Professors and non-academic economic experts continued Boston University’s Padeia Project conference yesterday in the School of Management with a panel discussing the role of companies in solving problems raised by globalization.
The discussion, part of the conference to discuss business, ethics and culture, was entitled ‘The Ethics of Political Economy.’
Professors from SMG and other departments, including International Relations and Philosophy, and economic experts from non-academic sectors all participated in the forum. The main topics were cultural misunderstandings and economic inequalities, and businesses’ roles in globalization’s problems and their solutions.
Panelists differed over how companies competing in a free-market system can be obligated to care of social issues.
Katherine Marshall of the World Bank and professor Bradley Goggins, head of the Center for Corporate Citizenship at Boston College, both emphasized the need for corporations to agree on basic principles about their employees’ human rights and protection of the environment.
Corporations could be more ethical in their overseas operations without losing out to rival multinationals, Marshall said. Such a set of agreed principles, in effect a Universal Code of Human Rights, has been pursued in the United Nations, but not universally accepted, she said.
Goggins supported further steps toward internationally agreed regulations, though he said enforcing them is more difficult.
‘Shareholders won’t be enforcement mechanisms,’ he said, implying that the average investor doesn’t care whether a company has needy laborers working under bad conditions or dumps pollutants into foreign waterways. Shareholders care only about whether their stock rises or falls.
But SMG professor James Post said such regulation would be contradictory to the free markets that make globalization possible. The system ‘tries to have the least oversight as possible,’ he said.
Post talked about Hewlett-Packard helping disadvantaged people afford computers and said private enterprise can do a certain amount of social good when it is aligned with the company’s self-interest.
Panel members agreed participants in the system should strive for trust, which is valuable in relationships between company and customer, as well as between countries. That goal can be reached through cultural understanding and universal rights, they said.
Marshall said American business could benefit personally, while at the same time helping international relations by having a higher level of cultural understanding.
‘There is a sense of the predominance of American values crowding all else out in the world and this is part of what fuels fundamentalism,’ she said.
She discussed the public relations and worker skill benefits to businesses from appreciating and assisting the culture of foreign nations where they operate.
She pointed to the fact that the American educational system lacks any education about other cultures. Expecting other cultures to simply assimilate with American ways is unreasonable and unfair, she said.
‘That is the classical English outlook just let them speak English,’ she said. ‘I think there has to be a cultural exchange back and forth.’
Certain cultural values, like the concept that some corruption in business makes it run better, lead to negative consequences, oppress the poor and should be changed. Still, she emphasized the idea that people should understand cultural differences, and especially Western corporations operating in foreign nations.
