M8D1 BUS 323
Revisiting the Global Business Ethics Question Christopher Michaelson ABSTRACT: A fundamental question of global business ethics is, "When moral business conduct standards conflict across borders, whose standards should prevail?" Westem scholar- ship and practice tends to depict home country standards as "higher" or more "restrictive" or "well-ordered" than the "lower" standards of emerging market actors. As much as the question appears culturally neutral, many who ask it do so with a culturally-specific lens shaped by prevailing conditions of Westem economic strength. However, the dominant economic powers of the future are not likely to be the same North American and Westem European markets that have reigned supreme in the recent past.
As corporations increasingly re-examine their political roles in global governance, we need also to re-examine the moral authority of global ethical norms so they do not merely reflect the dominant ideologies of the most economically powerful market actors.
THE QUESTION IN QUESTION W HEN THE BEIJING SKYLINE WAS RESHAPED by the appearance of several colossal structures desigtied by Westem architects in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics, the reviews of Westem critics suggested that the additions were signs of aesthetic progress. The general expressions of praise that rang out were tinged with an unstated irony, that it took importing a Westem aesthetic to demonstrate that Eastem cultural sophistication had arrived or surpassed that of the West.' Erom the comfortable distance of intemational television, the iconic buildings alight at night looked like they had taken the country over, but up close, they punctuated the juxta- position of ancient and modem in China. To suggest that one of the world's oldest continuous civilizations needed the imprimatur of New World artists to demonstrate its cultural maturity was a patronizing sentiment, to say the least. If the strong odor of condescension from abroad offended anyone in Beijing, however, they were not saying so. They were the ones who had hired the architects and invited the atten- tion, who came late to an ancient game that had been revived in the United States a century earlier, the mies of which went something like, the higher you could build a skyscraper, the more powerful you would appear. Today, the "mature" markets of the United States and Europe have left behind that game, whose new capitalist enthusiasts are headquartered in Dubai, Taipei, Kuala Lumpur, and Shanghai.
An analogous tone of moral patemalism lurks in the scholarship and practice of Westem business ethics, a paradigmatic question of which is, "When moral busi- ness conduct standards conflict across borders, whose standards should prevail?" In a recent special issue of Business Ethics Quarterly, entitled "The Changing Role of Business in Global Society: New Challenges and Responsibilities," the special issue editors characterize, in a culturally neutral way, a critical ethical challenge ©2010 Business Ethics Quarterly 20:2 (April 2010); ISSN 1052-150X pp. 237-251 238 BUSINESS ETHICS QUARTERLY of doing business across borders: "TNCs operate in a complex environment with heterogeneous, often contradictory legal and social demands" (Scherer, Palazzo, and Matten 2009: 328). By itself, this statement implies that whatever the TNCs home country (the United States or China, for example), there will be cultural ad- aptation challenges to doing business wherever the host country may be (China or the United States, for example). Fair enough. However, the editors and contributors to the Special Issue (including one article accepted for the Special Issue but pub- lished in a prior issue), along with the scholarly and practice tradition upon which they build, are generally not as concerned with the ethical challenges faced by the Chinese TNC doing business in the United States. Rather, as in the architecture anal- ogy, the cases of interest generally involve Western multinationals doing business in less economically prosperous countries outside of North America and Western Europe (for example, Texaco in Ecuador [Hsieh 2009], Talisman in Sudan [Kobrin 2009], and private security companies protecting American interests in Iraq and Afghanistan [Elms and Phillips 2009]). In these cases, the developing market actors are perhaps even more likely to be victim than villain. Nevertheless, in the tale as it is commonly told, there is a pervasive underlying vulnerability to misconduct in developing markets.
The shared concern is generally of the form that agents of the firm operating in a developing host market far from their developed home market are more prone to engage in unethical behavior. The parties implicated for unethical behavior may be home country managers who place less value on the well-being of host country employees, society, and the environment; they may be host country managers and employees who fail to abide by corporate ethics policies; and they may be third parties, government officials, or others who intentionally exploit gaps in ethical and legal standards or who unintentionally fall victim to confusion about such gaps.
