INTRODUCITION TO BUSINESS ETHICS

What is meant by ethics? - Consists of moral principles governing the right and wrongs of human conduct - Is about the principles of right and wrong accepted by individuals or social groups - A code of behaviour considered morally correct - Code of moral principles that guide the action of people and groups - Ethical behaviour is doing what is morally right Business ethics Business ethics are the principles and standards that: - Define acceptable conduct in business - Should underpin decision making An alternative definition is: the moral values which govern business behaviour and restrains companies from pursuing the interest of the shareholder at the expense of all other considerations - Some activities might be profitable and legal but nevertheless are considered to be unethical - An ethical decision is one that is both legal and meets the shared ethical standards of the community Is ethics the same as the law? - No - although the law should reflect the ethical views of society there are certain activities permitted by law which some individual or groups in society or individual

might regard as unethical. - Ethical considerations are about what is right and what is wrong - The law is about what is lawful and what is unlawful The following business activities are legal but might pose ethical dilemmas for individuals:

Profiting from gambling Selling goods manufactured by low wage in developing countries Engaging in the fur trade Experimenting on animals

Is it the same as corporate social responsibility? - There is clearly an overlap between CSR and business ethics - A socially responsible firm should be an ethical firm - An ethical firm should be socially responsible However there is a distinction: - CSR is about responsibility to all stakeholders and not just shareholders - Ethics is about morally correct behaviour Ethics - decision models - When faced with an ethical question, what guides our decision making? There are different ways of looking at the issue: Moral principles - Evaluate decisions on whether it is consistent with accepted moral principles Utilitarianism - Looks at decisions from the perspective of who gains - What is good for the greatest number is right - The test is whether or not it is consistent with the greatest happiness of the greatest number?

Justice model - The test is does it distribute benefits and penalties in a fair and equitable way? Human rights - People have fundamental human rights and liberties - consent, privacy, conscience, free speech, fair treatment, life, safety - The test is: does it violate human rights? - An ethically correct decision is one that best maintains the human rights of those affected - Decisions that violate human rights are unethical Individualism - Is it in the individuals best interest? - This is the ethics of self interest Spectrum of firms - It would be nave to believe that all business organisations behave in an ethical, moral way - We can classify firms in terms of their ethical stance in the following ways: The amoral firm - Seeks to win at all costs - Anything is acceptable The legalistic firm - Will obey the law but no more than that The responsive firm - Accepts that being ethical can pay off - Ethical behaviour is enlightened self interest The ethically engaged firm - Wants to do the right thing

- Has a code of ethics - But ethical behaviour is not fully integrated into the culture The ethical firm - Ethics are a core value and permeate the whole organisation

DEFINITION OF BUSINESS ETHICS

Business ethics can be defined as written and unwritten codes of principles and values that govern decisions and actions within a company. In the business world, the organizations culture sets standards for determining the difference between good and bad decision making and behavior. In the most basic terms, a definition for business ethics boils down to knowing the difference between right and wrong and choosing to do what is right. The phrase 'business ethics' can be used to describe the actions of individuals within an organization, as well as the organization as a whole.

Types of business ethics

The different forms of business ethics can be categorized into the following types: General business ethics

These ethics deal with the following issues:

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) Fiduciary responsibility Corporate governance Industrial espionage Hostile take-overs Corporate manslaughter Political contributions

Professional business ethics

The professional business ethics can be categorized into the following types: Ethics of human resource management (HRM)

Discrimination issues Strike breaking or union busting Drug testing Workplace surveillance Whistle-blowing Occupational safety and health Employment law Indentured servitude

Ethics of accounting information

Kickbacks Creative accounting Earnings management Misleading financial analysis Insider trading Securities fraud Bucket shop Forex scams Executive compensation Bribery Facilitation payments

Ethics of production

Harmful, addictive, or defective products Environmental ethics Pollution Carbon emissions trading Health Mobile phone radiation Genetically modified food Product testing ethics like animal testing and animal rights

Ethics of sales and marketing

Pricing: Price discrimination, price fixing, price skimming Anticompetitive practices

