Principles, integrity, law, profit and social responsibility – all these words occurred in my head when I did my research for this blog post and after 5 minutes of brainstorming, my thoughts were closer to an intricate ball of wool than to a thread through my developing blog post.
Fortunately, I am not the first business person finding herself confronted with the buzz word “business ethics” and I could inspire myself with the ideas of great thinkers like Milton Friedman, R. Edward Freeman and Peter F. Drucker. Especially Peter Drucker’s opinion on social responsibility of businesses sparked my interest, as he distinguishes between social impacts and social problems – in other words, he looks at the problem from two different sides: On the one hand, he considers what businesses do to society and on the other hand, he reflects what businesses do for society. In doing so, he expects companies to take over responsibility when it comes to social impacts and clearly states that it is not a firm’s duty to solve social problems such as unequal income distribution. He justifies his point of view with a definition of responsibility: Someone is only responsible for problems in areas, where he or she has power of decision.
Therefore, I asked myself some questions: Do businesses have the competence to make decisions on social issues? Do we want businesses to have this competence? Who has the power to solve social problems? How are businesses affected by social problems and what can they do?
References:
www.ssireview.org/blog/entry/the_first_rule_of_corporate_social_responsibility_is_not_what_you_think
http://blogs.hbr.org/2010/06/how-did-peter-drucker-see-corp/