centercenterWork in Thought and Action
Business ethics and csr
Phuong Nguyen
8820090900Work in Thought and Action
Business ethics and csr
Phuong Nguyen
I. Preface
In the spring of 2018, I had the chance to intern at Europe Economics, an economic consulting firm. The company was founded in 1998 by Dermot Glynn, former Managing Director of NERA, former Chief Economist of KPMG, former Economic Director of the CBI, and a member of the Department of Applied Economics at Cambridge University. The company is a small-sized firm, with a total of 15 members of staff in the main office, and 10 members work remotely. Being a consulting firm, Europe Economics specializes in economics regulation, competition policy, and the application of economics to public and business policy issues. The company believes that economic analysis can be applied productively to a wide range of business and public policy challenges. The practice is, therefore, organized around a number of broad themes with general relevance. The company has been in the consulting business for 20 years, considered as one of the most reliable private consulting agencies in London, UK.
Because of the flexibility in consulting directions, Europe Economics attracts a wide range of clients. The company often works with government departments and economic regulators, such as European Commission (EC) and the European Parliament. In the field of economic regulation, the issues that the company is frequently called upon to assess include price setting, cost of capital, cost modelling, and the design of public policies. Europe Economics also works with private companies, law firms, charitable bodies, and research institutions. Through the numerous assignments in diversified fields of economics, the company has gained extensive knowledge in communications, defense, energy, financial services, healthcare, retails, and transport industry.
My main duty in the office, being a consultant intern, was to do a lot of background research and market analysis on different topics of economics and regulation. For the first month of my internship, the task that I was usually assigned to was literature review, to construct research backgrounds for multiple projects. The fields that I worked with were diverse, expanding from energy, resource management, sustainability products, to insurance and credit loans. After the first month, the works that I was requested to do built up to be more complicated, with the most difficult assignment to be participating in constructing a computational model that processes liquidity and solvency data to assess the profitability and risk of businesses. The task remained the most challenging work I had to experience during my time in the internship, which took me 3 weeks to be able to finish it. Other than the works that relating to economics, I also had the chance to apply my knowledge in Data Analysis to the job, specifically with the project on Loan Syndication. I had the opportunity to perform a wide range of market research on the secondary market of government loan syndication, as well as extract and process the database on companies and loans. Overall, the internship, in the academic aspect, was a beneficial and ever-changing learning experience.
My motivation for the final paper came at the end of the first month of my internship. After having participated in 4 different projects, I noticed that companies and corporations now are putting more attention into the ethical prospect of their businesses. While the main emphasis of the consulting reports was on the qualitative and quantitative analysis and assessment of the companies’ economic issues, business ethics, especially ethical marketing, has been an emerging concern of firms and corporations. Whether you want to impose a new policy, or expand your business to a new market, the element of ethics and social impacts plays an important role in determining the success of the business model. I found this aspect of business really interesting, and therefore wanted to develop a paper that introduces, examines, and explores the concepts of ethical business, ethical marketing, and social purpose corporation.
II. Introduction
Business Ethics blah blah blah. Throw 1 or 2 statistics in, throw in a quote. Shape theo ý t??ng là c?a paragraph này là the role of business ethics in the modern world.
The first paragraph is going to be about the importance of business ethics in the current world, the situation that we are going through, the needs for corporate social responsibility to operate.
III. Business Ethics – An Overview
Ethics, as defined in Merriam-Wester (2014), is “rules of behavior based on ideas about what is morally good and bad.” People have varying concepts of what is considered right or wrong or good and bad. For this reason, ethics becomes difficult to define and comply with (De Cremer ; de Bettignies, 2013). Oates and Dalmau (2013) define ethics as “the body of knowledge that deals with the study of universal principles that determine right from wrong” (p.38). Racelis (2010) further explains that ethics is different from morality in that while morality deals with the principles of right and wrong in general, ethics focuses on the standards of conduct that are generally acceptable to a large group.
Therefore, it is important to note, that ethical behavior focuses on what is good for others rather than on what is good for oneself. Mihelic, Lipicnik, and Tekavcic (2010) add to this definition noting that “ethical behavior is both legally and morally acceptable to the larger community” (p. 32). Business ethics, therefore, is a branch of applied ethics as it relates to the various business activities of human beings (Keller-Krawczyk, 2010). Being able to understand and implement good ethical principles into the business setting is key to developing a strong organizational culture nurtured by ethical principles.