Particular marketing strategies: Greenwash, shill, bait and switch, spam (computer), viral marketing, pyramid scheme, and planned obsolescence Advertisement contents: Attack ads or promos, sex in advertisements, and subliminal messages Marketing in schools Grey markets and black markets

Ethics of intellectual property, skills, and knowledge

Patent infringement, trademark infringement, copyright infringement Patent misuse, patent troll, copyright misuse, submarine patent Employee raiding Biopiracy and bioprospecting Industrial espionage Business intelligence

International business ethics

Transfer pricing Fair trade pricing Cultural imperialism Globalization Child labor

Objective of bussness ethics

Why Study Ethics? Even granting that business ethics is important, many seem to believe that there is no point in studying the subject. Ethics is something you feel, not something you think. Finance, marketing, operations, and even business law lend themselves to intellectual treatment, but ethics does not. The idea that ethics has no intellectual content is odd indeed, considering that some of the most famous intellectuals in world history have given it a central place in their thought (Confucius, Plato, Aristotle, Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas, etc.). Ethics is in fact a highly developed field that demands close reasoning. The Western tradition in particular has given rise to sophisticated deontological, teleological and consequentialist theories of right and wrong. No one theory explains everything satisfactorily, but the same is true, after all, in the natural sciences. Even when they grant that ethics has intellectual content, people often say that studying the field will not change behavior. Character is formed in early childhood, not during a professors lecture. If the suggestion here is that college-level study does not change behavior, we should

shut down the entire business school, not only the ethics course. Presumably the claim, then, is that studying finance and marketing can influence ones conduct, but studying ethics cannot. This is again a curious view, since ethics is the one field that deals explicitly with conduct. Where is the evidence for this view? The early origins of character do not prevent finance and marketing courses from influencing behavior. Why cannot ethics courses also have an effect? 7 Ethics courses have a number of features that seem likely to influence behavior. They provide a language and conceptual framework with which one can talk and think about ethical issues. Their emphasis on case studies helps to make one aware of the potential consequences of ones actions. They present ethical that theories help define what a valid ethical argument looks like. They teach one to make distinctions and avoid fallacies that are so common when people make decisions. They give one an opportunity to think through, at ones leisure, complex ethical issues that are likely to arise later, when there is no time to think. They introduce one to such specialized areas as product liability, employment, intellectual property, environmental protection, and cross-cultural management. They give one practice at articulating an ethical position, which can help resist pressure to compromise. None of this convinces one to be good, but it is useful to those who want to be good. It may also improve business conduct in general. How many of the recent business scandals would

have occurred if subordinates had possessed the skills, vocabulary and conceptual equipment to raise an ethical issue with their coworkers? Ethics not only should be studied alongside management, but the two fields are closely related. Business management is all about making the right decisions. Ethics is all about making the right decisions. So what is the difference between the two? Management is concerned with how decisions affect the company, while ethics is concerned about how decisions affect everything. Management operates in the specialized context of the firm, while ethics operates in the general context of the world. Management is therefore part of ethics. A business manager cannot make the right decisions without understanding management in particular as well as ethics in general. Business ethics is management carried out in the real world.

LITERATURE REVIEW
Business ethics has only existed as an academic field since the 1970s. During the 1960s, corporations found themselves increasingly under attack over unethical conduct. As a response to this, corporations - most notably in the US - developed social responsibility programmes which usually involved charitable donations and funding local community projects. This practice was mostly ad hoc and unorganised varying from industry to industry and company to company. Business schools in large universities began to incorporate social responsibility courses into their syllabi around this time but it was mostly focused on the law and management strategy. Social responsibility has been described as being a pyramid with four types of responsibility involved - economic (on the bottom level), then legal, ethical and finally philanthropic. Ethical issues were dealt with in social issues courses however, and were not considered in their own right until the 1970s when philosophers began to write on the subject of business ethics 1) Business ethics provided an ethical framework for evaluating business and the corporate world. 2) It allowed critical analysis of business and development of new and different methods. (This also made business ethicists unpopular in certain circles.) 3) Business ethics fused personal and social responsibility together and gave it a theoretical foundation. In this way, business ethics had a somewhat broader remit than its predecessor (the social issues course) and was a good deal more systematic and constructive. Business ethics also recognised that the world of business raised new and unprecedented moral problems not covered by personal systems of morality. Commonsense morality is sufficient to govern judgments about stealing from your employer, cheating customers and tax fraud. It could not provide all the necessary tools for