Generally, there is no suggestion that developing host market people are less ethical than their developed market counterparts. However, there is often explicit or implied criticism that the ethical and legal framework of the host market, including but not limited to principles and rules, along with the institutions that support those principles and rules, is not sufficient to support fair and responsible free market capitalism. As Hsieh (2009: 267) argues, "MNEs have a responsibility to promote well-ordered institutions in societies where they operate that are not well-ordered." To claim that in jurisdictions where free market capitalism is newer, where societ- ies have not yet had the time and experience to construct the well-ordered institutions needed to support it—for example, the rule of law, a corporate governance system, and transparency—can be a culturally neutral claim, as innocent as teaching the complex rules of Olympic sports to the newer entrants who are determined to par- ticipate in the games. In fact, many business ethicists working in developed and developing markets endorse just such a view, that good business behavior is at risk in developing markets because, well, the markets (and their supporting institutions) are developing (for example, in addition to this sentiment appearing in several of the Special Issue articles, it also is expressed in Donaldson 1996, Donaldson and Dunfee 1999, Enderle 1999, Hanafin 2002, Harvey 1999, and Lu 1997 and 2009).
However, the ideal, well-ordered society of the Western imagination does not fit as REVISITING THE GLOBAL BUSINESS ETHICS QUESTION 239 well in reality in a society ruled by authoritarian regime, military govemment, or desert kingdom as it does in a Westem liberal democracy. The claim can too easily be taken to imply that ancient systems of market exchange do not count as capitalism when they are not supported by the rules of contemporary Westem capitalism that, for example, seek to limit conflicts of interest and promote impartial govemance. It is akin to suggesting that the only way to run an Olympic race is to measure progress in 100-meter increments, as though the Westem obsession with bmte speed usurps the spinning, control, and finesse elements that various cultures insert into their traditional running exercises. The prevailing practice in business ethics has been to depict the home country standards, those of the developed market actor, to be "higher" or more "restrictive" or "well-ordered," while host country standards are the "lower," often unwritten norms of the emerging market actor (for example, in addition to this stated or implied construct in several of the Special Issue articles, it also is expressed in Donaldson 1996, Donaldson and Dunfee 1999, Johnson and Abromov 2004, Santoro 2000, Citigroup 2007, ExxonMobil 2009, and many other practice codes). This use of language may imply that home country standards are better, that home country officials demonstrate a stronger commitment with better govemance to better standards, or both.
From the standpoint of the Westem business ethics literature, either developing markets' ethics are behind (the blunt charge im- plying developed market moral superiority), or their economics are behind, resulting in ethics and market institutions that have not caught up to global market standards (a more common, veiled charge of developing market moral ignorance).
The question in question—"When moral business conduct standards conflict across borders, whose standards should prevail?"—brings fundamental theoretical issues about moral absolutism and relativism to bear on basic, pragmatic questions about what is ethical business conduct amid conflicting norms. Business ethicists have been loath to appear to side with cultural relativists, and in fact I do not mean here to endorse moral relativism. I am suggesting, however, that we should be more open to the possibility that the justification for many of the moral absolutes that have come to align with Western capitalist doctrine may be conferred less by moral authority than by economic power. What might count as well-ordered, free market capitalism may be what those in economically powerful markets determine to be well-ordered, free market capitalism. As much as the global ethics question appears to be culturally neutral, many of those who ask it do so with a culturally- specific lens shaped by prevailing conditions of Westem economic strength. That is, the relative prosperity of developed economies seems implicitly to be taken as evidence of a sustainable form of free market capitalism that is supposed to be a universal economic destination. However, we need to be prepared for the possibility that as the balance of economic power evolves, the economic conception of global capitalism may also change, and with it so might ethical norms.
The BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) already represent a far greater share of economic growth than the G7 (World Economic Fomm 2009), and within a few decades, it is likely that neither the U.S. nor the E.U. will represent the world's largest economy in GDP terms (PricewaterhouseCoopers 2006, Keidel 2008).
