A Charles Sturt University (CSU) Marketing lecturer and an Honours student have published an analysis of the ethical framework of international trade that has ensnared the Australian Wheat Board (AWB).

 

The article – ‘The Ethics of International Trade: An examination of the Australian Wheat Board Scandal’ – was co-authored by Mr Ian Coghlan, lecturer in Marketing at CSU Albury, and Honours Business student Ms Elizabeth Dunlop, and was published in the prestigious International Journal of Business Research.¹

 

“The AWB case contains many lessons for the practice of ethical, and unethical, behaviour in international marketing,” according to Mr Coghlan.

 

“While AWB is just one of 2,392 organisations that were implicated in the Oil-For-Food scandal, the fact remains that payments were made and those payments were used to help support a sanctioned regime.

 

“Ethics is a multi-faceted concept that relates to how individuals behave in any one situation, and in the case of AWB it was complicated by Australia’s support of the war against terrorism in Iraq and its commitment to free trade. Equally, it was complicated by the difficulty of trading with a market that is culturally very different to the West.

 

“While there is a substantial amount of business ethics literature, there seems to be little guidance about how organisations and their employees should behave when dealing across cultures. Some even argue that international business norms do not exist and that there is a subsequent lack of universal standards of behaviour.

 

“Unfortunately, neither duty-based ethics (absolutism) nor consequence-based ethics (utilitarianism) illustrate the real world of business decision making,” Mr Coghlan said.

 

“Competition is a feature of the global market environment and it has a moderating effect on ethical behaviour. The playing field for the world wheat industry appears far from level, with bribery and kickbacks prevalent, along with subsidies and dumping under the guise of foreign aid.

 

“In the AWB case, management took a utilitarianism approach to ethical behaviour whereby a decision is proper if it produces the greatest good for the greatest number of individuals; they being Australia’s 36,000 wheat farmers and the wheat hungry people of Iraq.

 

“However, this stakeholder orientation begs questions in relation to who decides the greatest good and how individual or absolutist ethics can be reconciled with adverse consequences of decisions.

 

“The edicts of utilitarianism and absolutism may be too difficult to reconcile in a world where cultural relativism prevails despite desires for moral universalism. Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in between,” Mr Coghlan said.

 

Reference: 1. Coghlan, IA, Dunlop, ER. The Ethics of International Trade: An examination of the Australian Wheat Board Scandal. International Journal of Business Research, Volume V, Number 1, 2006.

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