Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Professor Stewart Clegg
Full text for this publication is not currently held within this repository. Alternative links are provided below where available.
Ethical codes have been hailed as an explicit vehicle for achieving more sustainable and defensible organizational practice. Nonetheless, when legal compliance and corporate governance codes are conflated, codes can be used to define organizational interests ostentatiously by stipulating norms for employee ethics. Such codes have a largely cosmetic and insurance function, acting subtly and strategically to control organizational risk management and protection. In this paper, we conduct a genealogical discourse analysis of a representative code of ethics from an international corporation to understand how management frames expectations of compliance. Our contribution is to articulate the problems inherent in codes of ethics, and we make some recommendations to address these to benefit both an organization and its employees. In this way, we show how a code of ethics can provide a foundation for ethical sustainability, while addressing management intentions and employees’ ethical satisfaction.
Author(s): Adelstein J, Clegg SR
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Journal of Business Ethics
Year: 2015
Online publication date: 21/02/2015
Acceptance date: 13/02/2015
ISSN (print): 0167-4544
ISSN (electronic): 1573-0697
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10551-015-2581-9
DOI: 10.1007/s10551-015-2581-9
Altmetrics provided by Altmetric
