Text 11

Read the text and refute the following statements.

1. Ethics and morality are practically equivalent.

2. Ethical decisions always conflict with the interests of customers.

3. Ethical decisions are idealistic and they cannot be reached in business.

Ethics and corporate social responsibility

Ethics deals with the fundamental issues of practical decision-making, and its main concerns include the nature of ultimate value and the standards by which human actions can be judged right or wrong.

The terms ethics and morality are closely related. We often refer to ethical judgments or ethical principles where it would have been more common to speak of moral judgments or moral principles. Strictly speaking, however, the term refers not to morality itself but to the field of study, or branch of enquiry, that has morality as its subject matter. In this sense, ethics is equivalent to moral philosophy.

Although ethics has always been viewed as a branch of philosophy, its all-embracing practical nature links it with many other areas of study, including anthropology, biology, history, economics, sociology, politics etc.

It is important to regard ethics as a framework within which we operate in society and the values or principles that society adopts should be applied to all disciplines.

Is there then a conflict between an organization that makes ethically sound decisions and the need to make profit? If one takes the view that the output of an organization may affect people or society in general, then are not the people or society customers of the organization? If they are regarded as customers, then there need not be a conflict between meeting their needs and achieving profit. Of course there may be instances when sound ethical decisions may conflict with the interests of certain customers, in which case the management must make a judgment on the long-term effects of their decision.

It is interesting to note that the Business Excellence model has a separate category in the assessment of results for the organization’s impact on society. This implies that the immediate customers of the organization are not the only ones whose needs must be catered for.

Text 12

Read the text and explain what multiculturalism is and how it affects state policies.

Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism relates to communities containing multiple cultures. The term is used in two broad ways, either descriptively or normatively. As a descriptive term, it usually refers to the simple fact of cultural diversity: it is generally applied to the demographic make-up of a specific place, sometimes at the organizational level, e.g. schools, businesses, neighborhoods, cities, or nations. As a normative term, it refers to ideologies or policies that promote this diversity or its institutionalization. In this sense, multiculturalism is a society “at ease with the rich tapestry of human life and the desire amongst people to express their own identity in the manner they see fit.”

Two different and seemingly inconsistent strategies have developed through different Government policies and strategies. The first focuses on interaction and communication between different cultures. (Such approaches are also often known as interculturalism.) The second centers on diversity and cultural uniqueness. A common aspect of many policies following the second approach is that they avoid presenting any specific ethnic, religious, or cultural community values as central.

Multiculturalism is often contrasted with the concepts of assimilationism and has been described as a “salad bowl” or “cultural mosaic” rather than a “melting pot.”

The term multiculturalism is most often used in reference to Western nation-states, which had seemingly achieved a de facto single national identity during the 18th and/or 19th centuries. Multiculturalism has been an official policy in several Western nations since the 1970s, for reasons that varied from country to country, including the fact that many of the great cities of the Western world are increasingly made of a mosaic of cultures.

Many nation-states in Africa, Asia, and the Americas are culturally diverse, and are “multicultural” in a descriptive sense. In some, communalism is a major political issue. The policies adopted by these states often have parallels with multiculturalist policies in the Western world, but the historical background is different, and the goal may be a mono-cultural or mono-ethnic nation-building.