Credibility Crises

Jerry Michalski's list: The years 2001 and 2002 were bad ones for a wide variety of institutions, from Enron to the Catholic Church. This year hasn't started any better.

Richard Nielsen studies corruption.

Business Ethics

• Defense Industry Initiatives On Business Ethics (1986): 46 vendors confessed voluntarily to fraud/waste. 39 of that group were shortly afterward investigated for abuses they failed to report
  • Paranoid perspective - maybe they were being punished for Co Operation!
• 1991 poll of Canadian office workers by LouisHarris found largest single source of job dissatisfaction was bad ethics.
• Business School involvement
  • Amitai Etzioni article - Debates continued over whether ethics should be a required course or a separate elective or, alternatively, whether the topic should be integrated into all classes. A member of the Marketing department mused that if the latter policy were adopted, his department would have to close because much of what it was teaching constituted a form of dissembling: selling small items in large boxes, putting hot colors on packages because they encourage people to buy impulsively, and so forth. A finance professor was also concerned about its effects on his teaching. Students later told me that they learned in his course how you could make a profit by breaking implicit contracts.
  • weeding out bad apples: 1 and 2
  • http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/jan2003/nf20030117_2368.htm
  • http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/jan2003/nf20030117_3119.htm