Values and Accounting

Ole Thyssen
Additional contact information
Ole Thyssen: Copenhagen Business School

Chapter 11 in Business Ethics and Organizational Values, 2009, pp 208-229 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract If values are to mean anything to an organization, it has to be apparent that they are not empty values, but active premises for its decisions. That does not mean that an organization can limit itself to ethical premises. There are always many types of premises. Decisions require an ongoing balancing, which might eventually become second nature and routine. The important thing is that values remain sufficiently active for them to offer resistance and avoid being outstripped every time there is a slight dip in the financial accounts, sales figures or interest rates, or if political decisions change the basis for the organizational planning. In rough times, it can seem tempting to scrap ethical concerns and focus on ‘the necessities’, but it could also be argued that, particularly in difficult times, ethics becomes indispensable because it delivers premises for decisions when other premises — financial or technological — are wonky. Ethics is not superfluous; or in the words of Voltaire: ‘The superfluous is a highly necessary matter.’ There is no inherent conflict, and no inherent harmony, between ethics, money and power. It all depends on the way in which the money is made and the power exercised.

Keywords: Business Ethic; Public Organization; Ethical Accounting; Ethical Demand; Concerned Party (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-25093-2_11

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9780230250932

DOI: 10.1057/9780230250932_11

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().