Marketing ethics: principles and challenges

Marketing Ethics: Recognizing and Justifying Private Corruption

Gopinath brings, in his article "Recognizing and Justifying Private Corruption" (2007), a discussion around the idea of private corruption. Public corruption is easy to identify and, quite often, fight against. However, private corruption is sometimes not so easy to spot, mostly because it is difficult to decide whether there is a breach of ethics or not. C. Gopinath describes the theoretical concepts surrounding the idea of private corruption, as opposed to public corruption, and uses a practical questionnaire and statistical data thus obtained to prove that private corruption is very difficult to identify, even at an academic level.

Summary of the article

The first part of the article discusses the idea of private corruption, as opposed to public bribery. The author is keen to give the reader some basic theoretical background on the matter at hand and to present, as much as possible, the two notions from parallel perspective. This helps in drawing the final conclusion on the difficulty of identifying cases of private corruption, exactly because they are less obvious and because their impact on society is not immediately felt.

In the second part of the article, the author uses an experiment by which a group of 100 respondents are asked to decide in a simple case of potential breach of business ethics. The final result shows the group very split on whether the act can be considered an act of unethical behavior and private corruption, which comes to show that this is very difficult to identify. The author emphasizes the importance of organizational codes of ethics, which can at least create common principles to which everybody in the company would be expected to abide by. The conclusion also tacitly shows that, despite the fact that it is less obvious than public corruption, private corruption affects us just as much, through the impact on the economic markets.

Critique of the article

The idea of bribery in the private sector can obviously only be judged in relation with corruption in the public sector. However, while the latter if easier to judge and determine, mainly because the affected individual are easily identifiable and the act is directed against them, private corruption is much more complicated both to identify and to evaluate in terms of its impact.

At the same time, the article is also keen to note the differences in the way in which the two types of bribery and corruption are handled by the society and by different institutions. On one hand, public corruption is a case generally handled by both national authorities and international organizations and institutions, having been prioritized as a necessity that needs the full attention of society. Private corruption is less in the public's eye and generally left to be handled by each organization in part.

The different approach to bribery may be caused, as the writer tacitly acknowledges, by the fact that there is a wrong impression that private bribery has a limited effect on society itself. However, this is not the case. The article points out to an example of private corruption from one of the most reputable companies in Germany, Siemens AG, whose management used bribery in order to secure important orders from their customers. One can obviously not judge something like this as having a limited impact, because such types of private bribery and corruption can be essential in creating disequilibrium on the market and can affect competition.

At the same time, it is somehow difficult to draw a line, as the article shows, between cases of private corruption and cases of normal business behavior. The ethical codes in each company need to point out and identify whether receiving gifts can be considered a form of bribery or whether simply accepting a business meal can also be included in such a category. The capacity to identify an ethical issue in a case of potential private corruption is the first question that the researcher aims to have answers to.