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This weekend, an interesting business ethics story hit the papers in Canada. It is about the fairly unprecedented measure of the Ontario Securities and Exchange Commission (OSC), on Friday last week, to not only suspend the trade of Sino-Forest (TSX listing: TRE) but to also to demand five of their top executives to step down. Sino-Forest is a Hong-Kong based lumber company mostly operating in China which appeared to have overstated their reserves as well as their revenues. The OSC was alerted to this by a whistleblower in a Canadian investment bank (with the conspicuous name of Muddy Waters...). While the OSC later had to rescind their demand for personnel changes at Sino Forest – it turned out to have no jurisdiction over such far reaching changes in the corporate governance - the case raises some interesting questions about the role and intricacies of business ethics. For one, it was a pretty unequivocal and drastic measure for a regulator. While the failure of the SEC in the US i...

In the latest edition of ‘Business Ethics’ we referred to the events of 2008 (Lehman, AIG, RBS etc.) as the ‘financial crisis of the late 2000s’. Well, at the time we did not expect this to be useful for the reasons it now makes total (non-)sense: we are quite likely to having witnessed the beginning of the next instalment these days. Following the budget compromise in the US and the downgrading of US government bonds by Standard & Poors (S&P), we have seen markets plummeting and shareholder’s wealth wiped out in the billions. Again. Rather than being a distinct event from 3 years ago, the ‘financial crisis’ – as it is still commonly referred to – seems more of an ongoing concern than a one-off. This also seems to be the message from Europe: Greece is hardly on the safe side, and new bad news is coming out of Italy, Spain, and even France, of all places! So let’s put it frankly: there is no such thing as ‘the financial crisis’ or ‘a new financial crisis’. What we see these days...

The end of July. School is out, the beach is beckoning, and North America is just emerging from a massive heatwave. OK, so its grey and chilly in much of Northern Europe right now, but for many of us, summer is truly here. And like all self-respecting sunworshippers, we're all too aware that this means it is time for sunscreen. The question is, though, what is the responsible choice among the myriad brands in the market? And what counts for responsible when it comes to sunscreen anyway? Over at the Ethical Consumer website , help is at hand. The UK-based magazine publishers and all-round ethical shopping wonks produce ethical buying guides for just about everything. Their buyers guide for sunscreen is available free and includes probably more information than anyone could possible want about how the various brands stack up against a wide array of social and environmental issues. Top of the list of things to avoid are potentially harmful chemical ingredients, including various para...

To write about Rupert Murdoch, the Australian born media mogul and Chairman & CEO of Newscorp, in a business ethics blog seems somewhat tedious. Already in the first edition of our business ethics textbook nearly a decade ago we had a vignette on him and his conspicuous influence on governments and public opinion. There is however now a good reason to take the subject up again. Murdoch and his British subsidiary News International have taken the old story to a new level ( The Guardian maybe has the most comprehensive coverage on this). Murdoch’s British tabloid ‘News of the World’ (NoW) has been in the headlines for a while for hacking into voicemail accounts of a number of celebrities. Actually the story is now lingering on since at least 2007. It only broke last week as to what the real extent of this scandal has grown into over the years: voicemail accounts, cell phones, bank accounts and legal files of some 4,000 individuals, 5,000 landline numbers and 4,000 mobile numbers may...

Data visualization, or the creation of "infographics", has been gradually seeping into the corporate responsibility world. And its no surprise. When their designers get it right, infographics can tell you an important story in a wonderfully accessible way using cool, hard facts. But when they get it wrong, it's just, well..... a mess. Too much data and it is confusing; too little and it risks being banal. And using the wrong data can simply discredit the whole enterprise from the beginning. So what does a good corporate responsibility infographic actually look like then? We've been taking a good look at the craze for infographics, and picked out some of the best and the worst that relate to corporate responsibility issues. There are more and more appearing every day, so we're not claiming to provide anything like an exhaustive review, but here are a few examples that we think give a good flavor of the potential and pitfalls of turning business ethics into pictures...

Yesterday, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou narrowly won the support of the Greek parliament for his ongoing efforts to steer the country away from bankruptcy. Whether this has given him a second political life though is an open question. Greece’s financial troubles are far from over. As a member the EU and the Eurozone the survival of Greece within these European institutions seems still anything but certain. Last week, the debate among European heads of state and Finance Ministers on further support for Greece was tough and controversial. Finally an agreement of another multi billion Euro cash injection from mostly France and Germany paved the way for keeping Greece floating for another month or so. A thorny nettle of disagreement between the countries was the question, in how far private sector banks should be part of the solution. Germany, whose banks exposure of some €20bn is much lower than France’s was insisting on more involvement, while France opposed this approach in ...

Last year we released a free download of our introduction to corporate social responsibility , originally published in our textbook " Corporate social responsibility: readings and cases in a global context ". It proved to be pretty popular, with hundreds of downloads in the months since it was released. Today, we are making available another free CSR download, this time from our three volume edited collection on CSR , originally published by Sage in 2007. You can download the chapter by going HERE and selecting the "One Click Download" tab. The new download is more of an academic-oriented treatment than our last one. It sets out to describe the academic literature on CSR rather than how CSR is thought about by practitioners. So for anyone doing research in the field, or just looking for a general introduction to the academic field of CSR, it will provide a handy starting point. We intended it to be accessible rather than too complex or jargony, so it should make s...