Introduction

Corporations are under fire. Hardly a day goes by that executive conduct doesn’t appear as a topic—or, more accurately, as a problem—in the media. This leads to increased public pressure on corporations, many of whom are reacting and publicly assuming their corporate responsibility. But how serious are they? Doesn’t the shiny façade of an environmentally and socially aware corporation simply conceal a game played according to the market’s purely economic rules? The notion that business and ethics are mutually exclusive refuses to die. And the prejudice that business success is possible only at the expense of morality continues to prevail. Or as the satirist Karl Kraus alledgedly responded to a student: “You want to study business ethics? Then study either one or the other!”