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Even if there were widespread cross-cultural agreement on the normative issues of business ethics, corporate ethics management initiatives (e.g., codes of conduct, ethics telephone lines, ethics offices) which are appropriate in one cultural setting still could fail to mesh with the management practices and cultural characteristics of a different setting. By uncritically adopting widely promoted American practices for managing corporate ethics, multinational businesses risk failure in pursuing the ostensible goals of corporate ethics initiatives. Pursuing shared ethical goals by means of culturally inappropriate management practices, in short, can undermine the effectiveness of ethics management efforts. This article explicates how several important dimensions of culture can influence the effectiveness of common ethics initiatives, and recommends the development and application of a culture-structure contingency analysis in the task of encouraging ethical behavior in global businesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information on a study which examined the cross-sectional effects and longitudinal trends of cultural cognition in international business (IB) research. An intriguing thesis of comparative management proposes that cultures incorporate different frameworks that guide both abstract ideas of rationality and intelligibility and hence, the interpretation of empirical reality. There are suggestions that cultural cognition occurs in academia for example, scholars from different nations interpret the same thesis differently. The desirability of creativity, innovation and responsiveness in IB research spurs to identify cultural preferences for cognitive schemas so that one can better address how cross-cultural synergy works and thus how to determine the components of the mixture. Interpreting culture as a cognitive phenomenon shifts emphasis in assessing culture from latent values to that of a socially constructed ontology of rationalized ideologies, interests, and ideas. Analysis found that lB scholars' interpretative frameworks varied in terms of types and properties for all levels of culture. Student t-tests and ANOVA found intriguing patterns of cross-cultural cognitive convergence and divergence.

This empirical study of Fortune 1000 firms assesses the degree to which those firms have adopted various practices associated with corporate ethics programs. The study examines the following aspects of formalized corporate ethics activity: ethics-oriented policy statements; formalization of management responsibilities for ethics; free-standing ethics offices; ethics and compliance telephone reporting/ advice systems; top management and departmental involvement in ethics activities; usage of ethics training and other ethics awareness activities; investigatory functions; and evaluation of ethics program activities. Results show a high degree of corporate adoption of ethics policies, but wide variability in the extent to which these policies are implemented by various supporting structures and managerial activities. In effect, the vast majority of firms have committed to the low cost, possibly symbolic side of ethics management (e.g., adoption of ethics codes and policies, etc.). But firms differ substantially in their efforts to see that those policies or codes actually are put into practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research on ethics codes has suggested, but rarely tested, the effects of code design alternatives on the impact of codes. This study considers whether the presence of explanatory rationales and descriptions of sanctions in ethics codes affects recipients' responses to a code. Theories of organizational justice and persuasive communication support an expectation that rationales and sanctions will be positively related to code recipients' recall of code content and perceptions of organizational justice. Content recall is an obvious precondition of code compliance; justice perceptions have multiple implications for the attitudes and actions of organizational members. Results show that explanatory rationales are associated with a statistically significant increase in perceptions of organizational procedural justice, but that rationales and sanctions generally show no relationship to distributive justice perceptions and accurate content recall. These results suggest that common prescriptions regarding ethics code design are of uncertain value apart from further research which unearths the relationships among the intended and perceived purposes of codes, the organizational settings in which they are applied, and a wide variety of code designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]