ABSTRACT
Any marketing department is operating in many environments which affect its ability to establish and maintain ethical conduct. These various influences are shown in Figure 4.1.
Terpstra and David (1991) describe the corporate environment as including formal administrative structures such as organization charts and the assignment of authority, responsibility and information flow as well as formal administrative systems such as methods for controlling operations, evaluation and rewards systems, and the corporate culture. Corporate culture is defined by Terpstra and David as, “a learned, relatively enduring interdependent system of meanings that classify, code, prioritize and justify activity both within the organization and toward the external environments it has defined as relevant.” They point out that the symbols and meaning of corporate culture are usually imperfectly shared by organizational members.
