Bachelor of Advanced Computing and Bachelor of Commerce student James Dwyer is a joint winner of the 2024 Natoli Student Ethics Competition for an undergraduate student.
Since the 1990s, business schools across Australia and the world have attempted a significant shift in the way they deal with ethics education. Now, it has pervaded all aspects of the education sphere. Yet, despite the fact that today’s business leaders have grown up surrounded by talk of business ethics, and major business ethical scandals continue fill the headlines, research shows the Australian consumer doesn’t seem to care, seeing the corporate sector as neither bad or good. This begs the question, why the apathy?
When looking at an international scale, businesses have been attempting to increase their ethical profile for years to align with new standards, such as the UN sustainable development goals. While sustainable investment strategies have come and gone as a method to achieve ethical responsibility, one key overlooked principle is Goal 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth. Companies are traditionally given a degree of brevity to achieve this, and it is this perception, of the ethical responsibilities of a business competing with the need to successes that could account for such a neutral societal view.
PWC after it’s major scandal was able to still continue intact. Could it be the cutthroat perception of many industries leads people to view unethical behaviour as almost necessary for success in these industries? I contend, it is the culture in the corporate world that sets people’s perceptions of it, and therefore leads people, no matter how much work on company ethics, to view the corporate world as playing by the ”law of the jungle”.
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