Business Ethics
Business Ethics and Wealth Creation:
Conceptual Clarifications and Research Questions
Introduction
Three considerations led me to the choice and investigation of this topic of business ethics and wealth creation. In his fascinating and powerful historical account “why some [nations] are so rich and some so poor,” David Landes (1999) scrutinizes the winners and losers in the process of wealth creation over the last 50 years. On the winners’ side, in addition to “the thirty wonderful years from 1945 to 1975” of France and the “economic miracle” in Germany, he highlights the East Asian success stories of Japan, the four “Little Tigers“ (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong), and the regional followers such as Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia, referring, among others, to the World Bank’s study The East Asian Miracle (1993), and adding China in his “Epilogue 1999” (Landes 1999: 524-531). The losers are the Middle East, Latin America, the countries of the Communist-Socialist bloc, and sub-Saharan Africa. While this “gap in wealth and health that separates rich and poor” (1999: xx), obviously, has been caused by multiple factors, the fact itself is enormous and provides paramount importance to the question of how we may understand the creation of wealth. A second consideration responds to the worldwide discussions about “corporate social responsibility” or CSR that have gained considerable momentum in the last ten years. Corporations are expected to care about their environmental impact, to behave as corporate citizens, to defend freedom on the internet, to support cultural and sports events in their communities, to help the victims of natural disasters such as tsunami and Katrina, to provide health care at reduced prices or for free to the needy who can’t afford it, etc. Against the backdrop of this wealth of expectations, it is striking that, quite often, the financial and economic responsibilities of business organizations seem to be ignored, and,
Conceptual Clarifications and Research Questions
Introduction
Three considerations led me to the choice and investigation of this topic of business ethics and wealth creation. In his fascinating and powerful historical account “why some [nations] are so rich and some so poor,” David Landes (1999) scrutinizes the winners and losers in the process of wealth creation over the last 50 years. On the winners’ side, in addition to “the thirty wonderful years from 1945 to 1975” of France and the “economic miracle” in Germany, he highlights the East Asian success stories of Japan, the four “Little Tigers“ (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong), and the regional followers such as Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia, referring, among others, to the World Bank’s study The East Asian Miracle (1993), and adding China in his “Epilogue 1999” (Landes 1999: 524-531). The losers are the Middle East, Latin America, the countries of the Communist-Socialist bloc, and sub-Saharan Africa. While this “gap in wealth and health that separates rich and poor” (1999: xx), obviously, has been caused by multiple factors, the fact itself is enormous and provides paramount importance to the question of how we may understand the creation of wealth. A second consideration responds to the worldwide discussions about “corporate social responsibility” or CSR that have gained considerable momentum in the last ten years. Corporations are expected to care about their environmental impact, to behave as corporate citizens, to defend freedom on the internet, to support cultural and sports events in their communities, to help the victims of natural disasters such as tsunami and Katrina, to provide health care at reduced prices or for free to the needy who can’t afford it, etc. Against the backdrop of this wealth of expectations, it is striking that, quite often, the financial and economic responsibilities of business organizations seem to be ignored, and,