Ethical Edge: Tales of Organizations That Have Faced Moral Crisis

Launched under an inspirational book imprint, this thoughtfully instructional volume maps out the high road for businesses and other organizations wishing to avoid the legal pitfalls of ethical lapses and to establish self-regulating climates of social responsibility. The authors, all affiliated with the Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass., present an array of case studies to show how a company writes a code of ethics, appoints an ethics officer and establishes a culture of enforcement, complete with whistle-blowing strategies, that reaches through the ranks to every employee. The cases presented here-Prudential-Bache, General Electric, United Way of America (nonprofit) and others-cover well-publicized scandals that have resulted in costly judgments and loss of prestige for the firms. But the organizations rallied and reformed themselves as more and more companies learned from them and built value systems into their own cultures. (Mar.)