evaluating moral justification of affirmative action, the right to strike and whistleblowing. By 1990, however, the climate was changing. An oil spill that found its way into the Monongahela River cost Ashland Oil $2.5 million, and under a new set of federal sentencing guidelines that became law just a year later, the fines could have amounted to between $30 million and $50 million. In publishing this reportage, Ethikos was not trying to tell its readers to establish some kind of defensive system to protect their cash position. The purpose was to demonstrate the value of raising ethical levels throughout the corporate structurefrom the executive suite to the mid-management sector and the work floor as well. In earlier times, Ethikos discussed many of the ramifications of a continuing discussion about whether or not proper ethical conduct could improve company profitability. In doing so it set forth the views of Milton Friedman in the Self-Interest Model of Business Ethics, who argued that the corporate responsibility was simply to return a profit. It followed up with part of a transcript of a debate between T. Boone Pickens and James Burke of Johnson & Johnson about where the company shareholders ranked in importance. To Pickens: First. To Burke: Last. There was coverage of the hotline set up by the National Association of Accountantsto offer guidance to its 100,000 members who work within businesses as controllers or budget officers. There queries were and still are familiar: A business owner modernizes his personal residence and orders his accountant to put the cost on the companys books. Another makes a business trip and takes friends along at company expense. A positive sign back then noted that companies were reporting huge writeoffs that in earlier times firms had once tried to hide.

There were interviews with prominent executives commenting on their personal experiences with the problems of facilitating payments, the acceptance of gifts and favors and the giving as well. DuPont pegged the limit of both at $25. In its very first issue, Ethikos sought opinions from a number of teachers in graduate schools of business throughout the country. This came in the wake of a $30 million gift from John Shad, a former chairman of the SEC to support a program on ethics at Harvard Business School. Having donated most of the money, he gave his reasons. Among them: Ive been very disturbed recently with the large numbers of graduates of leading business schools who have become convicted felons. Ethikos makes no claim to prescience. Still, familiarity with the complexities of the past does help to focus on the problems and concerns of the future. Ethikos aims to present them with clarity and timeliness.

In this broad sense ethics in business is simply the application of everyday moral or ethical norms to business. Perhaps the example from the Bible that comes to mind most readily is the Ten Commandments, a guide that is still used by many today. In particular, the injunctions to truthfulness and honesty or the prohibition against theft and envy are directly applicable. A notion of stewardship can be found in the Bible as well as many other notions that can be and have been applied to business. Other traditions and religions have comparable sacred or ancient texts that have guided people's actions in all realms, including business, for centuries, and still do. If we move from religion to philosophy we have a similar long tradition. Plato is known for his discussions of justice in the Republic, and Aristotle explicitly discusses economic relations, commerce and trade under the heading of the household in his Politics. His discussion of trade, exchange, property, acquisition, money and wealth have an almost modern ring, and he makes moral judgments about greed, or the unnatural use of one's

