4. Recontextualizing the Management Idea of ‘Business Ethics’
4.9. Concluding remarks
In this chapter, I have demonstrated how a code of ethics, the Ferring Philosophy, and an ethics program revolving around this code, meet severe challenges when it travels across different business units and sociocultural contexts within a multinational pharmaceutical corporation. This program encounters employee expectations that differ significantly from those ideals of empowerment and reflexivity at an individual and an organizational level that are engrained in the Scandinavian context and which also permeate the ethics program.
I began the chapter by exploring the first part of research question 172. I demonstrated how the management idea of business ethics has travelled into Ferring Pharmaceuticals and materialized in its code of ethics and in the Global Ethics Office which administers the corporate ethics program.
We saw how the Global Ethics Office has chosen a values-based approach to business ethics that focuses on fostering a culture of ethical behaviour and responsibility among all staff. I then turned to the second part of research question 1, showing how Ferring’s ethics program was interpreted and recontextualized as it travelled across national and vocational contexts. I argued that the Ferring Philosophy, as well as the ways in which ethics officers seek to convey it, rests upon values that are widespread and deeply engrained within a Scandinavian sociocultural context. However, participant observation and interviews revealed that the Ferring Philosophy, the ethics program and the ways in
72 ‘What material shape has the management idea of ‘business ethi cs’ taken in Ferring Pharmaceuticals and how is this idea interpreted and recontextualized as it travels to business units abroad?’
139 which it is communicated by the ethics officers was perceived with less enthusiasm within the
corporate headquarter in Switzerland and within a subsidiary in China.
The values of empowerment and reflexivity at both individual and organizational levels, and the related training practices that functioned well in the original Scandinavian context, could not be easily
‘transferred’ when the ethics program travelled into business units in Switzerland and China. At headquarters, the ethics program was met by scepticism so profound that the Global HR department developed a new set of global Leadership Principles that were intended to provide employees with clearer guidance of preferred behaviours and to offer management better tools for assessing
employees´ performance according to these behaviours. Similarly, in the Chinese business context, a value program containing guidance for behaviour and do’s and don’ts was introduced. Of course, I do not assume that human resources officers have developed these values programs entirely alone, and I do not disregard local management’s role. Nevertheless, perhaps because HR officers were
instrumental for developing these frameworks, the critique was voiced most strongly among this group;
and it was a critique with similar content and similar solutions across national contexts.
These findings highlight the fact that a code of ethics and an ethics program, because of its specific cultural assumptions and embedded practices, will always be reinterpreted, adapted or changed when moved to sites with other frameworks of meaning. However, the question remains as to what
frameworks of meaning might be most salient to focus upon and specifically, whether national culture deserves the significance it is often given, almost by default, within studies of large and complex organizations and international policy ‘transfer’ generally.
Perhaps the barriers to such ‘transfer’ derive from other characteristics besides national cultural specificities. We may benefit from other ways of conceiving of organizational complexity, and I argue here that we should pay more attention to differences between internal functions and vocational communities within the organization rather than to presumed differences between the geographical locations of its subsidiaries. I will seek to explore the influence of multi-vocational aspects of
organizations, and whether they may sometimes even be more compelling when seeking to understand what happens when business ethics programs travel. The remaining chapters within this dissertation are dedicated to investigating this.
It must be noted, however, that I am not suggesting that national culture plays an insignificant role. It seems to be precisely the Scandinavian traits of emphasis on moral uplift and on embracing the ambiguity in the ethics program that human resources officers in China and at the Swiss headquarters
140 find most challenging. Moreover, as mentioned earlier, previous studies have demonstrated that the characteristics of the Chinese educational system tend to be more instructional oriented (learning by rote) than Scandinavian teaching styles which emphasize reflection and individual decision-making (cf.
Chen and Lee 2008). Hence, in this way, national cultural traits deriving e.g. from the educational system surely play their part.
However, I found that the criticism voiced by human resources officers was nonetheless very similar among human resources officers across national contexts. Perhaps there are times when national culture is not always the most central element, and where we should focus on the culture of the vocational groups, or what I call ‘vocational communities of practice’.
Despite openness within the Global Ethics Office for encouraging local adaptations of their materials, as exemplified by the ethics officer Jane, who emphasized that local facilitators should feel free to change the ethics workshop to fit their local contexts, the Ethics Office, in exporting its program, remained steadfast that the program should not be turned into a ‘compliance approach’ with pre-defined answers, clear rules and check-lists of do’s and don’ts. However, by maintaining this position, they simultaneously maintained a fixed standard that did not lend itself easily to local recontextualizations.
Thus, while communicating a transnational approach to the ethics program (cf. Filatotchev and Stahl 2015) by encouraging local counterparts to make the workshops and concepts their own, the Global Ethics Office failed to recognize that the only thing they did not allow for adaptations of – i.e. their educational approach to working with business ethics rested upon cultural values that were salient in the Scandinavian context but which did not easily translate into other contexts. Hereby, although the Global Ethics Office did not explicitly state that it was proposing a global standard, their approach within the ethics program showed to be a global standard in practice. And this Scandinavian-based standard seems to have hindered local recontextualizations of the program. This study thus underscores the difficulties pointed out by Filatotchev and Stahl (2015) with having a globally standardized approach to ethics and CSR-related issues in a multi-national or a multi-vocational company.
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