Literature review on the ethics and social responsibility of an organisation.

Essay by summer October 2004

download word file, 3 pages 4.3

Downloaded 160 times

Literature Review on Ethics and Social Responsibility of an Organization

Today's society is primarily based upon performance and profit and a hunger to achieve

success at an increasing rate, therefore it is not odd to discover that it is essential to instill

a sense of social responsibility into any organization.

Throughout the centuries people were trying to choose between profit and moral. Perhaps some of them obtain both, but every time it was achieved it could have aroused another ethical issue. Those issues concern fairness, justice, rightness or wrongness; as a result, it can only be resolved according to ethical standards.

With this in mind we can ask several questions. Who are they hungry for? Who benefits from their thoughtlessness? And even more significantly who is to blame when things don't go according to plan? These are all questions asked constantly in organizations; questions that often seem to include the word 'ethics' in their answer.

Ethics can be defined as a process of evaluating actions according to moral principal of

values as was defined by (A. Alhemoud) but I personally believe that ethics is an

individuals personal beliefs regarding right and wrong behaviour. One could argue that an organization has no morals or even a concept of the word, it is only as moral and ethical as the employees that work within it. It is said that setting the ethical standards of the way of doing business in any organization is primarily the task of management.

Taking the example of the of the Enron scandal where it was alleged that the auditing company Arthur Anderson had shredded documents and deleted files in order to conceal that Enron was falsifying claims of huge profits when in actuality they were on the verge of bankruptcy. It would have been difficult to find...