The G20 has become a more influential political consortium than the G7 240 BUSINESS ETHICS QUARTERLY or G8 (Andrews 2009; Luce 2009). As a result of burgeoning economies from all comers of the globe, we could already be on the cusp of "when China rules the world" (Jacques 2009) and what Zakaria (2008) calls the "post-American world." With a shift in the global balance of economic power underway, it is time to revisit the question.
QUESTIONABLE ASSUMPTIONS Global market capitalism in Scherer, Palazzo, and Matten 2009 includes a role for the corporation as a political actor that goes beyond traditional notions of corporate social responsibility. In this system, which they assert is an emerging reality, business firms are often as economically and politically powerful, or more powerful, than traditional nation states, and they engage in activities that previously were the sole province of government (Matten and Crane 2005; Scherer, Palazzo, and Baumann 2006). This conceptualization of the corporation as, at the same time, a self-interested market actor and a collaborative participant in global governance, has features in common with the vision of the corporation as a "global corporate citizen" set forth by Klaus Schwab (2008: 114) of the World Economic Eorum. Schwab asserts that global corporations have "a civic duty to contribute to sustaining the world's well-being in cooperation with governments and civil society"—a duty that is inseparable from their "license to operate." The ambition of these authors to articulate, descriptively and normatively, an emerging role for the corporation in civil society, transcends the question in question ofthe present paper.
As the nation state's influence recedes, and standard-setting is increasingly a product of democratic discourse that includes TNCs as key participants (Scherer and Palazzo 2007), the likelihood of cross-border conflicts of moral standards should also recede, rendering my question obsolete.
Along with it, the impression that capitalism is a Westem invention, to which non- Westemers are relative newcomers, should dissipate. However, unless and until that situation is fully realized, the question in question will remain fundamentally important to the exploration of global business ethics.^ Scherer, Palazzo, and Matten (2009:
335) reference numerous examples of multi- lateral agreements (including the United Nations Global Compact) and cross-sector engagement (addressing such concems as environmental protection, human rights, and transparent corporate reporting) that "represent a new form of global govemance" that, while involving political actors and relationships, would in its ideal form go beyond what they refer to as "power politics." Indeed, Scherer and Palazzo (2007:
1110) envision a "Habermasian" process of public deliberation to address press- ing problems that corporations and govemments are either unwilling or unable to solve alone, while providing democratic mechanisms that may not achieve an ideal of "power free discourses of political will formation" but might come realistically close. The vision of global govemance expressed in Scherer, Palazzo, and Matten 2009 and several predecessor papers goes a considerable distance toward challenging the Westem capitalist stereotype of shareholder primacy and addressing associated concems about ethical imperialism that have often tamished well-intended efforts by developed market actors to bring well-ordered market institutions to developing REVISITING THE GLOBAL BUSINESS ETHICS QUESTION 241 markets. However, even the notion that true global governance can be brought about through a process of "deliberative democracy" (emphasis added) risks being per- ceived as a peculiarly Western ideal, suggesting that even in the ideas that underlie power free discourse there can be found the influence of the powerful. Similarly, Donaldson's (1996) invocation of a Rawlsian ideal of "overlapping consensus" to underlie his articulation of (cross-cultural) "core human values" appeals similarly to democratic consensus-building, which may seem foreign to alternative political traditions. While the process leading to the formation of the U.N. Global Compact might resemble a deliberative ideal, in reality such negotiations are not power free.
For example, there is little doubt that the impact of the Global Compact has had much to do with the endorsement of economically powerful market actors (over the protestations of some advocates of the less powerful), while the legitimacy of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change was harmed by the United States' longstanding resistance to it.
