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Abstract
Recent initiatives in business curricula have included emphases on global business communication and ethics. Combines these issues by comparing the ethical predisposition of business students in New Zealand and Singapore with their US counterparts. A sample of 373 students indicated that the students in the three countries generally hold high expectations for the behaviour of business. Of the 14 scenarios evaluated, only four exhibited significant differences between the two groups, i.e. USA compared with Singapore and New Zealand. In each of these four, students from New Zealand and Singapore expressed greater tolerance for the questionable business practice. However, there are several instances where Singapore is significantly different from the USA, but New Zealand is not. The relationship between ethics and business communication is well established, for instance ethical issues in advertising including Federal Trade Commission of the USA's concerns with advertising (and similar concerns elsewhere). Although this research was not designed to show this interconnection in an express manner, this relationship was borne in mind during the questionnaire design. The focus of this research is elsewhere but assumes that the interconnection is well understood.
Introduction
Two issues which have been deemed crucial for business education in the 1990s are global concerns and business ethics and their influence on cultural communication style and process. It has been argued that this combination represents the most difficult challenge that today's MNCs face (Duerden, 1995). Yet, international business ethics has been given little coverage in the typical business curriculum. Cowton and Dunfee (1995) recently conducted a survey of business faculty in the UK, Asia, and the USA: the results indicated that there is general agreement that the purview of business ethics must include insight which focuses on companies and incidents outside the US domain.
There have been numerous studies which have evaluated ethical predisposition of some relevant group within a single country. However, there have been comparatively few efforts to compare two countries via an identical survey. Conversely, there have been many cross-cultural studies which evaluated differences and similarities in behavioural characteristics of the various countries' consumers.
This study seeks to begin to address this deficiency. It begins by evaluating responses from three countries: New Zealand, Singapore and the USA. The intent is eventually to include...