capacities in pursuit of wealth for its own sake, and similarly condemns usury because it involves a profit from currency itself rather than from the process of exchange in which money is simply a means.1 He also gives the classic definition of justice as giving each his due, treating equals equally, and trading equals for equals or "having an equal amount both before and after the transaction."2 In the West, after the fall of Rome, Christianity held sway, and although there were various discussions of poverty and wealth, ownership and property, there is no systematic discussion of business except in the context of justice and honesty in buying and selling. We see this, for instance, in Thomas Aquinas's discussion of selling articles for more than they are worth and selling them at a higher price than was paid for them 3 and in his discussion of, and, following Aristotle's analysis, his condemnation of usury.4 Nonetheless he justified borrowing for a good end from someone ready to lend at interest. Luther, Calvin, and John Wesley, among other Reformation figures also discussed trade and business and led the way in the development of the Protestant work ethic. 5 R. H. Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism6 argues persuasively that religion was an essential part in the rise of individualism and of commerce as it developed in the modern period. The modern period, however, sought the divorce of the religious from the secular and politics from religion. In the process, economics and economic activity were similarly divorced from religion and joined with politics to form what was known as political-economy. John Locke developed the classic defense of property as a natural right. For him, one acquires property by mixing his labor with what he finds in nature.7 Adam Smith is often thought of as the father of modern economics with his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations . Smith develops Locke's notion of labor into a labor theory of value. In modern times commentators have interpreted him as a defender of laissez-faire economics, and put great emphasis on his notion of the invisible hand. Yet the commentators often forget that Smith was also a moral philosopher and the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. For him the two realms were not separate. John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel all wrote on economic matters and just distribution.

Karl Marx, however, stands out as the most trenchant critic of capitalism as it had developed up through the Nineteenth Century, and Marx's critique in one form or another continues up to today, even when not attributed to Marx. Marx claimed that capitalism was built on the exploitation of labor. Whether this was for him a factual claim or a moral condemnation is open to debate; but it has been taken as a moral condemnation since 'exploitation' is a morally charged term and for him seems clearly to involve a charge of injustice. Marx's claim is based on his analysis of the labor theory of value, according to which all economic value comes from human labor. The only commodity not sold at its real value, according to Marx, is human labor. Workers are paid less than the value they produce. The difference between the value the workers produce and what they are paid is the source of profit for the employer or the owner of the means of production. If workers were paid the value they produced, there would be no profit and so capitalism would disappear. In its place would be socialism and eventually communism, in which all property is socially (as opposed to privately) owned, and in which all members of society would contribute according to their ability and receive according to their needs. The result would be a society (and eventually a world) without exploitation and also without the alienation that workers experience in capitalist societies. Marx's notion of exploitation was developed by Lenin in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, in which he claims that the exploitation of workers in the developed countries has been lessened and the workers' conditions have improved because the worst exploitation has been exported to the colonies. His criticism has been adapted by many contemporary critics who claim that multinational corporations derive their profits from the exploitation of workers in less developed countries. Marx appealed to the workers of his time and helped start the labor movement, which improved the situation of the workingman. Marx's collaborator, Frederich Engels, saw the world as divided between those who follow Marx and those who follow religion, and the Marxists sought the hearts and minds of the workers. Refusing to yield the moral high ground, Pope Leo XIII in 1891 issued the first of the papal encyclicals on social justice,

Rerum Novarum. As opposed to Marx, it justified private property, while seeking the answer to exploitation in the notion of a just wage, which was one sufficient "to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner," his wife and his children. 8 Later popes followed Leo's example. Pope Pius XI in 1931 wrote Quadragesimo Anno, which morally attacked both Soviet socialism and laissez-faire capitalism, a theme continued by Pope John Paul II in Laborem Exercens (1981) and Centesimus Annus (1991). The U. S. Catholic Bishops in 1984 issued a Pastoral Letter on the U.S. Economy along the same lines, although more open to the U. S. free enterprise system. The aim of the encyclicals was not to propose any particular economic system but to insist that any system should not be contrary to Christian moral principles and should improve the conditions of the masses of humanity, especially of the poor and the least advantaged. Hence although the popes were critical of existing economic structures, the emphasis in the pulpits was still primarily on individuals living up to the demands of morality, including the giving of charity to those in need. The same is true of the Protestant tradition as of the Catholic, even though there is no central authority to issue documents such as the encyclicals. Perhaps the most influential protestant figure in this regard was Reinhold Niebuhr whose trenchant critique of capitalism in Moral Man and Immoral Society 9 became the basis for courses in seminaries and schools of theology. In 1993 the Parliament of the World's Religions adopted a Declaration of a Global Ethic 10 that condemned "the abuses of the Earth's ecosystems," poverty, hunger, and the economic disparities that threaten many families with ruin. The idea of ethics in business continues until the present day. In general, in the United States this focuses on the moral or ethical actions of individuals. It is in this sense also that many people, in discussing business ethics, immediately raise examples of immoral or unethical activity by individuals. Included with this notion, however, is also the criticism of multinational corporations that use child labor or pay pitifully low wages to employees in less developed countries or who utilize suppliers that run sweat shops. Many business persons are strongly influenced by their religious beliefs and the ethical norms that they have been taught as part of their religion, and apply these norms in their

