Answer:Signs of the boom are everywhere. Over 500 business-ethics courses are currently taught on American campuses; fully 90% of the nation’s business schools now provide some kind of training in the area. There are more than 25 textbooks in the field and 3 academic journals dedicated to the topic. At least 16 business-ethics research centers are now in operation, and endowed chairs in business ethics have been established at Georgetown, Virginia, Minnesota, and a number of other prominent business schools.
And yet, I suspect that the field of business ethics is largely irrelevant for most managers. It’s not that they are hostile to the idea of business ethics. Recent surveys suggest that over three-quarters of America’s major corporations are actively trying to build ethics into their organizations. Managers would welcome concrete assistance with primarily two kinds of ethical challenges: first, identifying ethical courses of action in difficult gray-area situations (the kind that Harvard Business School Lecturer Joseph L. Badaracco, Jr. has described as “not issues of right versus wrong,” but “conflicts of right versus right”); and, second, navigating those situations where the right course is clear, but real-world competitive and institutional pressures lead even well-intentioned managers astray.
The problem is that the discipline of business ethics has yet to provide much concrete help to managers in either of these areas, and even business ethicists sense it. One can’t help but notice how often articles in the field lament a lack of direction or poor fit with the real ethical problems of real managers. “Business Ethics: Where Are We Going?” asks one title. “Is There No Such Thing as Business Ethics?” wonders another. My personal favorite puts it wryly, “Business Ethics: Like Nailing Jello to a Wall.”
What is the matter with business ethics? And more important, what can be done to make it right? The texts reviewed here shed light on both questions. They point to the gulf that exists between academic business ethics and professional management and suggest that business ethicists themselves may be largely responsible for this gap.
Far too many business ethicists have occupied a rarified moral high ground, removed from the real concerns and real-world problems of the vast majority of managers. They have been too preoccupied with absolutist notions of what it means for managers to be ethical, with overly general criticisms of capitalism as an economic system, with dense and abstract theorizing, and with prescriptions that apply only remotely to managerial practice. Such trends are all the more disappointing in contrast to the success that ethicists in other professions—medicine, law, and government—have had in providing real and welcome assistance to their practitioners.
Does this mean that managers can safely dismiss the enterprise of business ethics? No. In the past year or two, a number of prominent business ethicists have been taking stock of their field from within. Much like managers trying to reengineer their companies’ business processes, they have called for fundamental changes in the way the enterprise of business ethics is conducted. And they are offering some promising new approaches of value to both academic business ethicists and professional managers.
What follows, then, is a guide to business ethics for perplexed managers: why it seems so irrelevant to their problems and how it can be made more useful in the future.
