Managers’ commitment to contribute to sustainable development holds the key to their long-term business success and may be a source of competitive advantage. The managerial perception of business ethics is influenced by the level of moral development and personal characteristics of managers. These perceptions are also shaped by forces existing in the environment of the firm, including available resources, societal expectations, sector, and regulations. The resource-based perspective can thus contribute to the analysis of ethical issues offering important insights on how (...) they can influence the environmental strategy of the firm. The findings of this study show that firm resources have a strong influence on business managers’ ethical attitudes. In addition, the application of resource-based rationales to ethical issues can be justified in the following several ways: it influences a managerial perception of natural environment as a competitive opportunity, it requires investments of financial and human resources, flexibility and speed in the adaptation to environmental changes, and it creates new resource-based opportunities through changes in prevention pollution technology, policy process, and market forces. (shrink)

Contemporary economic thought presumes that individuals in a society always act according to their self-interest or private economic incentives, while important ethical motivations for action, such as a concern for others and public interest, are largely ignored. This paper is based on my experience of teaching an undergraduate course that highlighted the divergence between economic incentives and ethical motives for action in present-day life and business. Teaching tools such as lectures, case and group discussions were employed to address important ethical (...) dilemmas of individuals and managers in contemporary societies. Readings underscored the evolving relationship of business ethics and economic incentives, and the relevance of ancient ethical principles (e.g., Ethics of Interdependence, and Ethics of Prudence and Self-Development) to present-day business ethics. The course emphasized the imminent need in contemporary societies to reduce the divergence between economic incentives and ethical motives for action, and called for a greater understanding of business ethics today, given the complex ethical concerns that managers confront in the current global environment. (shrink)

One of the five pillars of the Islam, zakat (alms) was made necessary after the hijra. Although Zakat was one of the most important resources of Islamic state treasury for many years, it was excluded from the state authority in the period of Omar bin Abdul-Aziz. In recent years, it has been seen that some Muslim-majority states have made significant attempts to manage zakat under the control of the state. For example; Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sudan, and Nigeria are very important (...) states in terms of zakat application in İslamic world and Malaysia, a Southeast Asian country, comes first among those. Especially after 1990, Malaysia activated a new zakat management. This study deals with the Malaysian zakat system in the context of the state administration of zakat. The aim of the study is to examine the Malaysian zakat system in a comprehensive way. In the study, the history of zakat system in Malaysia, the current zakat models applied in there and the areas to which zakat is distributed are investigated. As a qualitative research method, document analysis was employed in the study. In this context, many international studies were examined which are directly related to the subject, and twenty-five Malaysian websites belonging to the institutions which collect and distribute the funds were also scanned. It has been found that Malaysian zakat system consists of public model, semi-public model and private model and seen that the states are divided into three regions and different zakat models are applied in each region. (shrink)

Located at the crossroads of the Eastern and Western world, Turkey today is characterized by a demographically versatile and modernizing society as well as a rapidly developing economy. Currently, the country is negotiating its accession to the European Union. This article yields some factual grounding into the ongoing value-related debate concerning Turkey's potential EU-membership. It describes a mixed-methodology study on moral reasoning in Austria and Turkey. In this study, the arguments given by individuals when evaluating ethically problematic situations in business (...) were compared. Although there were major consistencies, a number of differences were found. These differences, however, were not in the substance of arguments used but in their relative frequency. Overall, our findings suggest that young, well-educated urban individuals from Western Christian and Eastern Islamic countries are highly consistent in their moral reasoning. (shrink)