business activities. Aaron Feuerstein is a prime example of someone whose actions after fire destroyed almost all of his Malden Mills factory complex kept his workers on the payroll until he could rebuild. He has stated often and publicly that he just did what his Jewish faith told him was the right thing to do. This strand of the story is perhaps the most prominent in the thinking of the ordinary person when they hear the term business ethics. The media carries stories about Enron officials acting unethically and about the unethical activities of Arthur Andersen or WorldCom, and so on, and the general public takes this as representative of business ethics or of the need for it. What they mean is the need for ethics in business.

Business Ethics as an Academic Field Business ethics as an academic field, just as business ethics as a corporate movement, have a more recent history. The second strand of the story that I shall tell has to do with business ethics as an academic field. The 1960s marked a changing attitude towards society in the United States and towards business. The Second World War was over, the Cold War was ever present, and the War in Viet Nam fostered a good deal of opposition to official public policy and to the socalled military-industrial complex, which came in for increasing scrutiny and criticism. The Civil Rights movement had caught the public imagination. The United States was becoming more and more of a dominant economic force. American-based multinational corporations were growing in size and importance. Big business was coming into its own, replacing small and medium-sized businesses in the societal image of business. The chemical industry was booming with innovation, and in its wake came environmental damage on a scale that had not previously been possible. The spirit of protest led to the environmental movement, to the rise of consumerism, and to criticism of multinational corporations.

Corporations, finding themselves under public attack and criticism, responded by developing the notion of social responsibility. They started social responsibility programs and spent a good deal of money advertising their programs and how they were promoting the social good. Exactly what "social responsibility" meant varied according to the industry and company. But whether it was reforestation or cutting down on pollution or increasing diversity in the workforce, social responsibility was the term used to capture those activities of a corporation that were beneficial to society and usually, by implication, that made up for some unethical or anti-social activity with which the company had been charged. The business schools responded by developing courses in social responsibility or social issues in managementcourses which continue to thrive today. For the most part, in the 1960s such courses put an emphasis on law, and the point of view of managers prevailed, although soon that of employees, consumers and the general public were added. The textbooks paid no systematic attention to ethical theory, and tended to be more concerned with empirical studies than with the development or defense of norms against which to measure corporate activity. The history of the social responsibility movement is a story in itself and one that different people are writing somewhat differently. One version, by Archie Carroll, describes social responsibility as a pyramid that encompasses the four types of responsibility that businesses have: At the bottom is economic, then legal, then ethical and then philanthropic. And although some representatives of corporate social responsibility claim that they did business ethics before business ethics became popular and although some claim that what they do is business ethics, that is not the story of business ethics I am going to tell today. Business ethics as an academic field emerged in the 1970s. Prior to this time there had been a handful of courses called by that name; and a few figures, such as Raymond Baumhart, who dealt with ethics and business. For the most part ethical issues, if they were discussed, were handled in social issues courses. Theologians and religious thinkers, as well as media pundits continued writing and teaching on ethics in business; professors of management continued to write and do research on corporate social responsibility. The new ingredient and the catalyst that led to the field of business ethics as such was the entry of a significant number of philosophers, who brought ethical theory and

