Answer: According to Duska (2000, cited in Crane and Matten 2016), it is very often that people state “Business Ethics” is an oxymoron (i.e. a combination of apparently contradictory and incongruous words). In other words, many people believe that “business” and “ethics” are completely opposite that there can hardly exist something called “ethics” in “business” and that business are just immoral. Somehow it is rational that people think this way, given a string of shameful business scandals of firms living with their profit-exploitation motive (Crane and Matten 2016). Nonetheless, there are two sides to every story. Being ethical or unethical is a choice that business and businesspeople made. According to Barry (1998) business ethics is a discipline to evaluate firms regarding morality. To emphasize the weight of ethics in current business scenario, Trevino and Nelson (2015) assert that good ethics are crucial to an effective business, not just “optional” as it was in the past, and that firms can only succeed if they have a strong moral base.

Another important theory to be examined is “Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). CSR is defined as the firm’s continuous effort on taking ethics into consideration when making business decisions, being responsible to society, seeking to improve life quality of employees and their families as well as developing the community (Holme and Watts 1999). From the view of stakeholders (i.e. local community, customers, consumers, government or anyone who has an interest in the firm), today organizations are expected to go beyond making a profit and follow the law (Carroll 2015). CSR conducts differ by country (Freeman 2011) industry (Frynas 2009) and are changeable (Carroll 1999), but CSR is always greater than individuals’ liabilities and legal obligation (Frynas and Stephens 2014).