ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests the attitudes, values, and norms driven by international business are shaping and transforming religiously based local traditions. The global business ethic has the effect of precipitating or accelerating change in the local religious cultural system. The chapter outlines the global business ethic and indicates some of the forces that have led to its emergence. It reviews the ways in which developments in the Japanese context illustrate complex processes of continuity and change in religious ethical systems as they come to terms, through business life, with a larger community of moral relationships. The first component of the global business ethic requires firms doing business on an international level to avoid complicity in bribery and corruption. The second value of this global business ethic is a commitment to nondiscrimination on the basis of race, religion, ethnicity, and gender in the conduct of business.
