1. Sustainability
1.1. Overview
1.1.1. Ensuring that resources, particularly materials found in mother nature, is being used responsibly allowing the future generation to still have a supply of it, uncompromising.
1.1.2. Results from activities that...
1.1.2.1. Ensure that companies are able to sustain their productive life as well as keeping a great amount of corporate performance.
1.1.2.2. Keeping good welfare for both the current and future generation.
1.1.2.3. Strengthening society's skills in keeping itself protected to find solutions for massive issues.
1.1.2.4. Strengthening the earth's environment where resources can be renewed infinitely and protecting its nature and flora/fauna.
1.2. Current Sustainability Problems
1.2.1. Climate Change
1.2.2. Large corporations extracting raw materials irresponsibly just for their profits.
1.2.3. Deforestation for urbanisation.
1.2.4. Greenhouse Gas Emissions
1.2.5. Water Scarcity
1.2.6. Toxic Waste, Plastic Waste, and E-Waste
1.3. Elon Musk's Solution Towards A Sustainable Future
1.3.1. With the fossil fuel industry being the largest of its kind in the world, Elon Musk, famous billionaire inventor and entrepreneur, has proposed a plan to create a singular but gigantic factory where batteries are produced on a low cost (economies of scale).
1.3.2. The significance of producing this large quantities of batteries eliminates the need to build a power plant for all places including remote villages, as these batteries can be stored near households being charged by solar panels and supplying power to the locals without placing miles amounts of cables for electricity.
1.3.3. Musk added that if the large corporations follow this plan, the steps to transition into a safe future will be shorter.
1.4. Carbon Tax
1.4.1. Defined as an extra amount of tax government charges to corporations when they emit carbon emissions that exceed the limit.
1.4.2. Initiated to influence a cleaner industry and businesses to be greener by looking for ways to limit their use of fossil fuels as much as possible.
1.5. Sustainable Strategic Competitiveness
1.5.1. Companies today develop competitive advantages when they adapt to discover new attributes that allow them to outperform their peers. Today, corporations are also ensuring that sustainability happens to be an attribute that makes them outperform their competitors, as this would influence the industry to be more environmental-friendly, synonymous to Elon Musk's master plan.
1.5.2. Major opportunities for competitive advantage include...
1.5.2.1. Cost and Quality
1.5.2.2. Knowledge and Speed
1.5.2.3. Barriers to Entry
1.5.2.4. Financial Resources
1.5.3. Examples include Aldi making plastic bags obsolete, causing other supermarkets such as Coles and Woolworths to do the same.
2. Social Responsibility
2.1. Overview
2.1.1. Corporate Social responsibility
2.1.1.1. The duty of a corporation to act in methodologies that serve its own and stakeholders' interests.
2.1.2. Organisational Stakeholders
2.1.2.1. Includes government, competitors, shareholders, customers, employees, civil society, suppliers, pressure groups and regulators.
2.1.2.2. Affected by the characteristics of the company and hold a stake in its activities.
2.2. Perspectives on social responsibility
2.2.1. Classical View
2.2.1.1. The only responsibility of management in the company is to earn the most profitability as possible.
2.2.2. Socioeconomic View
2.2.2.1. Rather than just focusing on maximising profits, organisations must be concerned for the broader social welfare.
2.3. Evaluating social performance
2.3.1. Social Audit
2.3.1.1. Systematic assessment of an organisation’s achievements in the aspects of social responsibility.
2.3.2. A formal assessment of corporate social performance might include questions posed at these four levels, which includes...
2.3.2.1. Is economic responsibility met? Is it profitable?
2.3.2.2. Is the legal responsibility met? Does it obey the law?
2.3.2.3. Are ethical responsibilities met? Is it doing the morally-right things?
2.3.2.4. Has the discretionary responsibility be met? Does it contribute to the community?
2.4. Social responsibility strategies
2.4.1. Obstructionist Strategy
2.4.1.1. This strategy fights for social demands and reflects mainly on economic priorities. If the organisation is criticised or caught for any misconduct, the expectation is that it may deny the claims.
2.4.2. Defensive Strategy
2.4.2.1. A defensive strategy seeks to protect the organisation by doing the minimum legally necessary to satisfy expectations. Corporations based on these beliefs complies only to legal requirements, competitive market pressure and perhaps activist voices.
