… for the distance is so great between how we live and how we ought to live that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation…(Machiavelli 1520 [1980], p. 66).
Abstract
Ethical codes have been hailed as an explicit vehicle for achieving more sustainable and defensible organizational practice. Nonetheless, when legal compliance and corporate governance codes are conflated, codes can be used to define organizational interests ostentatiously by stipulating norms for employee ethics. Such codes have a largely cosmetic and insurance function, acting subtly and strategically to control organizational risk management and protection. In this paper, we conduct a genealogical discourse analysis of a representative code of ethics from an international corporation to understand how management frames expectations of compliance. Our contribution is to articulate the problems inherent in codes of ethics, and we make some recommendations to address these to benefit both an organization and its employees. In this way, we show how a code of ethics can provide a foundation for ethical sustainability, while addressing management intentions and employees’ ethical satisfaction.
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Notes
Ethisphere Institute is an US-based influential ethics think tank that surveys and publicly recognizes ethical companies.
Ethisphere Institute describes itself as a “leading international think-tank dedicated to the research and promotion of best practices in corporate ethics and compliance… honorees not only promote ethical business standards and practices internally, they exceed legal compliance minimums and shape future industry standards by introducing best practices today” (http://ethisphere.com/worlds-most-ethical/wme-honorees). One of Ethisphere’s areas of research is to examine codes of business conduct and score them for best practices. Its website states that the Institute has scored the codes of the Fortune 1000 companies and other global companies. (http://www.ethisphere.com/history). Microsoft has been ranked in the category of one of the “World's Most Ethical (WME) Companies” between 2011 and 2014. Since 2007, Ethisphere has run an annual survey of the World’s Most Ethical Companies. Its rating system is based on a comprehensive questionnaire that includes self-rating questions, awards/recognition by other institutions, board governance activities, board oversight of compliance and ethics, job title of person responsible for the compliance and ethics program, the code of ethics, and ethics training. The questionnaire has five core categories: Ethics and Compliance program (worth 25 per cent of the total score); Reputation, Leadership and Innovation (20 per cent); Governance (10 per cent); Corporate Citizenship and Responsibility (25 per cent); and Culture of Ethics (20 per cent). It is this last category that interests us in this paper. It “looks at the culture of ethics at the organization concerning widely accepted or unaccepted norms as it pertains to ethical conduct. Starting with adoption of a values-based culture and building on those core guidelines by having the workforce buy into the culture and not only know it, but live it” (http://ethisphere.com/worlds-most-ethical/scoring-methodology. However, the survey does not address the issue of potential moral conflict or moral integrity between a corporation and its employees. It is this prickly area that is the subject of this paper.
Doublethink is a term in Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) that rejects morality while claiming to embody it.
We have not addressed this aspect of ethics in this paper simply because, empirically, it would take us outside of the textually discursive frame that we have adopted to delimit our enquiry.
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Adelstein, J., Clegg, S. Code of Ethics: A Stratified Vehicle for Compliance. J Bus Ethics 138, 53–66 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-015-2581-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-015-2581-9