Italian corporate codes of ethics : the influence of national regulatory framework

Abstract

In Italy, as elsewhere, codes of ethics are an integral part of the development of an ethical business behaviour and of a corporate identity and culture. In the present paper, ten codes of ethics adopted by ten large Italian companies active in different sectors are analysed within the theoretical framework of discourse analysis. The scope of this study is to understand whether the selected companies opt for a legalistic or a commitment-oriented code type. The analysis conducted on the collected corpus reveals the presence, or lack of thereof, of the typical traits of the two types both at a macroand a micro-textual level, although a tendency to employ a hybrid code was detected.