Fundamentals of Management, 8th ed

Sarbanes–Oxley

Act of 2002

A law that requires

CEOs and CFOs to

vouch personally for

the truthfulness and

fairness of their

firms’ financial

disclosures and

imposes tough

new measures to

deter and punish

corporate

and accounting

fraud and corruption

46

Part 1: An Introduction to Management

Copyright 2016 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).

Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.

---

Social Responsibility in Organizations

As we have seen in this chapter, ethics are associated with individuals and their decisions

and behaviors. Organizations themselves do not have ethics, but they relate to their

environments in ways that often involve ethical dilemmas and decisions. These situations

are generally referred to within the context of the organization’s

social responsibility

.

Specifically, social responsibility is the set of obligations an organization has to protect

and enhance the societal context in which it functions. Some of the more salient argu-

ments on both sides of this contemporary debate are summarized in Figure 2.2 and are

further explained in the following sections.