Views of Business Ethics & Managerial Accountability

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. Some developing countries have to (not willing to) implement the lower standard in order to attract the foreign investment. For these countries, the opportunity cost is higher than the loss of investment if they charge higher standards. It is very controversial if the government should improve its economy at the cost of environment. However, if we think in their shoes, what are the other options then? Take China as an example, we cost our environment to implement the reform and opening up policy more than 20 years ago. In some northern cities such as Beijing, the air pollution is so serious that it even affects people’s life there. Sand Storm is one of the severest weather there; while sadly but not surprisingly, many researches have revealed that the sand storm is the result of desertification, and desertification is coming from deforesting trees for producing and export chopsticks! On the other hand, many multinational companies move their factories to developing countries because of the low labor cost and light environmental protection burden. Actually, no one is “wrong” here, some countries have lower standards; as a result, they become a magnet for the investors. Therefore, during the first period, both parties get benefit from the loss of environment or the rights of labors. However, it should have more effort to remedy the damage from both parties after the benefits. We should uplift the lower standards to the same level as higher ones, by the means of collaboration with all the stakeholders, even with some cost at first. That’s what right attitude we should have on this varying standards issue. Both parties (countries with lower standards and countries (usually with higher standards) invest there) should work together to figure out how to improve the standards by institutional innovation or advanced technologies.

Cultural imperialism is another heated-discussed issue in class. For example, the internet narrows down the distance around the world and at the same time, it becomes an ideal tool for companies to perform marketing throughout the world. Some “bad” method like spam have become a scourge on the internet as millions of unwanted messages are transmitted daily to almost every e-mail recipient as well as newsgroups. However, even it is notoriously popular; it is viewed as one of the most cost effective tools for marketing. Some companies shoot e-mails regardless of what the impact they would have on the recipients. Some contents of spam represent some certain values form the companies. It is not always for evil, or we call it cultural fascism, but the globalization gives companies golden chances to express themselves without considering the influence they will exert, and some companies just make full use of even overuse of the chances and take blind eye about the feelings of their customers with different cultural background. As far as I can see, this issue is not easy to handle because every companies are now trying best to get used to the globalization and integration, it is worthwhile for brainstorm and adjustment.