Summary of Business & Society by Archie B. Carroll and Ann K. Buchholtz

Summarized by Da Jeen, Lee

Business ethics, these days, has become a lot more serious challenge for the business society than past decades. The public’s trusts of executives and major business institutions have been affected by the major ethics of the early 2000s. Polls and a variety of article tell us that the public does not have a high regard for the ethics of managers. It is not easy to say whether business’s ethics have been decreased or just seem to have done already due to increasing rising expectation of public and media coverage. Business ethics concerns about whether it is right or wrong and fairness of managerial behavior, and it is needless to say that these are not easy judgements to decide. Plenty of norms compete to make the conclusion with which criterions behavior should be compared.

The first way which manager might think about ethical judgements was the conventional approach. One of important problems with the approach is not clear. So thus the conventional approach is susceptible to ethical relativism.

A Venn diagram model was seen as an aid to making decisions when economics, laws, and ethics expectations compete with each other be in tension. Four questions of the important ethics are 1) What is? 2) What ought to be? 3) How can we get from the first and second questions? 4) What is our motivation in this transition?. Answer of these four questions could help one in an ethical analysis of a situation.

Three models of management ethics are 1)immoral management, 2) moral management and 3) amoral management which is further classified into intentional and unintentional categories. These are two hypothesis about the presence of these three moral types in the management population and in individuals.

A normally accepted view is that moral judgement develops according to the pattern described by Lawrence Kohlberg. His three levels of moral development are preconventional, conventional and postconventional, autonomous, or principled. Some of that have suggested that men and women use different perspective as they perceive and deal with moral issues.

Furthermore, managers’ ethics are affected by sources of values originating from external to the organization and from sources with the organizations. The latter category includes respect to the authority structure, loyalty, conformity and a thought about financial performance and results.

Finally, six elements in developing moral judgement were given. These elements are consisted of moral imagination, moral identification and ordering, moral evaluation, tolerance of moral disagreement and ambiguity, integration of managerial and moral competence, and a sense of moral obligation. If the moral management model is to be realized, these six element need to be developed.