Literature Review on Ethics in Business with Example of Apple Company

LITERATURE
REVIEW ON ETHICS
IN BUSINESS
AUSTRALIA

ETHICS IN BUSINESS 1
Introduction
Through this paper the literature review will be conducted on the topic ‘Ethics in Business’ by
using the example of the Apple Company throughout the research. First to start further it’s
important to know about the literal meaning of ethics and then followed with that definition of
the business ethics or the ethics in an organization. In accordance with Rodrigues the study of
universal values like the essential equality of men and women, human or natural rights and all
the other basic concepts and fundamental principles of decent human conduct is known as ethics
or these are those principles which governs the behavior of the person or the conflict between the
right and wrong (Shetkar & Rodrigues, 2015). Ethics in business or also known as the corporate
ethics is a type of applied or professional ethics and are applied to all the aspects of business
conduct and are relevant for all the humans and the entire organization. Many businesses get
collapsed due to the unethical behaviors as it result in loss of credibility amongst the shareholder
and businesses.
Literature Review on Business Ethics
Ethics is thus that complex construction that interprets and understand the things and business in
a very different way, where each individual has its own opinion regarding the constitution of a
good ethical behavior and there is no single definition which can be considered correct for ethics
(Durkheim, 2018)
. In the recent year the business ethics literature has explored in both volume and importance and
because of this sheer volume and diversity of the literature it has raised its value and has
attracted a lot of media action. Trevino & Nelson stated that ethics is concerned with the moral
judgments about right and wrong and the decision taken within the organization may be taken by

ETHICS IN BUSINESS 2
an individual or the group, but the persons making them must be influenced by the culture of the
company (Trevino & Nelson, 2016).
According to Akrani the best example stating the importance of ethics in business is reflected via
the Apple Company whose headquarter is of is situated in Cupertino, California and has
experienced a lot of success and challenges as well as ethical issues in the journey of its business
history just like many other technological industries (Akrani, 2011), The Apple brand serves as
the quality, prestige and innovation for millions of consumers, though there are many companies
who tries to copy the its model but none have been able to discover what it was made by the
Apple. This company had its own principles of ethics which were followed by them on the
regular basis like, it has always tried to display best and appropriate of its conduct to all its
employees and the persons it worked with mostly in all the situations,. It tried to create
innovative and high qualified products and services, it also has reflected integrity, honesty,
respect, confidentiality and compliance in every of its business transaction. Pearson had drafted a
code of conduct for their business which was applied to all its operations including the overseas
ones, it has also formulated some specific policies relating to the corporate governance, conflicts
of interest in the directors and the guidelines on website referring to the question relating to the
questionable conduct of the company. A proper business conduct helpline plan for the workers
were made where the misconduct was reported to the Audit of the Apple and Finance Committee
(Pearson, 2017).
Even though Apple has regularly won the top most place in the world’s most preferable
company, in the recent years it has come across many ethical issues which can have diverse
effect on the success of the company in the future, some of them are as follows Durkheim firstly
raised the Privacy issue where the company’s ability to track its customers have raised due to