ABSTRACT
Which principles ought to govern business practice? Some contributions in this volume meaningfully address this key question concerning normative business ethics. However, this question brings along another one, which is the key topic of my contribution: How do the principles that ought to govern business practice change? Old debates in political philosophy, starting from de Groot (1625/2002), assume that what ought to govern society is stable or changes very slowly. Empirical observations apparently support this assumption when we examine the evolution of societal values, religions, international relations, etc. Does it apply to business? Empirical observations and the large stream of research on institutional change (for an overview, see Dacin et al. 2002) seem to suggest that the speed of evolution of normative standards for business is more controversial.