philosophical analysis to bear on a variety of issues in business. Business ethics emerged as a result of the intersection of ethical theory with empirical studies and the analysis of cases and issues. Norman Bowie dates the birth of business ethics as November 1974, with the first conference in business ethics, which was held at the University of Kansas, and which resulted in the first anthology used in the new courses that started popping up thereafter in business ethics.12 Whether one chooses that date or some other event, it is difficult to identify any previous period with the sort of concerted activity that developed in a short period thereafter. In 1979 three anthologies in business ethics appeared: Tom Beauchamp and Norman Bowie, Ethical Theory and Business; Thomas Donaldson and Patricia Werhane, Ethical Issues in Business: A Philosophical Approach; and Vincent Barry, Moral Issues in Business. In 1982 the first single-authored books in the field appeared: Richard De George, Business Ethics; and Manuel G. Velasquez, Business Ethics: Concepts and Cases. The books found a ready market, and courses in business ethics both in philosophy departments and in schools of business developed rapidly. As they did, the number of textbooks increased exponentially. The field developed very similarly to the field of medical ethics, which had emerged ten years earlier in the 1960s, and the name paralleled that of the earlier fieldalthough even whether the term "business ethics" should be adopted was discussed among the relatively small group that was engaged in starting what has become a field. The seminal work of John Rawls in 1971, A Theory of Justice, had helped make the application of ethics to economic and business issues more acceptable to academic philosophers than had previously been the case. Whereas most of those who wrote on social issues were professors of business, most of those who wrote initially on business ethics were professors of philosophy, some of whom taught in business schools. What differentiated business ethics as a field from social issues in management was 1) the fact that business ethics sought to provide an explicit ethical framework within which to evaluate business, and especially corporate activities. Business ethics as an academic discipline had ethics as its basis. While social responsibility could be and was defined by corporations to cover whatever they did that they could present in a positive light as helping society, ethics had

implicit in it standards that were independent of the wishes of corporations. To that extent, 2) the field was at least potentially critical of business practicesmuch more so than the social responsibility approach had been. If we take Archie Carroll's pyramid, those in business ethics did not see ethics as coming after economics and law but as restraints on economic activity and as a source for justifying law and for proposing additional legal restraints on business when appropriate. As a result business ethics and business ethicists were not warmly received by the business community, who often perceived them as a threatsomething they could not manage, preaching by the uninformed who never had to face a payroll. The development of the field was far from easy, and those academics working in it initially also found a cool reception both from their colleagues in philosophy departments and from those in business and in business schools. The former typically did not see business as a philosophically interesting endeavor, and many of them had an antibusiness mind-set. The latter questioned whether philosophers had anything of interest to bring to business. The initial efforts were tenuous, and more and more people entered the field who were often ill-informed, or who, in fact, adopted polemical attacks against or positions in defense of business. Many observers dismissed business ethics as a fad that would pass. Many misunderstood its aims and envisioned it as providing justification or a rationale for whatever business wanted to do. It took a number of years for the field to define itself, incorporate standards of scholarship and rigor, and become accepted. As a field, business ethics covered the ethical foundations of business, of private property, and of various economic systems. 3) Although the field was concerned with managers and workers as moral persons with responsibilities as well as rights, most attention was focused on the corporationits structure and activities, including all the functional areas of business, including marketing, finance, management, and production. Related issues, such as the environmental impact of business actions, were included in most courses and texts, as were, with increasing attention, the activities of multinational corporations. As a field, business ethics included a good deal, but not all, of what was covered in social issues courses and texts, as well as giving structure to discussions of

ethics in business. As it emerged by the middle of the 1980s it was clearly interdisciplinary, with the lines between philosophy and business research often blurred. Initial discussions of business ethics introduced students to two of the basic techniques of moral argumentation, that used by utilitarians (who hold that an action is right if it produces the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people), and that used by deontologists (who claim that duty, justice and rights are not reducible to considerations of utility). Other approaches were soon introduced including natural law, virtue ethics (based on Aristotle), and the ethics of caring (often associated with a feminist approach to ethics). An initial philosophical discussion that arose concerned the moral status of corporations and whether one could appropriately use moral language with respect to them, or whether the only proper objects of moral evaluation were human beings and their actions. That controversy has not completely subsided, but most authors take into account the fact that most people do attribute actions and policies to corporations as well as to the individuals within them.

