Ethics for International business: Decision Making in a Global Political Economy

The modern world demands quick answers to increasingly complex questions. As interconnected events rush past, few decision makers can afford the luxury of considered reflection. International business embodies this reality, confronting both growing challenges and opportunities created by recent globalization trends. Calls for greater corporate social responsibility, sparked by the increasing impact of international business, place a particular premium on executive decision making. This textbook encourages development of a personal value framework that can help guide decisions on international business issues while simultaneously exploring the extent of current global agreement on core value principles. Scandals periodically erupt in the media that focus renewed attention on business ethics. However, these incidents seldom reflect difficult ethical dilemmas. Whatever the technical arguments about legal culpability, most reported business scandals represent actions the perpetrators surely knew were improper but decided to take anyway, either rationalizing their decisions or simply expecting not to get caught. Preventing or pushing such misdeeds falls to corporate governance and management, or civil and criminal law. The real task for business ethics is to assist individuals with more common but also more difficult “best choice” judgments, where good moral arguments can be marshaled to support alternative courses of action. These types of ethical dilemmas are especially frequent for international companies doing business in complex cross-cultural environments. Ethics involves a reasoned search for the value framework that should be used to judge and guide action. Formal theory provides valuable intellectual insights that enrich and elucidate this task. However, the opaqueness of theoretical formulas can also lead people to associate ethics with abstractions too idealistic to apply in everyday life. This gap in perception must be bridged through an approach to applied ethics that can encourage and facilitate consciously normative decision making. The expanding scope and influence of international business underline the practical importance of developing skills in applied ethical analysis among current and future business leaders.