Organizational Ethics Programs and the Need for Stakeholder Discourse

Abstract

More than ever, businesses are called upon to manage organizational ethics programs. There are, as of yet, no internationally accepted guidelines for doing so. Some find in the U.S. Federal SentencingGuidelines a framework that fits this need (Palmer & Zakhem, 2001;Izraeli & Schwartz, 1998;Jackson, 1997) . As they stand, the Guidelines offer little insight as to what constitutes "ethical conduct." This in itself is not a problem. Indeed, the question of what business ethics demand is for the most part an "open" question and one that should be regularly revisited to better understand andproperly act on changing stakeholder demands (Freeman, 2008