Spirituality and Business

Business ethics, as an academic discipline and a management practice related to corporate social responsibility (CSR), emerged in the late 1970s and the 1980s. It was a promising movement in the shadow of the globalization process. It started in the United States and followed five to ten years later in all industrialized countries, including those in Europe. Some companies developed their first codes of ethics, mission statements and charters of values at that time. Seminars were held for managers in order to look at ethical dilemmas and analyze ethical case studies. The Body Shop, the well-known cosmetics company, went a step further in the 1990s by launching a major social and ethical audit of its operations. Shell, in its famous report “People, Planet and Profits,” applied the notion of sustainable entrepreneurship to a new sort of reporting, which measured and analyzed not only the company’s financial goals and results, but also its ecological and social goals.