Ethical problems of organizations.

Essay by tamayouUniversity, Bachelor's November 2005

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Most of this chapter focuses more on company's disasters than typical ethical issues within companies. According to this chapter "business wasn't always as complex as it is today". (pg.195)Today, big companies have many stakeholders. Stakeholders are "consumers, customers, employees, shareholders and the community."(pg 197)In fact, some of these stakeholders can affect or be affected by business decisions. So any bad decisions a company makes affect its stakeholders as we are going to see in the following cases.

With the collapse of Enron many of the stakeholders suffered the consequences of bad decisions made by the company. For instance, employee's retirement savings were wiped out and thousands of jobs were lost. In the case of Enron not just the employees suffered but also the U.S economy. "The Enron debacle cost the U.S. economy $35 billion."(pg.194)So what really happened at Enron? Enron, through a variety of accounting tricks relating to partnerships, inflated their profits and lowered their debt.

They misled their employees, investors and the general public about the company's financial condition. In fact, According to this chapter employees or stakeholders have the right to be informed about the true financial condition of their company. But in this case Enron failed to tell the truth about its financial performance.

Another case that is mention in this chapter is about the Johnson and Johnson Company. "In the year 2000 J&J pleaded guilty to criminal charges and had to pay millions of dollars in fines for selling defective glucose-monitoring devices to diabetics."(pg.203)In this case J& J failed to provide safe products to the consumers. According to this chapter companies are obligated to produce products that are safe for consumers. If a company fails to provide safe products, it can put the company out of business. So, J&J didn't consider the long term consequences when...