This is to say that, whether Westerners or non-Westerners are perceived to be the cause of social and environmental problems, more often than not. Western economic and ethical constructs are proposed as potential solutions. For example, in his analysis of human rights obligations for TNCs, Kobrin (2009: 351) asserts, "the host country is typically the perpetrator, the primary violator of human rights." This assertion seems clearly to hold in the Sudan case that is his primary object of analysis, but there have been important cases in which the primary violators were outsiders (e.g., the perpetration of the opium trade by Britain in India and China) and in which moral accountability was distributed among multiple internal and external parties (e.g.. Shell's historical involvement in Nigeria). It would be simplistic and unfair here to assert that the "emerging transnational order" to which Kobrin appeals as a solution is a conspiracy of the powerful; however, it would also be simplistic and naive to suppose that this order does not reflect a conception of international law with which Western market actors tend to feel more at home and which seems alien to certain non-Western market actors which depend less on formal institu- tions to enforce moral norms. Pies, Hielscher, and Beckmann's (2009) use of game theory to support an "ordonomic" approach to corporate citizenship reflects another familiar Western worldview that, even when private and public interest coincide, private interest is the primary motivator of individual human behavior. Their use (392-93) of the Google et al. in China example as an example of how private par- ties can act collectively to benefit their own and others' interests presupposes the priority of the right to free speech, as Western analysis of this case has been prone to do.
But it is worth questioning whether free speech, a private interest, necessarily is prior to social order, the public interest wbich the Chinese govemment evidently put ahead of private rights in this case. My point here is not to doubt the efficacy of these Western constructs as solutions; rather, it is to ask whether the background assumptions about order, rightness, and deliberative democracy reflect the universal consensus of reasonable human beings or rather the more tenuous consensus of more economically powerful human beings that have had disproportionate influence in the current instantiation of our global economy. 242 BUSINESS ETHICS QUARTERLY The Special Issue editors' vision of global govemance might advance us beyond these power politics, but on the real road to a more ideal global govemance system, it is worth revisiting a concem. The concem, as outlined earlier in this paper, is that the justification for global business standards that currently prevail, some of which arise from multilateral discourse, may be conferred less by moral authority than by economic power. In a reality that falls short of the ideal of power free discourse, it is worth recognizing, where possible, the influence that economic power can have over ethical norms in the midst of a historic period of economic rebalancing.
A QUESTION OF FIT Westem perspectives on doing business in a global context have been criticized for betraying a Westem ethical bias; however, the Westem economic bias that pervades the cultural foundations of market capitalism is less often challenged.^ We may be sensitive, though not immune, to the specter of moral "imperialism" (Donaldson 1996) if we contend that one culture's ethical systems and practices are more advanced than another's. Yet, we routinely use such terms as "developed" and "developing" when we refer to the level of economic advancement of countries.
Therefore, when we grapple with ethical problems of doing business across borders, we often explore what ethical practices and legal and political institutions are needed to regulate free market capitalism as we know it, especially in jurisdictions in which this form of capitalism is relatively new. That is, we examine cross-cultural ethics, or how ethics and law need to adapt to accommodate the smooth functioning of market capitalism as we know it. We less often explore cross-cultural economics; that is, how the global market system itself may need to adapt to accommodate cultures that may not share certain ethical tenets about human nature fundamental to Westem free market capitalism.
Inevitably, such broad claims and categorizations as these oversimplify the state of play, unfortunately dividing the world into "us" and "them," potentially undermining the goal of harmonious interplay." While exploring progress toward a global market system less susceptible to power politics and more likely to produce coincidence between ethical and economic outcomes, polarities—such as "West- em and non-Westem," "developed and developing," and "ethics and economics," among others—can be useful for emphasizing contrasts, even though such contrasts are not in reality as stark as depicted. For example, state ownership of corporate enterprises, a model that we may previously have associated with non-capitalist markets, has recently retumed in the United States and elsewhere as a result of the global recession (Bremmer and Pujadas 2009). Business ethicists and corporate social responsibility theorists have suggested that there is a polar contrast between United States compliance-oriented and European Union sustainability-oriented ap- proaches to corporate social responsibility (Handy 2002). Meanwhile, the model of family ownership that has sometimes been perceived as contributing to "crony capitalism" in Asia is now seen to be an important driver of entrepreneurial growth (James 2008). That is to say that there is no "capitalism as we know it" in reality, but absent a single reference point, the business ethics debate about whose moral REVISITING THE GLOBAL BUSINESS ETHICS QUESTION 243 standards should prevail has tended to gravitate toward a dominant ideology em- phasizing instrumentalism and rationality.
