The Ethical Company

Recognisable features of the ethical company, in the literature and discussion of business ethics, involve these attributes:

Transparency
Straightforwardness
Accountability
Owning-up
Honesty
Fairness
Common decency
Distributive justice

Recognisable features of a company whose base is ethically challenged are these:

dissembling,
use of threats,
unkindness to employees,
a widespread use of gagging orders,
an inequitable distribution of company income.

On the contrary, a company which would rather conduct its business:

– verbally (particularly with regard to disputed issues) instead of committing its views to writing;
– commonly resorts to litigation, or employs the frequent threat of such; employs gagging clauses as standard policy;
– pays its directors highly disproportionate sums in comparison with its employees;

…this company is suspect and should be avoided wherever possible.

It is a sad commentary on current business and public life that this needs to be written, or debated, says Fripp.

His thoughts can be summed up as follows:

transparency + straightforwardness = honesty
accountability + owning-up = responsibility
distributive justice + fairness = equity
common decency = goodwill

And the Four Pillars of The Ethical Company are:

Honesty
Responsibility
Equity
Goodwill

The IJIRE is the first peer-reviewed online journal, dedicated specifically to cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural research on Internet Research Ethics. All disciplinary perspectives, from those in the arts and humanities, to the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences, are reflected in the journal.

A little bit of background:

With the emergence of Internet use as a research locale and tool throughout the 1990s, researchers from disparate disciplines, ranging from the social sciences to humanities to the sciences, have found a new fertile ground for research opportunities that differ greatly from their traditional biomedical counterparts. As such, “populations,” locales, and spaces that had no corresponding physical environment became a focal point, or site of research activity. Human subjects protections questions then began to arise, across disciplines and over time: What about privacy? How is informed consent obtained? What about research on minors? What are “harms” in an online environment? Is this really human subjects work? More broadly, are the ethical obligations of researchers conducting research online somehow different from other forms of research ethics practices

So what is Internet Research Ethics?

As Internet Research Ethics has developed as its own field and discipline, additional questions have emerged: How do diverse methodological approaches result in distinctive ethical conflicts and, possibly, distinctive ethical resolutions? How do diverse cultural and legal traditions shape what are perceived as ethical conflicts and permissible resolutions? How do researchers collaborating across diverse ethical and legal domains recognize and resolve ethical issues in ways that recognize and incorporate often markedly different ethical understandings?