OB 330, Spring 2010 University of Massachusetts Amherst

 Ethics ◦ Reflecting on and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior

 Corporate social responsibility (CSR) ◦ Organizations seek to meet or exceed legal and normatively mandated standards, by considering the greater good of the widest possible community within which they exist ◦ In both local and global terms, with regard to the environmental, social, economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic impact of the organizations’ way of conducting business and the activities they undertake

Sustainability ◦ Literally, ensuring that resources are renewed ◦ A sustainable use of resources would leave the world short of nothing that was depleted in any process – that resource would be renewed ◦ Ensuring that nothing deleterious to the world’s natural systems resulted from whatever processes were being undertaken

Thinking about ethics ◦ The core issue in business ethics is how businesses ought to act in an ethically sound way ◦ As Milton Friedman believes, should an organization do no more than to fulfill its function, as long as it does so within the market mechanism? ◦ Should an organization ensure it meets all socially desirable needs and wants relevant to its practices? ◦ Questions of business ethics do not have easy answers

 Normative ethics ◦ Seeks to establish means of judging whether business practices are right or wrong  Descriptive ethics ◦ Does not seek for normative guidelines that ought to be applied in practice, but rather monitors and describes what actually happens

 When rules work to effect compliance  When rules work as ceremonial facades  When ethical rules are at odds with other rules