The neo-colonialist literature goes so far as to suggest that globalization is not as much the product of a multiplicity of systems coming together as it is the "assimilation within the dominant ideology" of the economically and politically powerful (Banerjee and Linstead 2001), which can at times have the "dark side" of unintended consequences (Khan, Munir, and Willmott 2007).
In general. Western business ethics are inextricably tied to the ideal of a free market, which is itself a moral ideal worth questioning. Western theories of human nature on which the founding doctrines of free market capitalism are based suppose that people are naturally prone to act in their own narrow self-interest. Accordingly, Western corporate governance prescriptions require oversight that is independent of conflicts of interest. These conceptions presuppose a highly instrumental form of reasoning, in which little is done for its own sake but everything is done for the sake of gaining some other sort of extrinsic advantage.
As a moral philosopher before he was an economist, Adam Smith was not alien to the idea of moral sentiments associated with non-market goods (Calkins and Werhane 1998; Heilbroner 1999).
However, the emphasis of particular ideas in the practice of Western free market capitalism—especially, individualist instrumentalism and the primacy of scientific rationality—can encourage and exploit these ideas in practice that are supposed to be fundamentally human and yet are ahen to many, including some people who were not raised under Western capitalist doctrine. That doctrine takes a self-interested, instrumentalist sentiment that is common to a piece within all of us and then ac- cuses all of us of being all self-interested. Then, because it is a piece of all of us, it uses rationalistic, economic predictive modeling techniques to show that the self- interested assumption is all we need in order to understand human market behavior.
Economists and political scientists are aware that what these predictive models say of the instrumental rationality of the collective does not apply equally to each indi- vidual within the collective (Fehr and Tyran 2005, Eriedman 2005, Inglehart 1990, Sen 1988), while even predictive neuroscientific models of the brain and behavior need to account for the interaction of multiple mechanisms that include the passions (Camerer, Loewenstein, and Prelec 2004, 2005), and those non-economic values and emotions routinely lead people to act in ways that appear to be contrary to their self-interest (Fehr and Gächter 2000). Postmodern and feminist theories have long emphasized the role of the emotions in ethical and economic reasoning (Nussbaum 2001, Solomon 2003, 2004). Notwithstanding these challenges to it, the worldview implied in Western business ethics scholarship suggests that individualist, instru- mental rationality holds true of the collective—even in Asian societies which we (often too simplistically) characterize as collectivist and less instrumentalist.
In our current, globalized economy in which the free market may be a means and not an end in itself, in which public markets commingle with a norm of private, family-run enterprise, and private equity competes with sovereign wealth funds, it is time to give up some of our blind fidelity to Western norms of economic behavior to recognize that under an alternative economic scenario, those norms may not be as normal. This is not naively to suggest that there are no self-interested abuses of 244 BUSINESS ETHICS QUARTERLY power and influence in developing markets or to suppose idealistically that most people who were raised under Confucian or Communist or Catholic doctrine un- waveringly and always put the common good ahead of individual self-interest. Much has been made, perhaps too much (Koehn 1999), of the stereotypical difference between collectivist and individualist societies (Friedman 2005; Nisbett 2003), but this contrast does do the important service of suggesting that a global population that is a more diverse mix of moral sentiments than Westem capitalist doctrine al- lows us to suppose may defy well-wom assumptions about collective behavior if we are able to see it through non-instrumentalist, less purely rationalistic lenses. It is further to recognize the diverse capitalisms in play across the globe as proof that capitalism is not a constant doctrine, but rather a set of ideas to be put into practice, and how it plays out depends upon who is playing it. It plays out in a seemingly never-ending series of scandals if the players are taught to pursue profitability within the boundaries of an extemal regulatory regime which will take care of the boundary-setting. Altematively, in a global market that is sensitive to the privileges often enjoyed by business managers in juxtaposition with impoverished populations, a form of capitalism begins to emerge in which scholars and practitioners alike get to ask humanitarian—and, I would emphasize, other-regarding—questions such as that asked by the Special Issue editors:
"What are the challenges and responsibilities of the changing role of business in global society?" The global business ethics question, "When moral business conduct standards conflict across borders, whose standards should prevail?" needs to be accompanied by a global business economics question: "What kind (or kinds) of capitalism(s) is (are) the right fit for a rebalancing global marketplace?" This pair of questions suggests that business ethics is not purely a matter of imposing a spurious moral absolutism, nor is it to succumb to moral relativism, but rather it is a matter of "fit"—between ethics, economics, and the people in cultures who practice them.
