Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility

The variety of values and customs strongly affects the behaviours considered to be morally acceptable, the motivations to behave ethically, and the types of control that a company can legitimately exercise over its employees. This chapter displays the benchmarks within which ethical approaches make sense in different cultures, both for company employees and for external stakeholders. First, the cultural embeddedness of social responsibility issues is examined with a focus on the differences between the approaches that prevail in France and in the United States. In the second part, the question of corruption is addressed through an Argentinian case. It is further developed by scrutinizing the differences between cultures in which an ethic of respect for principles prevails and those in which an ethic of loyalty towards relatives and friends is favoured.