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Introduction
The internationalisation of business and the process of globalisation raise many ethical issues about acceptable norms of conduct on the part of multi-national companies (MNCs) and other organisations. The core concerns of international business ethics today are: human rights, labour standards, bribery and corruption, environmental protection, and financial probity and the control of money laundering ([13] Kline, 2005). Racism and discrimination are also a universal problem for a global business ethics ([5] Chua, 2004). The search for better business ethics has been an issue accompanying the industrialisation process, as it has slowly become a global phenomenon ([18] Ruskin, 1860). Globalisation is the main reason why international business ethics has become an important topic in the international business curriculum ([8] Dunning, 2003). The firm doing business on a global basis is faced with many difficult decisions about what to do in different countries: whether to follow the company's home country rules and customs, or whether to follow host country rules and local customs. Ethical dilemmas and value conflicts are bound to arise in many areas, and corporate managers need new guidance ([3] Brown, 2005). For example, over ethical issues arising out of international business transactions such as patent protection in the pharmaceutical industry; what is fair trade; what constitutes cultural imperialism; varying global labour standards, the dilemmas of child labour; outsourcing production and services to low-wage countries; the problem of international commerce with pariah states. Hence, corporations need to give careful thought to international business ethics, and need to use moral theory to establish principles of international business ethics.
This paper will attempt to summarise the progress made in establishing the field of international business ethics. The problems faced by developers of moral theory in cross-cultural management will be outlined in the first section. The second section will focus upon the search for a cross-national code of ethics that could help to establish norms of conduct to deal with these issues in the global marketplace, and on the evidence of their effectiveness. The final section will look at the rise of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in multinational corporations, and will identify and discuss the effectiveness of these policies in improving international business practice.
Theoretical foundations for global business ethics
A very important initial question...