Explain how individuals develop their personal codes of ethics and why ethics are important in the workplace.
Distinguish social responsibility from ethics, identify organizational stakeholders, and characterize social consciousness today.
Show how the concept of social responsibility applies both to environmental issues and to a firm’s relationships with customers, employees, and investors.
Identify four general approaches to social responsibility and describe the four steps that a firm must take to implement a social responsibility program.
Explain how issues of social responsibility and ethics affect small business.
Behavior toward Employees - This category covers such matters as hiring and firing, wages and working conditions, and privacy and respect.
Behavior toward the Organization - Ethical issues also arise from employee behavior toward employers, especially in such areas as conflict of interest,
confidentiality, and honesty.
Behavior toward Other Economic Agents - Ethics also comes into play in the relationship of a business and its employees with so-called
primary agents of interest — mainly customers, competitors, stockholders, suppliers, dealers, and unions.
Figure 2.1 provides mechanisms for dealing with unique circumstances — those that apply only in limited situations.
Figure 2.2 illustrates the role that corporate ethics and values should play in corporate policy. You can use it to see how a good ethics statement
might be structured. Basically, the figure suggests that although strategies and practices can change frequently and objectives can change occasionally,
an organization’s core principles and values should remain steadfast.
Major corporate stakeholders are identified in Figure 2.3.
Price gouging—responding to increased demand with overly steep (and often unwarranted) price increases.
Table 2.1 summarizes the central elements of so-called “green marketing”—the marketing of environmentally friendly goods.
The first formal declaration of consumer rights protection came in the early 1960s, when President John F. Kennedy identified four basic consumer rights.
Since then, general agreement on two additional rights has emerged; these rights are described in Figure 2.4.
The Consumer Bill of Rights is backed by numerous federal and state laws.
Unethical managers might project profits in excess of what they actually expect to earn, hide losses and/or expenses in order to boost paper profits,
or slant financial reports to make the firm seem stronger than is really the case. In 2002, the U.S. Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act,
which requires an organization’s chief financial officer to personally guarantee the accuracy of all financial reporting.
As Figure 2.5 illustrates, the four stances that an organization can take concerning its obligations to society fall along a continuum,
ranging from the lowest to the highest degree of socially responsible practices.
Social Audit – systematic analysis of a firm’s success in using funds earmarked for meeting its social responsibility goals
Explain how individuals develop their personal codes of ethics and why ethics are important in the workplace.
Distinguish social responsibility from ethics, identify organizational stakeholders, and characterize social consciousness today.
Show how the concept of social responsibility applies both to environmental issues and to a firm’s relationships with customers, employees, and investors.
Identify four general approaches to social responsibility and describe the four steps that a firm must take to implement a social responsibility program.
Explain how issues of social responsibility and ethics affect small business.
