Abstract
We analyze ethical policies of firms in industrialized countries and try to find out whether culture is a factor that plays a significant role in explaining country differences. We look into the firm’s human rights policy, its governance of bribery and corruption, and the comprehensiveness, implementation and communication of its codes of ethics. We use a dataset on ethical policies of almost 2,700 firms in 24 countries. We find that there are significant differences among ethical policies of firms headquartered in different countries. When we associate these ethical policies with Hofstede’s cultural indicators, we find that individualism and uncertainty avoidance are positively associated with a firm’s ethical policies, whereas masculinity and power distance are negatively related to these policies.
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Acknowledgements
We wish to thank EIRIS for sharing their data with us. We are very grateful to IMUG – Hannover (Germany) for discussing the EIRIS database. We especially want to thank Silke Riedel and Kirein Franck. EIRIS nor IMUG can be held responsible for the analysis we conduct on the basis of their data. Furthermore, we thank several participants of the international workshop on CSR at London Metropolitan University, October 2005, and of on Business Ethics at the Freie Universität Berlin, May 2006, as well as the participants in research seminars at the University of Groningen. Especially, we acknowledge the help and useful suggestions of Johanna Fernholm, Lise-Lotte Lindfelt, and Elmer Sterken. However, only the authors are responsible for all interpretations and conclusions as well as for all remaining errors and omissions.
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Bert Scholtens received his Ph.D. at the Universtiy of Amsterdam. Since 1999 he has been working at the Department of Finance of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. His research particularly looks into the interaction between financial institutions and corporate social responsibility. He has published in, among others, Ecological Economics, Journal of Banking and Finance, Finance Letters, Journal of Investing, Sustainable Development, and Journal of Business Ethics. Lammertjan Dam is a Ph.D. student at the Universtiy of Groningen. He expects to defend his thesis about the integration of corporate social responsibility in economic valuation in Summer 2007.
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Scholtens, B., Dam, L. Cultural Values and International Differences in Business Ethics. J Bus Ethics 75, 273–284 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-006-9252-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-006-9252-9