Welcome to Global Business Ethics and Corporate Responsibility. I'm Patricia Werhane, I'm an adjunct professor in the School of Business Administration at the University of Illinois, Professor of Merita at DePaul University in Chicago and Professor of Merita at University of Virginia. We want to welcome you to this course and I hope you enjoy it. In the first half of this course, as you know, you learned about culture and how culture stamps meaning in markets. In this part of the course, you're going to learn how ethics is part of and shapes commerce, offered within a particular social/cultural or religious context, but often affecting judgments more globally. Ethics and responsibility are embedded in conference. Business ethics and corporate responsibility are part of it, they're inherent in it. You can't separate them out. The reason is that commerce has to do with markets, and markets have to do with people, and really relationships between people. Indeed, it'll be weird if they didn't because then you wouldn't have any customers, you wouldn't have any employees, you wouldn't have any suppliers, you wouldn't have any owners or shareholders, it wouldn't have any managers, it would not be commerce at all. So, it matters then how we treat each other, and it matters how organizations treat each other. It's very important. When we fail to treat people and businesses with respect and think about their rights, it's not only a moral failure is a market failure. So, we can't escape moral obligations in commerce unless we escape commerce altogether. Now, business ethics. What is that? Well, it's the study of how ethics and business are connected and is the analysis of ethical decision-making on three levels: between individuals, individuals and organizations, organizations between each other, and of course, the political/economic systems in which they operate. Now, business ethics is both normative and descriptive. By descriptive it describes, it tells stories about individuals and corporate behavior. That's easy. But it also evaluates these practices and suggest what companies and their managers ought to do. Doesn't mean they always do it as you go, but it's that thinking that is the core of business ethics. So, ethics creates the foundations for corporate responsibility. Corporate social responsibility and corporate citizenship. One often confuses business ethics with corporate responsibility. They are the same but sometimes corporate social responsibility has to do with philanthropy, and defines corporate and other business responsibilities to the communities in which they operate. That's important. Corporate citizenship, how am I a good citizen? Where I'm operating is also important, but business ethics has to do also with the interrelationships between the company and all it's stakeholders, it's employees, it's customers, it's managers, it's suppliers, it's owners. So, that's why business ethics is more than just corporate/social responsibility, it's also internal responsibility as well. Now, businesses have responsibilities to obey the law obviously. But the question is are there any exceptions? What about a country that condones slave or young child labor? What about a country that tolerates human rights violations? Some companies won't even do business in those countries. Some companies do, and then how does that work out? So, ethics is not merely compliance with the law, many companies but not all, have compliance officers and these are people that tell you what the law is and make sure everyone in the company is obeying the law. That's great, we need that. But ethics also goes beyond that and has to do with the organization ought to do in addition to it's legal mandates. Now, what are the course goals here? I'm hoping you'll each develop moral sensitivity to ethical issues in commerce. I want you to be able to identify ethical issues, kind of getting a smell test for ethical issues in global business. I want you to best your stakeholder analysis. Who affects and who is affected by the company. I want you to be able to address issues from more than one point of view. We often look at the world from our point of view which is great, but I want us to be able to think about sort of out of the box if you like. How does it look from other points of view even if we disagree with it? Then the key to this, I want everyone to develop a well reasoned process to think through moral decision-making and to evaluate good arguments and weak arguments and be able to defend your conclusions. So the course materials, we're going have a lot of case studies from global business, we're going to have lectures, clearly discussion board and weekly written assignments and quizzes. So, what is the takeaway? I've one takeaway from the course. One thing I want you to be able to do, I want you to be able to use a framework for moral decision-making that you can use in wherever you go and whatever ethical dilemmas you face, because you will face them, we all do. I just can't predict what they are. So, I want to give you a tool to think through those and I hope that will be worthwhile. Thank you.
