DO BUSINESS ETHICS REALLY MATTER?

Abstract

There are few people today who would dare to say that business and ethics are incompatible forces. This was not the case so very long ago. Despite this shift, the recent spate of spectacular business collapses would seem to suggest that there is still a lag between the values being espoused by today’s business leaders, and the resources allocated to ensuring the ethical imperative is embedded in day-to-day decision-making.

This paper seeks to present an overview of where the business ethics debate sits today and how this relates to the current state of ethical play in the oil and gas industry. It reviews the major forces pushing ethics up the corporate agenda and seeks to build the business case for why attention to business ethics will improve overall organisational performance. It does this by reviewing the new business philosophies of sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR) and argues that these new business doctrines can be seen as essentially applied ethical practices and present the greatest opportunity to date for embedding the ethical imperative in organisational life.

The author argues that historically it has been the oil and gas industries that have been the first to recognise the interdependence of business ethics and organisational performance and that it is these industries have now moved into stage two phase of sustainability development where they are focussing their efforts on embedding the ethical perspective into their day-to-day performance management systems.