Global Business and Ethics

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Thank you for posting today. It is my goal to provide ideas, definitions, research help, and instructions on how you, the student, should approach the assignment.

I think the easiest example to discuss would be Google. I've written on this topic, myself, and I think it will provide you the easiest approach. Google has been the focus of criticism when it comes to their Privacy Policy and censorship of content, most notably in China.

a) Compare the cross-cultural ethical perspectives of the issue.

"Acknowledging China's growing influence in the political and economic arenas, Kirk Hanson, executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, and Mary Szto, visiting professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law, jointly tackled how Western companies can cope with the ethical challenges of doing business in China at a forum sponsored by the Ethics Center April 10, 2006.

Many companies feel they are forced to choose between tolerating practices that go against highly regarded principles and completely boycotting markets in countries like China. Hanson likened this struggle to the "South African dilemma," where U.S. firms debated pulling out or staying and working for change.

Recently put in the spotlight for agreeing to censor search results in China, Google reasoned that even adhering to the Asian superpower's free-speech restrictions, it could still provide better access to information for the Chinese people. On the other hand, critics believed that by giving in to China's demands, U.S. companies like Google are not left with much bargaining power.

"For every Western company going into a developing country, there is a fundamental dilemma - [is] it better to be there in order to influence and liberalize, or is it better to isolate them in order to put pressure on them to change," Hanson said.

Ethical challenges

Apart from censorship of media, the emerging superpower has also been criticized by the international community for bribery and corruption, substandard working conditions, and intellectual property violations. To concretize the severity of the situation, Hanson cited these figures: Roughly 85 to 90 percent of the software used in China is pirated, and ...