THE EUTHYPHRO QUESTION Are prevailing answers to questions of cross-cultural business ethics conflict ac- cepted because they are right, or are they right because they are accepted? To any reader trained in the Westem intellectual tradition, this question will sound familiar as a reformulation of Socrates' question to Euthyphro (10a): "Is the holy loved by the gods because it is holy [o]r is it holy because it is loved by the gods?" Of course, the answer to that question is that the gods love what is holy because it is holy, and likewise, we would like to think that our global business ethics standards are global in virtue of their universality rather than in virtue of their promulgation by the economically powerful. However, if economic strength has been the basis for ethical leverage, then we should be prepared for a tumultuous storm of ethical rebalancing as the global economy rebalances.
When we suggest that developing economies are not as far along in their pro- gression toward free market capitalism, just what are we purporting to suggest is the goal? Is it to be more like that form of Westem capitalism that has sanctioned instmmental, individualistic behavior to the point at which it has become a pathol- REVISITING THE GLOBAL BUSINESS ETHICS QUESTION 245 ogy, as demonstrated in the business ethics scandals of 2001-2002 and the global recession of 2008-2009, threatening to undermine the very system that has set it forth as a fundamental human expectation? Is it to embrace a scientific model of reason- ing in which self-interested behavior is the acceptable norm but the slippery slope toward self-dealing leads to an unacceptable violation of a moral ideal of impartial- ity? We should not forget that systems of market exchange predating recent events have been part of the economic and political history of every market—including Brazil, Russia, India, and China, in spite of their recent flirtation with Communist and Socialist ideologies.
In the literature on which the Special Issue builds conceming business ethics across borders, prominent concems have been raised on numerous critical business ethics issues, including but not limited to climate change, and the challenge of limiting greenhouse gas emissions while preserving legitimate economic development (for example, Benton 2002, 2008; Romar 2009; Windsor 2004); the pervasiveness of intellectual property piracy (not incidentally, a value-laden term) (Donaldson 1996; Sybert 2008) and cultural differences in attitudes toward intellectual property (Wer- hane and Gorman 2005); the trade-off between human rights and controlling costs to attract foreign direct investment (for example, Amold and Bowie 2007, Campbell 2006, Sethi 2003, Velasquez 2000), and limiting cormption (another value-laden term) (O'Higgins 2006, Windsor 2004), while untangling it from legitimate social relations traditions, such as guanxi, which confounds the principle of impartiality (Donaldson 1996; Luo 2007; Warren, Dunfee, and Li 2004). With regard to each of these issues, the Westem approach to influencing ethical behavior has been to fol- low the instmmentalist, rationalist path of setting a minimum standard and then to measure and monitor compliance therewith. However, the level of formalization of market and law enforcement institutions is not necessarily a reliable indicator ofthe level of moral commitment to enforcing moral standards. Given concems over the excessive litigiousness of Westem, and particularly American, legal institutions, the emerging transnational order may well benefit from applying less formal methods for achieving social compliance familiar in less litigious societies, such as cultural conformity, pressure from community elders, and the threat of being ostracized from the market community. Important and irreducibly complex social traditions give rise to practical differences:
• Climate change places values of natural beauty, poverty alleviation, cultural preservation, future generations, and faimess, among others, in tension with economic competitiveness. A tme global capitalism cannot solve such a complex problem by setting standards that focus on preserving economic competitiveness alone, and the present increase in triple bottom line report- ing can be taken to reflect openness to a system in which a multiplicity of values vie for importance.
