ABSTRACT
No one familiar with the international business situation today needs to be told that contemporary issues of ethics and responsibility are complex and critical. They include important issues such as human rights, environmental protection, equal opportunity and pay for women and various disadvantaged minorities, stakeholder rights, and fair competition. These broad issues become instantiated in activities such as using prisoners as workers, moving operations to environmentally less restrictive communities, offering and taking bribes and payoffs, creating environmentally unsound or wasteful products, growing income disparity, malingering harassment, advocating consumerism and closing of economically viable plants in takeover and merger games. Transportation and information technological developments and the concurrent growth of internationalization of business create a complex, high speed business environment that is not very conducive to value debate and the type of value-based decision making that benefits the wider community (see Deetz, 1995a, b; King & Cushman, 1994). Furthermore, the massive growth and consolidation of commercial corporate ownership and sponsorship of mass media can restrict and distort such debates.
