Privacy, Trust, and Business Ethics for Mobile Business Social Networks

New information and communication technologies and their integration extend possibilities for high-level human collaboration. Various groups of people can come together according to their private or business interests forming a virtual community through social networks. However, in addition to the positive effects of this technical breakthrough there are dangerous potential side effects using these high-level networked systems; the sensitive personal or business data can be misused. Therefore, privacy has an increasingly important role in social networks and is becoming a significant area related to business ethics taking into consideration the close connection between trust and privacy. The goal of this chapter is to discuss the role and relationships between trust and privacy in mobile (business) social networks and to introduce the possible types of privacy threats and countermeasures in case of online social networks. A short summary on future trends in mobile social networks is also presented.

The Starbucks Culture

Bombarded with reports of immoral corporate performances, many have become convinced that ethical companies are history. CEOs, facing narrow performance windows, often feel pressured to adopt a hit-and-run mentality, thereby contaminating their entire corporate culture. Yet, there are companies that continue to outperform their competitors and redefine their industries, while simultaneously following a strict moral compass. One such company is the Starbucks Corporation, entailing 18,000 stores worldwide, of which approximately 13,000 are in North America. Starbucks directly supervises 5,500 coffeehouses in 61 countries. After a successful expansion into China, Starbucks is now moving into India. Nonetheless, the coffee giant continues to make the list of the world's most ethical companies for good reasons. This case reviews Starbucks's internal and external culture, examining its partner treatment, environmental awareness, farmer support, stakeholder inclusion, and other revolutionary strategies, in hopes to have these elements serve as focus points for current and future leaders.

Techniques for Preparing Business Students to Contribute to Ethical Organizational Cultures

This chapter distinguishes among four corporate cultures with respect to ethics—cultures of defiance, compliance, neglect, and character—and outlines a plan for constructing an ethical organizational culture. Some proven ideas are then shared for showing business students how to contribute to such a culture. These include (a) describing how to establish an effective learning context for teaching about business ethics, (b) offering a number of practical suggestions for student assignments and experiences that can empower students to understand, appreciate, and contribute to ethical organizational cultures, and (c) explaining how to enhance experiential learning by conducting an effective debriefing session. The chapter concludes with three examples from the authors' experience illustrating how these ideas can be incorporated into programs designed to teach business students how to contribute to organizational cultures grounded in moral character.

Globally Responsible Management Education

Responsible management education is a crucial step in shaping our common future. This chapter reviews how the Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME) offers a platform for institutional commitment and leadership engagement toward business ethics and poverty alleviation. Specifically, this work critically analyzes the challenges and opportunities in adopting the educational principles for practical outcomes in the context of other trends in socially responsible global engagement. Through a review of the institutional trends in relation to PRME, the authors offer practical opportunities for curricula development, academic engagement, and ethical education for the 21st Century.

Business Ethics, Strategy, and Organizational Integrity

With a focus on the role of integrity in relation to business ethics versus economic strategy, this chapter contains following sections: 1) the concept of organizational integrity as a moral notion as it is described in the work of Lynn-Sharp Paine on organizational integrity, 2) the concept of integrity as an economic notion as it is described in the recent work of Michael Jensen—this section discusses recent efforts in the business economics literature to consider integrity as an important notion of strategy—, 3) Paine contra Jensen: a virtue or a workability concept of integrity—here, the authors discuss the basic dilemmas and problems of integrating integrity, economic performance, and strategy in the perspective of the two theories about integrity of Paine and Jensen.

Game-Theoretic Insights Concerning Key Business Ethics Issues Occurring in Emerging Economies

This chapter identifies some game-theoretic insights concerning several key issues of business ethics typically occurring in emerging economies. The chapter explicates four elements in this sequence: nature of game theory, characteristics of emerging economies, fundamentals of business ethics, and key business ethics issues. The chapter emphasizes useful insights of game theory rather than undertaking formal modeling (examples are noted in references). Game theory assists reasoning about strategic scenarios for businesses. A multinational entity operates within layers of institutions and norms from the international to the national and sub-national levels. Such institutions and norms help structure the complex environment within which a multinational entity operates. The approach in this chapter is to inquire into certain specific decision scenarios available in the extant literature as instances of important classes of decision problems and to suggest game-theoretic responses. These scenarios concern long-term sustainable business models, corporate values, and corporate reputation.

Facilitating Trust

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is highly valuable for transnational corporations, but entails special requirements of heightened honesty in the marketing of CSR as compared to other goods and services. Because trust is essential to communicating the value of CSR effectively, companies must attend to the unique benefits and challenges that online communication of CSR commitments pose. While the Internet is ideal in allowing for global reach and greater capacity than the confines of standard advertisements, the Internet also poses special challenges in terms of facilitating trust with consumers and other stakeholders. This chapter highlights both the problems and benefits of marketing good corporate conduct online and provides moral guidelines for marketers of good corporate conduct.

Ethical Healthiness

This chapter proposes that learning improvements in organizations are not just a matter of techniques or aptitudes but are concerned with feelings, attitudes, and, above all, the moral habits of their members. This work suggests complementing currently established conceptions of knowledge management and organizational learning through the explicit inclusion of ethics and ethical learning in organizations. The study describes the explicit need to consider ethics and ethical learning competence among agents in a learning organization context. It then points out the differences between ethically healthy organizations and ethically unhealthy organizations. Finally, the authors argue that the ethical healthiness of an organization is an essential, structural, and necessary condition to achieve a comprehensive learning process in learning organizations on both a technical and human level.

Identifying Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Curricula of Leading U.S. Executive MBA Programs

Our society has witnessed large enterprises collapse from a disregard for Corporate Social Responsibilities (CSR) and illegal and unethical comportments. This chapter provides an understanding of the basic concepts of CSR in the context of lawful and ethical responsibilities, while recognizing the power of CSR branding. Moreover, in accordance with the theory that higher education can elevate the importance of CSR strategies, it reports the results from a qualitative content analysis study identifying explicit and implicit inclusions of CSR, law, and ethics in course titles and descriptions from 20 leading Executive Master of Business Administration (MBA) programs at institutions of higher education in the United States. The results report that while law and ethics are commonly part of the reviewed Executive MBA programs, CSR has minimal representation in these programs.

Ethics for Students Means Knowing and Experiencing

There is growing interest in ethics education and the literature is replete with methods for approaching this complex and challenging subject. This chapter reviews the state of ethics education in business programs from infusion across the curriculum to standalone courses, the potential impact it may have on ethical behavior, and outlines several approaches to addressing ethics in the classroom. An instructional module in ethical decision making, grounded in scholarly literature, is presented. The authors discuss implications for practice and suggest utilizing several approaches from multiple perspectives to facilitate the development of ethical thought and action.