Role of Ethics in Corporate Strategy

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Corporate Level Strategy
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What role does ethics play in todays’ corporate strategy to ensure that organisations
consider competitive environment and social responsibility in every aspect of business?
Introduction
Despite of growth seen in academics and professional’s attention for considering
business ethics, moral gaps continue to evolve in business sector that suggests corporates to
rethink their ethical strategies and environmental policies. One of the recent corporate issues
can be seen in Google where the company is been fined 1.7 billion EU for unethically
disadvantaging its competitors in websites search platform. The case study shows how the top
management of the firm promoted unethical practice to fade away competition from
European market. According to an article published in CNBC, this is not the first time that
Google is been accused of similar case. In 2018 and 2017, the company had been fined 4.34
billion and 2.42 billion EU respectively (Reid, 2019). After seeing growth of unethical
business practices in corporates, this literature review will find out the answer to the above-
mentioned question through the lenses of academic literature.
Literature review
Ethics in corporate strategy simply means application of ethics within core business
practices. Previous studies reveal that business cannot be ethical, however, with changing
times and trend seen in today’s businesses, more and more people are considering ethical
business practices along with showing social responsibility in every business aspect. Today’s
professionals have found that they must remain responsible for social well-being as they
operate and live within a social structure. In current globalised economy, corporate
governance and corporate social responsibility as well as ethical behaviour has become key

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factors for concern (Saremi & Nezhad, 2014). As seen in the case example of Google, it is
essential to find out how business managers can accelerate their business practices by
application of moral code of conduct in their business environment, including consenting
upon market competitiveness.
According to Saremi & Nezhad (2014), the role of ethics in corporates depends on the
amount of responsibility the organisation is willing to take. Indeed, this statement has been
supported by Stucke (2013) also where the author considers competition as best suitable tool
that promotes consumers well-being. This means, competition officials who undertakes
protecting public from anticompetition due to special interest are justifiably worn out as seen
in Google case example. Although economic crisis had made policymakers reconsider
general assumptions, the competition virtue is not among them as per current literature.
Nevertheless, to advocate ethics in competitions, corporates needs to understand that
competition itself is not an issue or is any cure. Though, many researchers still questions that
whether competition benefits society always or not? With regards to it, Hsieh (2017) suggest
that in the field of corporate ethics, many scholars have devoted much of their research to
articulate and justify the roles and responsibility of corporate strategies and their
organisation’s managers in relation to society.
Many researchers have framed an alternative theory related to corporate
responsibility as stakeholder’s theory that suggests every business shall be managed
according to the interest of every person or community that can be affected by strategies
made by firms. Corporate citizenship theory is also opined by theorists that enables shared
value within corporates. Alternative theories mentioned in literature that draws explicitly
upon morals and traditions along with political philosophy includes Kantian theory, virtue
ethics, social contract theory and deliberative democracy. Other than this, corporate social
responsibility along with notion to operate and reflect that business organisations follows