Zur Begründung einer Übernahme ethischer Verantwortung in Unternehmen

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Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Business economics - Business Ethics, Corporate Ethics, grade: 2,3, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, course: Unternehmensethik, 42 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: In the past few years, business ethics has emerged as a broad and importantconcept, universities are offering seminars, corporations are sending their managerson trainings, and an enormous literature body seems to be emerging out of nowhere.In contrast to this movement, the ‘globalization bible’, the novel NoLogo written byjournalist Naomi Klein draws a different picture: it accuses companies and CEOs ofantisocial behaviour. Consumer capitalism on the one hand and at the same timearticles about sweatshops, bad working conditions, and ‘famous’ names like theBrent Spar platform, Sao Wiwa and Shell, and Nike sweatshops support the negativeimage of MNCs.In the following I would therefore like to examine why certain corporations seem totake on corporate responsibility while others, as stated in Klein’s novel, act as ‘the bigbrand bullies’. I seek to answer in this paper why business ethics as a concept is notan oxymoron (cp. Collins 1994) per se and why in the words of John L. Campbell“given the incentives for maximizing profit and shareholder value, let alone actingopportunistically, why would a corporation ever act in socially responsible ways, evenat the most minimal level” (947).In general, there are three main approaches to the grounds of acting sociallyresponsible: there are moral reasons, economic reasons and institutional reasons.First of all I would like to start by giving some theoretical basics. Subsequently moral,economic and institutional theories as an explanation for the implementation ofbusiness ethics will be examined. Because each of these three parts is consideredequally important they will all be covered, but concessions need to be made due tothe enormous width of the topic. I would then like to come up with a diagnosis andpossible topics to ‘walk the talk’ and finally draw a conclusion.