2.4.3. Accommodative Strategy
2.4.3.1. Organisations following an accommodative strategy complies with their social responsibilities. These corporations try to satisfy economic, legal and ethical criteria.
2.4.4. Proactive Strategy
2.4.4.1. Designed to meet all the criteria of social performance, including discretionary performance. Done to avoid adverse social impacts from company activities, and anticipates in identifying emerging social issues.
3. Ethical Behaviour
3.1. How Organisations Can Maintain Ethical Standards
3.1.1. Ethical Role Models
3.1.2. Ethics Training
3.1.3. Codes of Ethics
3.1.4. Codes of Conducts may cover...
3.1.4.1. Discrimination - Forced labour
3.1.4.2. Working conditions
3.1.4.3. Freedom of association
3.2. Whistleblower Protection
3.2.1. Whistleblowers are those who uncover the misconduct of individuals in corporations to preserve ethics and protection against horrid activities.
3.2.2. Whistleblowers face the risk of being discharge from their companies due to ruining their image. Because of that, federal and state laws in countries such as Australia and New Zealand offer protection for these people to avoid unemployment from the firm they are working for,
3.2.3. Because of an ongoing history of corporate misconduct, organisations have increasingly employ staff members to be 'ethics advisors'.
3.3. Factors influencing ethical behaviour in the workplace
3.3.1. Manager As Person
3.3.1.1. Family Influences
3.3.1.2. Religion Values
3.3.1.3. Personal Standards and Needs
3.3.2. Employing Organisation
3.3.2.1. Policies, Codes of Conduct
3.3.2.2. Behaviour of Supervisors and Peers
3.3.2.3. Organisational Culture
3.3.3. External Environment
3.3.3.1. Government Regulations
3.3.3.2. Norms and Values of Society
3.3.3.3. Ethical Climate of Industry
3.4. Common Rationalisations that are used to Justify Misconduct
3.4.1. Convince yourself that this act is technically not illegal.
3.4.2. Convince yourself that the behaviour is really in everyone’s best interests.
3.4.3. Convince yourself that nobody will have knowledge of your misconduct.
3.4.4. Convince yourself that the organisation will ‘protect’ you, being on your side.
3.5. The Outcomes Of Faking Ethical Behaviour - A Volkswagen Case Study
3.5.1. With Volkswagen caught red-handed in hacking their car systems to make their vehicles look more economical, this resulted Volkswagen posting its first quarterly loss for 15 years of 2.5 billion Euros in late October 2015.
3.6. Ethical Dilemmas
3.6.1. Examples
3.6.1.1. Discrimination
3.6.1.2. Sexual harassment
3.6.1.3. Conflicts of interest
3.6.1.4. Customer confidence
3.6.1.5. Possessing forbidden organisational resources
3.6.2. A scenario that offers a potential gain but is deemed morally wrong. These dilemmas usually cause stress until they are solved and therefore must be tackled as much as possible.
3.7. The Alternative Views Of Ethical Behaviour
3.7.1. Utilitarian View
3.7.1.1. A behaviour is ethical when it does good to the large number of people.
3.7.2. Individualism View
3.7.2.1. Ethical behaviour is met when it meets people's long-term self-interests.
3.7.3. Moral-Rights View
3.7.3.1. Considers ethical behaviour when it respects and protects the fundamental rights of people.
3.7.4. Justice View
3.7.4.1. A behaviour is ethical when it treats people equally according to the available measures. This includes...
3.7.4.1.1. Procedural justice
3.7.4.1.2. Distributive justice
3.7.4.1.3. Interactional justice
3.8. Example Controversies of Business Ethics
3.8.1. Coca-Cola
3.8.1.1. Worker's Rights Violation and Over-extraction of water
3.8.2. Nestle
3.8.2.1. Uses unsustainable and genetically materials
3.8.3. Tesco
3.8.3.1. Over-extraction of materials such as Timber
3.8.4. Walmart
3.8.4.1. Worker's Rights Abuse
3.8.5. Amazon
3.8.5.1. Tax Avoidance
3.9. Overview
3.9.1. Seen as the right/good behaviour in the sense of a governing moral code.
3.9.2. Some individuals will side strictly on a legal act while others believe the ethical test goes beyond legality. This is based on personal values.
3.9.3. An example of an ethical behaviour that occurs in a workplace when an employee is requested to do a task violates the dictates of their conscience, as different moral values are perceived differently by others.