• The notion of human rights derives from an intellectual tradition of liberal individualism that regards each human being as the basic unit for moral analy- sis.
This rights-based perspective is foreign to societies, often more populous and therefore deriving strength in numbers, in which families and communi- 246 BUSINESS ETHICS QUARTERLY ties are the basic unit for moral analysis. The kinds of tradeoffs foreseen by climate change economists (Stem 2007) between resource conservation and human well-being—which may also entail health, safety, and other material sacrifices that are seen by Westemers as human rights issues—are already familiar in resource-constrained societies.
• Intellectual property is a product of institutional pragmatism aimed at, among other things, promoting competition to innovate on the supposition that instrumental incentives are required to promote intellectual invention. The so-called piracy of intellectual property, which is often cast as a disregard for the mle of law accompanied by inadequate enforcement, can also be seen as a reflection of a cultural sentiment that knowledge is public property (or not property at all), for sharing rather than commoditization. As Appiah (2006:
129) notes, IP protection for the sake of cultural preservation may well "dam- age, irreparably, the nature of what it seeks to protect. . . making countless mine-and-thine distinctions." • Bribery is bribery within an instmmentalist framework in which every cause has a transactional effect. Guanxi is not necessarily bribery in a relationship- oriented framework that is more complex than Westem legal institutions allow for, in which moral partiality is not perceived to be an automatic vice.^ I am not here condoning a worldview that regards environmental degradation, human rights abuses, piracy, and bribery as mere social constructs. Nor do I mean to imply that a shift in economic and political power relations necessarily entails a shift toward the ethical priorities of the new economic champions. However, I am suggesting that in a rebalancing global economy, when we encounter tension in moral standards across borders, we need to be more open than ever to the possibil- ity of revision. That shift in economic power relations gives us reasons to explore whether what we might have taken to be morally authoritative norms might on further examination tum out to have been the product of pre-existing power rela- tions.
Lest the notion of economic-ethical-cultural "fit" appear to be merely cultural relativism under a threadbare and flimsy cloak, it is important to distinguish between moral rationalization (accepting cultural differences as universal moral justifica- tion for differing cultural practices) and explanation (using cultural differences to illuminate and resolve legitimate cross-cultural value tensions). Under a different balance of economic power, Westem business ethicists may still have reasons to challenge human rights practices in emerged (what else should we call them then?) markets, but we may well see a shift in the tone and tenacity of the argument that reflects compromise among legitimate values. Intellectual property, meanwhile, may someday recede in importance as a legal concept, as we are already seeing it undermined by social networking and mass collaboration vehicles that change the way in which content is produced, distributed, shared, and sold. In this evolving global economy, cross-cultural ethical tensions are unlikely to disappear altogether, even as the role of the corporation in a global society increasingly involves greater cross-sector collaboration and multilateral standard-setting. REVISITING THE GLOBAL BUSINESS ETHICS QUESTION 247 Recently, at a business fomm that I helped coordinate, business executives from major U.S.-based multinationals were asked whether a change in the economic balance of power might portend a change in ethical influence. The executives, themselves of Westem cultural descent, plainly did not even understand the ques- tion. The question they heard—not the one they were asked—was whether they should compromise their home country ethical standards when operating in host countries.
They reverted to familiar tmisms about how their corporate values must be unwavering wherever their businesses were operating.
The audience did not press them on their failure to address the question at hand, perhaps because these parties also were conditioned by the power relations that have prevailed since the rise of capitalism in the West. This failure of Westem eyes to see the cultural complexity beneath the question is reminiscent of our aesthetic conditioning that leads us to see only the telegenic punctuation points on the Beijing skyline, the ones whose Westem architects had the cultural audacity to illuminate more brightly than the rest.^ NOTES The author would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. Research that contributed to the ideas in this paper was supported by a grant from the University of St.
