Ethics in Management Research

Abstract

The behaviour that a business adheres to in its daily dealings with the world is the main point of discussion in this paper. It is suggest that management researchers face ethical issues of a different nature to those most frequently confronted by other social science researchers, and thus the paper enhances on more explicit acknowledgement of contextual factors involved in management research.  The ethics of an organization may be discrete, however ethics do not just apply to how the business communicates with the world, but also includes the business’ one-on-one relations with individual research clients and employee’s.

The paper suggests the involvement of ethics codes, despite the risk that ethics codes may encourage instrumental compliance with minimal ethical obligations, we suggest they also have the potential to reflect a more aspirational agenda and that an ethics code could be used to formulate new ways of thinking about management research relationships.  The development of an ethics code for management research should therefore be seen as a potentially worthwhile project.