Marketing ethics in context: the promotion of unhealthy foods and beverages to children

Marketing ethics has been described as an inherently relative conceptwhereby ethical problems and consequences result from interactionsbetween individuals, but are also shaped by the context in which theyoccur (Chonko and Hunt 1985; Singhapakdi et al. 1996). In makingethical decisions, marketers are influenced by a complex interplay offactors in the broader cultural, economic and organizational environments(Singhapakdi et al. 1996). Within this field, issues arise from organizations’ marketing activities and their consequences (Chonko and Hunt 1985), and the way marketing decisions are shaped by moral standards (Murphy et al. 2005).

The methodology in empirical sales ethics research: 1980-2010

The study examines the research methodology of more than 200 empirical investigations of ethics in personal selling and sales management between 1980 and 2010. The review discusses the sources and authorship of the sales ethics research. To better understand the drivers of empirical sales ethics research, the foundations used in business, marketing, and sales ethics are compared. The use of hypotheses, operationalization, measurement, population and sampling decisions, research design, and statistical analysis techniques were examined as part of theory development and testing. The review establishes a benchmark, assesses the status and direction of the sales ethics research methodology, and helps inform researchers who need to deal with increasing amounts of empirical research. The investigation identified changing sources of publication with the Journal of Business Ethics and the Journal of Personal Selling & Sales Management maintaining their position as the main conduit of high quality empirical sales ethics research. The results suggest that despite the use of theoretical models for empirical testing, a greater variety of moral frameworks and wider use of marketing exchange theory is needed. The review highlights many sound aspects about the empirical sales ethics research statistical methodology but also raises concerns about several areas. Ways in which these concerns might be addressed and recommendations for researchers are provided. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.

Space, place and race: Ethics in practice for educational research in ethnically diverse rural Australia

Research in Australia’s ethnically diverse rural and regional communities requires an approach that is informed by notions of space, place and culture, and which recognises race as a relational social construct mediated by social and political discourse and context, and prone to change overtime. This critical review examines how teacher education researchers connect culturally competent research and rural ethics with the view to improving education systems, addressing rural teacher workforce issues, informing the preparation of pre-service teachers, and, most importantly, ensuring that rural students have access to educational opportunities that are engaging and meet their needs. It focuses specifically on researcher positionality on the insider-outsider continuum and how this informs ethical research in diverse rural communities, particularly those in which visible new migrants reside. Peer-reviewed journal articles that discuss how education researchers negotiate working in rural space are examined and considered in relation to discourse about ethics in practice and the insider/outsider continuum. Scholarship reflected in the literature spanned the fields of rural/research ethics, inclusive education, education research methodology and research with new migrants, minority and marginalised groups.

A cross-cultural construct of the ethos of the corporate codes of ethics: Australia, Canada and Sweden

The objective of this paper is to develop and describe a construct of the ethos of the corporate codes of ethics (i.e. an ECCE construct) across three countries, namely Australia, Canada and Sweden. The introduced construct is rather unique as it is based on a cross-cultural sample seldom seen in the literature. While the outcome of statistical analyses indicated a satisfactory factor solution and acceptable estimates of reliability measures, some research limitations have been stressed. They provide a foundation for further research in the field and testing of the ECCE construct in other cultural and corporate settings. We believe that the ECCE construct makes a contribution to theory and practice in the field as it outlines a theoretical construct for the benefit of other researchers. It is also of managerial interest as it provides a grounded framework of areas to be considered in the implementation in organizations of corporate codes of ethics.

A cross cultural comparison of the contents of codes of ethics: USA, Canada and Australia

This paper examines the contents of the codes of ethics of 83 of the top 500 companies operating in the private sector in Australia in an attempt to discover whether there are national characteristics that differentiate the codes used by companies operating in Australia from codes used by companies operating in the American and Canadian systems. The studies that were used as a comparison were Mathews (1987) for the United States of America and Lefebvre and Singh (1992) for Canada. The major conclusion is that, whilst Australian codes do have some characteristics that differentiate them from the other two groups, it appears that companies in all three cultures are driven by the same motives to develop codes.

Cross-cultural encounters and 'difficult heritage' on the Thai-Burma railway: an ethics of cosmopolitanism rather than practices of exclusion

This chapter argues for the significance of embodied actions and their traces in the heritage landscape as traces of cross-cultural practices in the context of interpreting difficult heritage in places where the heritage of war is of significance for multiple stakeholders.