes of corporations operating in Australia, Canada and Sweden : A longitudinal and cross-cultural study

Based on the ‘Partnership Model of Corporate Ethics’ (Wood, 2002), this study examines the ethical structures and processes that are put in place by organizations to enhance the ethical business behavior of staff. The study examines the use of these structures and processes amongst the top companies in the three countries of Australia, Canada, and Sweden over two time periods (2001–2002 and 2005–2006). Subsequently, a combined comparative and longitudinal approach is applied in the study, which we contend is a unique approach in the area of business ethics. The findings of the study indicate that corporations operating in Sweden have utilized ethical structures and processes differently than their Canadian and/or Australian counterparts, and that in each culture the way that companies fashion their approach to business ethics appears congruent with their national cultural values. There does, however, appear to be a convergence of views within the organizations of each culture, as the Swedish companies appear to have been more influenced in 2005–2006 by an Anglo-Saxon business paradigm than they have been in the past.

International standards of business conduct: framework and illustration

Purpose: – The purpose of this paper is to describe the insights and a proposal into the structure of standards of business conduct and its intended applications.

Design/methodology/approach: – The case study is based upon an inductive content analysis of corporate ethics artefacts.

Findings: – It is concluded that the standards of business conduct may be highly prescriptive in world wide corporations, but that there should be an explicit commitment to a flexible and dynamic approach to the application of standards of business conduct.

Research limitations/implications: – An examination of the actual behaviour of a corporation's operations was beyond the scope of the present research, but such a study has potential for future research. This would open up the wider question of how corporations can minimise the gap between corporate intentions and actual outcomes in business operations across national and cultural boundaries.

Practical implications: – These diverse national and cultural contexts that world wide corporations encounter must be taken into consideration in the content of their standards of business conduct.

Originality/value: – The authors emphasise the concern of recognising that the contexts surrounding standards of business conduct are dynamic. Corporate codes of ethics should be regarded as dynamic artefacts. A framework of application is proposed.

Communicating the ethos of codes of ethics in corporate Australia, 1995-2001: whose rights, whose responsibilities?

This paper considers the commitment to business ethics of the top 500 companies operating in the Australian private sector and communicates the results of a longitudinal study conducted from 1995 to 2001. Primary data was obtained (in 1995 and again in 2001) via a self-administered mail  questionnaire distributed to a census of these top 500 Australian  companies. This commitment of each company to their code of ethics was indicated and measured via a range of methods used by organizations to communicate the ethos of their codes to employees. Just as they were in  1995, it would appear that companies in 2001 still are good at ensuring that their rights are protected, but at the same time they do not seem to take on the responsibility to ensure that employees'' rights are just as well protected. This double standard leads to cynicism towards the current business ethics processes inherent in Australian companies.

The use of codes of ethics in the marketplace in corporate Australia : a longitudinal study

The stock market crash of 1987 was a defining moment in Australian corporate life. As a nation, we became acutely aware of the ‘moral bankruptcy’ that had come to permeate our corporate world. The focus on business ethics or the lack of it, in corporate Australia in the late 1980s, prompted this research.

The research for this paper that was first conducted in 1995 and replicated in 2001 focussed on the top 500 companies in Australia. These companies were surveyed on a raft of issues, one of which was their use of their codes of ethics in the marketplace. This paper examines the data sets from 1995 and 2001 and concludes that many of Australia’s largest enterprises have recognised the need for business ethics. As perceived by them, they can and do use their codes of ethics in a positive manner in the marketplace and attribute benefits to this interaction.