Thomas, Opus College of Business.
1. The signature structures included Beijing National Stadium, the centerpiece of the Olympic Games that became known as the "Bird's Nest," a collaboration between the Swiss firm of Herzog & de Meuron and the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei; Sir Norman Foster's T3 (Terminal Three) at the Beijing Capital Interna- tional Airport; and China Central Television's headquarters, designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas.
Ourousoff (2008) notes that the Bird's Nest was "said to embody everything from China's muscle-flexing nationalism to a newfound cultural sophistication"; Slessor (2008) hails T3 as both the arrival of modernity and the Pacific Century; while Rose (2009) wondered whether the firecracker-induced blaze at CCTV's sister building would spook superstitious Chinese from hiring Westem architects again.
2.
Any such sweeping commentary on the state of global business ethics as this will necessarily betray some oversimplification. This paper, along with many that it references, makes use of such dichotomies as "East and West," "developing and developed" market, "democracy and autocracy," "absolutism and relativ- ism," "ethics and economics," "capitalism and non-capitalism," which are in reality blurry and sometimes counterproductive to collaboration and understanding. These are terms of convenience that can have real impacts on the ways in which we see and act.
3.
Both forms of concern are evident in the following examples: Takahashi (1999) asserts that global business standards have tended to reflect a Westem ethical bias while also characterizing non-Western economic systems as backward. Thomas Friedman (2008: 343) echoes oft-made charges that developed nations have unfairly benefitted from decades of carbon-intensive production that is now restricted for all nations. Benjamin Friedman (2005: 304) explains globalization critics' concern that "industrialization disrupts previously existing social arrangements." Said's well-known concerns about colonialism are not exclusively focused on business and economic behavior but incorporate examples of the interplay between economic power, ethical imposition, and imperialist tendencies (1993).
4.
Both Appiah (2006), who prominently advocates an ideal of cosmopolitanism that deemphasizes cultural differences, and Said ( 1993), who prominently defends colonized peoples against imperialist empires, express discomfort with the divisions implied by "us" and "them" dichotomies.
5.
Luo (2007:
215-18) distinguishes guanxi from corruption in that it is a social norm, not a deviation; it is legal, not illegal; it is an exchange of favors rather than money; the reciprocity obligations are implicit rather than transactional; there are no lawful risks if it fails; it is long-term rather than short-term oriented; it is not timebound; it is trust- rather than commodity-based; and it is transferable.
6. In a curious endnote to the Beijing Olympics story, the games ended happily for most people.
China won the gold medal count, demonstrating athletic superiority that could well be a proxy for future political 248 BUSINESS ETHICS QUARTERLY and economic superiority. The United States won the overall medal count (again), showing that it still re- tained the ability to mine the lanes, courts, and fields for the most prodigious material haul.
The marathoners ran, even though there had been an ironic concern that the relative economic prosperity that had led many Beijing residents to trade their bicycles for cars was going to plague the games with the primitive industrial specter of pollution.
The Uyghur ethnic minority of western China, which had threatened possible terrorist activity to bring attention to its human rights claims, was kept at bay in the eastern capital city.
Even though a random act of fatal violence by a deranged Chinese man against an American tourist showed that random acts of violence could emerge under an authoritarian regime, the games, as a whole, were peaceful. The success was celebrated by nearly all but the vice mayor of Beijing, Liu Zhihua, who had supervised the construction projects in preparation for the Olympic Games. Liu was stripped of his post and status in 2006 for corruption, a particularly painful revelation for a country and city seeking to demonstrate the orderhness of its institutions to a global marketplace in which many players are convinced that corruption is endemic.
The indictment of Liu for corruption might have been taken by Western observers as a sign of promise that the rule of law was working; his death sentence (suspended as of this writing) might have been taken by those same observers as a sign of concern that China had yet to wake up to modernity on the ethical issue of human rights (Yardley 2008). Or, might it signal a greater commitment to anti-corruption enforcement?
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