How to Write An Essay on Business Ethics Text

Jonathan Friesen - Writing Coach

Use an internet search engine to query articles relating to business ethics and read as many as you can. Having a general idea of what business ethics involve will help you formulate a plan of an outline. With your research, pick three or four areas of business ethics that are the most interesting to you. For example, you may find corporate scandals, management decision making and core business values most intriguing. You'll have an easier time writing your essay if you choose subject matter that has meaning to you. Your outline will consist of an opening and closing paragraph, along with a paragraph on each of your topics of interest. Write a rough draft of the opening paragraph defining business ethics and gaining the reader's interest.

The goal of the opening paragraph is to make the reader want to continue reading. Depending on the required length of your paper, you may need more than one paragraph per area. If there isn't enough information in one article to write a paragraph on, consider finding another article.

Your closing paragraph on business ethics should bring your essay together, summarizing your positions and emphasizing your key points. Finish off your essay with style by making a strong statement to close your paper. It's amazing the small mistakes you can miss even after editing your paper several times.

Dated back to code of hammurabi some 4,0 years ago, business ethics is a social science, whose main aim is to define and examine the responsibilities of businesses and their agents as a part of the general moral environment of a given society. The products of this field of research are sets of rules and codes of conducts, which serve as a means of protection from the possible infringements of moral codes as a result from the general activities and responsibilities of a firm to its stakeholders e.g. This paper will briefly explain the foundations and the growing importance of business ethics in today’s economy. In its simplest sense, the field of business ethics represents the meeting point between ethics and business, where business decisions and their implementation are evaluated in terms of the right moral and wrong immoral.

Master Thesis Business Strategy

However, ethical decision making is far from being simple, as is involves much greater complexity and debate trevino amp brown, 2004 than other ethical fields, even complicated ones such as bioethics. The main reason for this confusion is not only the themes of business ethics, but the difficulty to recognize the relevance of ethics to the business decision in question. For example, corporate governance standards are closely related to ethics, but the weight of the latter in the spectrum of this field which also involves financial, legal and other issues is not always clear, especially when ethical standards collide with other customs. Thus, it is better to define business ethics through the types of responsibilities it does and does not deal with. Corporate governance, the business ethics school will emphasize the moral underpinnings of the matter and will support the decisions and actions only from those perspectives.

Finally, ethics differ from law by the sense that not everything that is legal is also moral. For instance, although it is legal for a company to pollute to environment to some extent, many would argue that pollution is inherently immoral and hence unethical. As mentioned earlier, issues of business ethics have a long history, and are thoroughly referred to in civilian and religious writings. Throughout the various forms of commerce, matters such as competition, accurate reporting and pricing to name a few are part of all major transcripts, including aristotle, the old testament, the koran and even appear in buddhist writings. However, this interest in business ethics has grown significantly during the 20th century, reaching a peak today due to several main reasons: first and foremost is the unique role of corporations in the modern society. This form of business, whose economic and social power may be immense and involves numerous stakeholders, motivated further thinking regarding the means in which possible negative influence of corporations can be restricted.

Second, a wave of corporate scandals, involving cases of fraud, negligence and immoral marketing methods has increased the attention to companies’ internal affairs, in particular their agents. This was due to the explosions of scandals such as enron and worldcom as well as a growing interest in corporate affairs in hollywood, leading to blockbusters such as wall street, quiz show, the insider and jerry maguire. Third, a new wing of economic and legislative thinking in all fields of ethics e.g. In medicine and environmental issues has also transformed the line of thought towards businesses, from perceiving them as mechanisms for creating value to active members of the society with individual sets of responsibilities. As the theoretical and practical efforts in the field of business ethics surround virtually all aspects of business conduct, there is also a great variety within this science. Some of the main issues that occupy business ethics scholars are: social responsibility: different circles of stakeholders can be defined for any given business. This may include not only the owners, managers and employees, but also customers, inhabitants in the firm’s region, the government and the environment.

A comprehensive ethical thinking applies that those stakeholders should be identified and their well being should be promoted, or at least not infringed, by the firm’s operations. Individual ethical behavior: decision making of the firm’s agents should be examined in the light of ethical standards, regardless of the firm’s stated policies. For example, a company may have very high marketing ethics standards, but the latter become obsolete when individual salespersons engage in ethically questionable behavior. Moral behavior in the face of immoral environment: a significant test for the firm’s ethical behavior is the nature of business transactions when the environment does not enforce high standards, thus enables ethically questionable and maybe more profitable conduct.

Retrieved 16 july, 2009 from the editors of the business ethics journal review hope that bejr provides good examples of how to write a critical essay. Each of the commentaries we publish is a short critical essay aimed at a single paper published in another scholarly journal. In each of the responses we publish, the author whose work was critiqued in one of our commentaries gets a chance to defend or clarify his or her thinking. If you read a commentary and response, you will see accomplished scholars professors and occasionally phd students in the field of business ethics applying their expertise. And remember: such scholars got to where they are today not just by being smart, and by knowing a lot about business ethics, but by being good at writing clearly and convincingly. you can learn a lot from them! here is some advice for writing critical essays, in business ethics but also in other fields.

Buy Research Paper Plagiarism