Ethical and Social Challenges

Globalization has been a factor that has brought countries closer worldwide, and Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) are eager to look for new market opportunities in developing countries. This chapter analyzes the implementation of MNEs' global ethical principles in business into local moral standards of societies from developing countries. The author will discuss, using current scenarios, how principles of both moral relativism and moral absolutism can provide a profitable or punishable opportunity within developing countries when MNEs operate accordingly, or not, to ethical decision making processes in business. Additionally, the chapter proposes how MNEs' managers can discover the limits of moral free space, to distinguish a moral value in tension with their own from one that is intolerable. At the end, it is expected that MNEs' managers can apply ethical decision making in business by clearly perceiving and understanding their corporate culture in a developing country society.

Are Business Managers “Professionals”?

This paper examines two issues about professionalism and business that appear at first blush to be entirely separate. The first is the question of who counts as a “professional,” and whether, in particular, business people are “professionals.” The second issue is how acknowledged professionals that regularly interact with business, such as accountants, lawyers, and physicians, can find the moral free space necessary to maintain professional integrity in the face of financial pressures. Conflicts of interest for professionals working in corporations recur with disturbing regularity, and often have serious consequences. In the end I will show how both issues share a common solution. The solution involves understanding the normative function of the manager in the modern corporation, a function, I will argue, made more conspicuous by work over the last two decades done in the areas of stakeholder theory, corporate social performance (CSP), and social contract theory. The remainder of the paper is devoted to articulating these two problems and clarifying their common solution.