Let’s do a thought experiment. Focus group moderators will often ask participants to anthropomorphize a company or brand. For example, to probe aspects of corporate character or brand personality, researchers will ask: “If BMW were a person, whom would that person be?” Many companies today have officers or functions for overseeing ethics or compliance, so for this thought experiment, I would ask: “If current business ethics functions were a person, who would that person be?” In such exercises, experts tell us to go with our first impression, trusting what immediately comes to mind as representing some kind of subconscious truth. Without too much pondering, whom do you identify as the personification of the business ethics discipline?
In my case, I began this thought experiment in response to the plethora of business ethics failures that have emerged in only the last few weeks. Facebook was caught trying to plant false stories about Google’s supposedly questionable privacy practices in newspapers, and with influential bloggers. Bad enough that the defining social media company in the world was made to blush over its indiscretions, but that it secretly hired Burson-Marsteller to do the dirty work also implicates one of the world’s largest PR companies in the intentional dissemination of unproven–and for many experts, inaccurate–information. This subterfuge about privacy was played out (more…)
Tags: bad news for business ethicists, business ethics, compliance, ethical imagination, when compliance is merely complicit
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