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¶ … Balanced Business Ethics
Ethics and Social Responsibility in Strategic Planning
Business ethics may be much easier to understand in the hypothetical world of academia than they are to apply on behalf of business organizations in the real world of business. That is particularly true when doing the proverbial "right thing" comes at substantial financial costs to the organization. On one hand, the needs and agendas of shareholders and other stakeholders in the business of the organization are among the most important considerations in business planning. On the other hand, some of the decisions that are in the best interests of shareholders and other stakeholders in the business of the organization necessarily come at the expense (or at great risk in other respects) of other entities. Strategic planners have fiduciary and due diligence (and other) responsibilities to maximize profit and to benefit the organization in other ways. Meanwhile, those responsibilities frequently conflict directly with the needs and agendas of external stakeholders including the general public.
Therefore, efficient strategic planning is a more complex process than simply charting the best conceivable business strategy for the organization. It must also incorporate ethical...
In contemporary industry and big business, incorporating ethics into strategic planning involves much more than isolated decisions about specific elements of business. Business ethics cannot be introduced for the first times to the executives making strategic decisions: ethical training must be part of academic and other formal training, employee development, and more generally, throughout the organizational culture.
Strategic Business Planning Scenarios
In the 1990s, the Nike Corporation had to respond to ethical criticism of its business practices as a result of some of their outsourcing strategy to reduce overhead costs (Zadek, 2004). It eventually became clear that Nike had never made any conscientious effort to monitor the working conditions and practices in the impoverished foreign nations where Nike contracted out much of their production processes. In fact, initially, Nike actually defended its non-regulation of working conditions in its foreign facilities under the argument that every sovereign nation maintained its own labor laws and public policies (Zadek, 2004). However, in the late…
References
Foley, V.J. "Post-Deepwater Horizon: The Changing Landscape of Liability for Oil
Pollution in the United States." Albany Law Review, Vol. 74, No. 1 (2011): 515
Zadek, S. "Best Practice: The Path to Corporate Responsibility." Harvard Business
Review (December 2004).
Employees as Benefactors of Corporate Philanthropy Corporate Social Responsibility The Case for Employees as Benefactors of Corporate Philanthropy The Case for Employees as Benefactors of Corporate Philanthropy A United Auto Workers unionization vote recently made the news, in part because the vote was taking place in the Southeastern United States where conservative state legislators have historically treated organized labor with hostility, but what seemed to be most newsworthy about this event was that the
However, a corporate executive, according to Friedman, would have to spend other people's money for a general social interest, by means of reducing returns to stockholders, lowering worker wages, or raising the price of products. However, herein lies the basic flaw of this author's reasoning, for the social responsibility of the business as it falls on the executive is to make sacrifices for the benefit of others. In a
2). These are important issues because fire chiefs are routinely confronted with actual ethical dilemmas that involve conflicting or competing public and private values as well as corresponding conflicting professional responsibilities (Haraway & Kunselman, 2009). This point is also made by Pammer and Killian (2003) who cite the expanded responsibilities of both fire chiefs and line personnel in recent years. According to these authorities, "A successful fire chief today
Social responsibility is subject of considerable debate. For not-for-profit organizations, their responsibility is defined by their mandate. Their donors set this mandate, or at least they accept it. It is actually not much different in for-profit entities, except that the general perception is that earning profit is not socially responsible, whereas the activities of not-for-profit entities are generally considered to be socially responsible. For a for-profit entity, there are two schools
Business Ethics Every company has corporate governance initiatives in place. Consider that corporate governance simply refers to how the company is run and controlled. The current usage of the buzzword derives from the issues that a few companies had where executives or managers were not subject to appropriate levels of governance. Thus, the guidelines issued recently by the OECD, the ASX, the Combined Code and in Sarbanes-Oxley serve to institutionalize stronger
Business Ethics Palmeri, C&Rupp, L 2013, May 3, Disney Bangladesh Exit Pressure on Clothes makers Who Stay, Retrieved from http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-03/disney-bangladesh-exit-puts-pressure-on-those-who-may-stay-1-.html The work of Palmeri and Rupp (2013) is focused on highlighting the issues faced by the multinational organizations while operating in developing markets. It is highly likely for large organizations to develop their overseas presence. However the economically developing markets a number of issues including environmental, infrastructural, and compliance with health and