In Search for a New Balance: The Ethical Dimension of the Crisis

Wojciech Gasparski, Anna Lewicka-Strzalecka, Boleslaw Rok and Dariusz Bak

Chapter 14 in The Role of Large Enterprises in Democracy and Society, 2010, pp 189-206 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract In his book, Business Fairy Tales: Grim Realities of Fictitious Financial Reporting (2006), Cecil W. Jackson quotes the words of Arthur Levitt, the former Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), who draws attention to the habitual behaviours that lie in the grey zone; that is, between what is legal and what is not. Illusion wins over honesty, continues the cited author; we are witnessing a specific kind of deception. These words seem to be incredibly prescient, considering the crash on the US financial market. Craftiness turns out to be more valuable than integrity. Is this because — in the words of John Hendry (2004) — we live in a bimoral society? Perhaps not everybody, but rather the ‘developed’ (in terms of what: unreliability or integrity?) societies of highly active economies, though globalization stimulates the attitude of ‘getting as much as possible, as fast as possible, in whatever way’, which does not have a place of origin and continues to spread to remote places in the world.

Date: 2010
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-28313-8_14

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DOI: 10.1057/9780230283138_14

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