Business Ethics in the USA. Overview and Reflections (translated by Barbara Stuckey)
Type
working paper
Date Issued
1983-01-01
Author(s)
Enderle, Georges
Abstract (De)
The object of my trip to the USA was to visit institutions and to meet people who are actively and consciously dealing with the issues of business ethics. In this way I hoped to gain an overview of th on-going teaching and research activities in this field. My main interest was directed toward the activites at American universities. In addition, however, I wanted to visit non-university institutes and organizations, because such institutions are often more sensitive toward the most pressing issues and are often more interested in direct, timely confrontation. Whenever I spoke about the plans for an Institute of &auot;Economic" Ethics at the Saint Gall Graduate School and, analogous to the concept "social ethics" about the concept "economic ethics", I was confronted with surprise and immediate questions about this intuitively sensible, yet unusual, expression. In America, one speaks of "business ethics", not "economic ethics". The term "business ethics" is in fact the phrase under which the relevant literature is listed in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Thus, in this paper I shall only use the term "business ethics", whereby the word "business" refers to the "total exonomic reality". The topics which fall into the category of business ethics are diverse both in subject matter and in the quality of their treatment of the issues. In Section 5 of this paper the subject matter of business ethics will be examined in length. First, however, I shall discuss the way in which interest in the subject has grown (section 2), the nature of the motivation which led to the emergence of the subject in the USA (section 3), and some of the more common objections to the academic pursuit of business ethics (section 4).
Language
German
HSG Classification
contribution to scientific community
Refereed
No
Subject(s)
Eprints ID
17482