CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION
1.1 General Statement
Business ethics refers to the standard of right and wrong under the context of business, a form of applied ethics that examines ethical principles and moral problems that arise in a business environment, which also advocates that apart from the mere pursuit of profit in business, ethics must also be taken into account. The term “business ethics” came into common use in the United States in the early 1970s as a result of increasing number of business scandals. From then on, the ethical stature has been highlighted: business courses, textbooks, journals have deemed it as an indispensable issue, and professional societies, centers have been established aiming to analyze the ethical behaviors of business and to enhance the public’s awareness of business ethics.
The increasing awareness of business ethics together with some deteriorating business conducts gives rise to people’s comment on company’s ethics in business, with business ethics review being a main avenue for their criticism and judgment on the ethics in business’s operation including finance, human resource, and social responsibility firms have to shoulder as a whole. Business ethics review, a The existence of these business ethics reviews is of much significance for readers since it enables readers to absorb valuable theories and latest information on business ethics, to gain a general understanding and assessment of a certain company by revealing its ethical or unethical behaviors, and to attain some enlightenment and implications from the corporate strategy of the companies under discussion.
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1.2 Research Rationale and Research Significance
The study of this topic is the result of the combined forces as follows:
Firstly, the present author has been committed to the study of business ethics for the past year and is deeply interested in the integration of ethics and business as it provides the author with a comprehensive perspective by combining philosophy with business; the determination is further strengthened by the author’s ceaseless concern over the widespread business scandals in China, especially the food safety, product quality and unfair business competition.
Secondly, confronted with the prevalent false information and distorted comment, the author is in firm belief that a critical viewpoint and thinking pattern is in need to discern right and wrong, to winnow truth from lies. Hence, the analysis of strategy or tricks in the discourse and information is required, especially when the comment is about the moral conduct, an intangible power that influences the public’s ethical perception, standard, and perhaps the tendency of values system of a nation, or the world as a whole.
Last but not least, the author highly appreciates the analysis perspective advocated by systemic functional linguistics. Interpersonal meaning or function, as one of the three meta-functions is concerned with the role relationship with others and the perception or the attitude of the wo
