第三期1/5

In today's lecture, the key issue we are going to discuss is ethics in companies. I'd like to talk about, in the first place, the importance of ethics in today's business world. Well, in the old days measuring company performance was simply a case of looking at turnover, profits and dividends. However, the last few years have seen environmental and ethical issues move to be the forefront of public concern and have resulted in a closer scrutiny of a company's performance of ethics. Today globalization is allowing companies to source from even greater distance. This enables a company to exploit the economic advantages of a low labor costs in one country and high market value in another. Of course, they have to be careful not to be seen to be exploiting the workers. Consumers are becoming even more sensitive to the exploitation stories and indeed environmental issues. This is because as consumers become richer and become used to spending more on a product, they also feel that they should be spending ethically. This is backed up by media stories and press items, and exploitation stories receive very good press. And of course, they can cause great damage.