The Role of Business Ethics Today Business and IT students spend the majority of their time at university learning about economics, business development, software engineering and computer programming. This is all valuable and necessary knowledge to prepare them for the demands of employment in the business/IT sector. However, running or working in a business will raise many difficulties that are completely unrelated to the skills or knowledge gained in university. How do you evaluate such problems as hiring the more qualified candidate for a job when she has a disability requiring costly adaptations to the work environment, outsourcing production materials from countries where child labour and sweatshops are prevalent etc.? In recent years there have been several business scandals that caused serious damage to the credibility of the companies involved, occasionally the entire industry in which they operate, and the numerous stakeholders of the business. One such example is the collapse

of Barings Bank - the actions of one rogue trader incurred losses of almost US$1 billion. It has been discovered that many high profile people (at home and abroad) are involved in tax-evasion, insider trading and fraud, Charlie Haughey and Martha Stewart are two such examples of people with considerable wealth and public standing who have been involved in questionable business dealings. At this stage in your course, you are well equipped with knowledge of your subject, and this will be built on when you go into the workplace due to on-going training and other such practices. But it is fair to say that some of you may have never had the chance to think of the ethical issues entailed in business and IT . During this course on business ethics it is hoped that you will be given such an opportunity and attain a working knowledge of the different theoretical frameworks that can be applied to business

Research methodology

As far as research is concerned the data can be collected in only two formi i.e primary data or secondry data . in this research work secondary data has been used .

Secondary data
In research, secondary data is data collected and possibly processed by people other than the reseasrcher in question. Common sources of secondary data for social science Include censuses, large surveys, and organizational records . In sociology primary data is data you have collected and secondary data is you mhave gathered from primary to create a new research . In terms of historical research, these two terms have different meaning . A primary source is a book or a set of archival records . A secondary source is summary of a book or set of records.

Secondary data analysis

There are two different types of sources that need to be established in order to conduct a good analysis , The first type is a primary source which is the initial material that is collected during the research process. Primary data is the data that the researcher is collecting themselves using methords such as surveys , direct ovservationas , interviews, well as logs(objective data sources). Primary data is a reliable way to collect data because the researcher will know where it came from and how it was collected and analyzed since they did it themselves . Secondary sources on the on the other hand are sources that are based upon the data that was collected from the primary source. Secondary sources

take the role of analyzing, explaining, and combining the information from the primary source with additional information. Secondary data is analysis commonly kown as second-hand analysis. It is simply the analysis of preexisting data in a different way or to answer a different question than originally intended. Secondary data analysis utilizes the data that was collected by someone else in order to furher a study that you are interested in completing . Common sources of secondary data are social science surveys and data from government agencies, including the bureau of the census, the Bureau of the census, the Bureau of labour Statistics and various other agencies. The data collected more often collected via surveys research methords. Data from experimental studies may also be used.

LIMITATIONS
Due to non availability of the concerned persons questions remained unanswered. Turnover were not given Biasness is the most serious limitation. Retailers behavior are not accessed correctly. Realibility of data is dependen on their honesty.

Ethical problems
Ethical standards change over time Human reasoning is imperfect Ethical standards and principles are not always adequate to resolve conflicts

cCONCLUSION
establishing organizational values nurturing individual responsibility providing leadership & oversight relating decisions to stakeholder interests developing accountability relating consequences auditing & improvement making in the organization? culture, values & programs compliance & leadership recognition of the role of co-workers & managers balancing stakeholder interests management of situational pressures rewards beyond short-term performance business ethics is often squeezed out of the core & is not fully represented in the curriculum development process faculty members trained in traditional business disciplines often feel they lack the training & expertise different cultural & historical perspectives make it difficult to define & teach

Bibliography
www.itcportal.com Ethics Resource Center at http://www.ethics.org/ International Business Ethics Institute at http://www.business-ethics.org/ BOOKS

Title:Business Ethics at Work Author: Elizabeth Vallance Publisher: Cambridge University Press