1. OB 330, Spring 2010 University of Massachusetts Amherst

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

3.  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

4. 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

5. 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

6.  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

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