Chapter 3: Corruption, Globalisation and Business Ethics: A Metatheoretical Approach

Corruption is a prominent aspect of local, regional and global commercial activity. It takes many forms and has been researched from many different perspectives (Vardi & Weitz, 2004). There are also important ethical issues involved in the engagement between local communities and businesses and the powerful forces of economic and cultural globalisation. Without an improvement in the general level of ethical business practice, it is hard to see how global commerce can contribute to a truly sustainable world economy. This is a complex encounter and it will have immense implications for the sustainable development of both local and global communities. In terms of conventional approaches to business ethics these types of issues have been contextualised with contesting ethical positions such as essentialism or universalism on the one hand and situational ethics or relativism on the other. Such characterisations have not been useful in developing a more general approach to describing a global business ethics. Such debates have not resolved this dilemma because shared ethical principals and situational contingencies are inherent in every decision-making process that has some ethical dimension. A new and more integrative way of seeing the relationship between the local and the global, the personal and the public and the universal and the particular nature of ethical standards and corruption This chapter contributes to vision building in this area by offering a metatheoretical framework for considering economic globalisation and corruption in the context of global business ethics.