ABSTRACT
Past literature exploring the impact of culture on ethical decision making in businesses has mostly relied on the use of a somewhat ‘stable’ concept of national culture. National cultures have been related to ethical preferences and countries have been ranked as being high or low on the ethicality index as a function of their national cultures. In this chapter, we use a very different approach to culture. The Douglasian Cultural Theory (CT) treats culture as being dynamic and constantly evolving. We offer CT as an alternative approach to make sense of the diversity and dynamicity of ethical preferences. Using examples from the European business world, we demonstrate that every social system is made up of four dynamic cultures, each of which has different underlying value systems, different rationalities and hence different ethical preferences. Since these four cultural groups coexist in every social system, including nations and continents, we question the credibility of past research that categorizes entire nations on ethical rankings. Through the use of CT, we attempt to go beyond the unity versus infinity dilemma in the ethics discourse.
