ABSTRACT
Cosmopolitan business ethics aims at finding responsible principles and values that should guide the actions and strategies of public and private business corporations and organizations. Cosmopolitanism suggests that business ethics must be global. This must be realized in the social responsibility and engagement of business corporations. This chapter distinguishes between different definitions of business ethics and corporate social responsibility (CSR) that circulate around notions of good corporate citizenship, global citizenship, stakeholder management, sustainability and the triple bottom line, corporate social performance, social engagement, and ability to respond to social issues. These approaches to business ethics have a different focus, and they emphasize different dimensions, for example profits, international relations, societal expectations, corporate communications and public relations, voluntary self-regulation of businesses as good citizens, and their good relations with stakeholders. Business ethics is considered by many people as a new discipline in organization and management, but one can also find ethical aspects of the organization theory of earlier times.
