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Week 3 Assignment: Ethical Decision Making and Hiring
MGMT314: Week #3 Paper:
Include an abstract
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For this assignment, you should focus on the reading material for week 3 AND use our library for research and support.
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The body of your paper: (3 Pages total BODY in length)-Your thoughts should be supported with relevant course content and library research.
Explain the differences, importance, and purpose of both the code of conduct and the code of ethics. Secondly, tell me about some of the factors that you would use to make ethical hiring decisions in an organization. Why would these be important to include in the hiring process (Example of things that you might include: Legal Ground Rules or other items in our reading material or library that would be considered in the process). Format: APA Paper (With an abstract).
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J Bus Ethics (2016) 138:53–66
DOI 10.1007/s10551-015-2581-9
Code of Ethics: A Stratified Vehicle for Compliance
Jennifer Adelstein • Stewart Clegg
Received: 31 July 2013 / Accepted: 13 February 2015 / Published online: 21 February 2015
Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
Abstract Ethical codes have been hailed as an explicit
vehicle for achieving more sustainable and defensible organizational practice. Nonetheless, when legal compliance
and corporate governance codes are conflated, codes can be
used to define organizational interests ostentatiously by
stipulating norms for employee ethics. Such codes have a
largely cosmetic and insurance function, acting subtly and
strategically to control organizational risk management and
protection. In this paper, we conduct a genealogical discourse analysis of a representative code of ethics from an
international corporation to understand how management
frames expectations of compliance. Our contribution is to
articulate the problems inherent in codes of ethics, and we
make some recommendations to address these to benefit
both an organization and its employees. In this way, we
show how a code of ethics can provide a foundation for
ethical sustainability, while addressing management intentions and employees’ ethical satisfaction.
Keywords Code of ethics Organizational risk
management Business ethics Power relationships
Governance Domination Genealogical discourse
analysis
J. Adelstein (&) S. Clegg
Centre for Management & Organization Studies (CMOS),
University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]
S. Clegg
Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal
S. Clegg
Copenhagen Business School, Frederiksberg, Denmark
S. Clegg
EM-Lyon, Écully, France
… for the distance is so great between how we live and how we ought to
live that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done learns
his ruin rather than his preservation…(Machiavelli 1520 [1980], p. 66).
Introduction
Machiavelli’s exhortation still resonates with implications
for organizations in the twenty-first century. Against a
backdrop of economic austerity and embarrassing corporate misdemeanours, the need for corporate executives to
adopt stringent economic measures that may also necessitate a review of corporate governance procedures may
seem closer to ruin rather than preservation. From the
perspective of managerial elites, ‘ordinary’ people who just
do not know what is good for them need to be brought to
heel to ensure the survival of the institutional apparatus in
which they function: hence, organizational processes must
be implemented that discipline them normatively. Corporate governance and codes of ethics are usually regarded as
answering the call for discipline that corporations, as a
legal fiction, require of all their members. Intertwining of
corporate governance with member compliance signified
by doing what is right is becoming a normal feature of
many organizations’ assumptions about how managing the
organization should be done.
In this paper, we address assumptions embedded in organizational codes of ethics, also known as codes of professional conduct, through close inspection of a particular
and significant case. Specifically, we address assumptions
that the ethics of individual employees need to align with
what management elites define as the organization’s interests. Tacitly, by extension, management’s interests are
taken to be definitive of the ‘real interests’ (Lukes 1974) of
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54
those subject to these codes. A corollary of the premise that
management is entitled to define real interests is that if the
ethics of individuals and the organization do not align,
whatever the distance between an organizational member’s
moral integrity and that of the organization, then it is the
individuals who need to abandon (or at least modify) personal ethical choices for what management deems ought to
be done.
While creating a nexus between business and ethics may
be admirable in and of itself, there is potential conflict of
interest when a code of ethics is conceived as primarily a
mode of organizational risk management. If it is conceived
in terms that stipulate its authoritativeness in a unidirectional imposition, it potentially overrides the moral integrity and choice of organizational members. Such a
strategy creates a potential for conflicts of interest between
ordinary members and organizational elite management, as
we will show. We illustrate the debate through a genealogical discourse analysis of a code from one global
organization that is typically representative of the codes of
many other such institutions. We question the ethical validity of such a code’s rhetorical technologies with its real
purpose being mitigating risk by controlling individual
members’ ethical choices.
We choose as our subject for empirical enquiry one of
the world’s most significant and globally visible organizations Microsoft Corporation. We do so not to position it
as exemplary but as typical. Microsoft has a welldocumented approach to ethics, and its code is a typical
example of many other corporate codes of ethics, so we
particularize it here in order to understand how these codes
typically frame expectations relating to organizational
members’ behaviours. Our aim is not to present a case
study or empirical investigation of the code in practice but
to understand what the code actually articulates. We analyse the code discursively as a document that states policies. Hence, the genre to which this paper belongs is policy
analysis at the organizational level, in which we search for
contradictions and tensions in the discourse.
Methodologically, we use Foucault’s genealogical discourse analysis (1972, 1980, 1981, 1988). This paper begins with an explanation of the methodology of
genealogical discourse analysis. We follow with an analysis of the conventional codes’ literature before positing
the view that codes of ethics are premised on strategies of
control and risk management. We conduct analysis of our
site of enquiry—Microsoft’s code of ethics—to show how
management couples legal compliance with non-legal internal corporate governance in equal measures as prescriptions for employee behaviour and disciplinary actions.
We argue that by prescribing ethical behaviours, not only
for legal compliance but also for corporate interests,
management aims to effect compliance by removing
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J. Adelstein, S. Clegg
individual ethical options. In Microsoft’s code, we find a
discourse of risk management that is inextricably tied to
ethics, such that deviance from one implies deviance from
both, with potential power effects being reprimand or
dismissal.
Framing the Subject
The primary concern of corporate codes of ethics is to
assure compliance by staff with interests defined
specifically as corporate as a form of insurance against any
breach of corporate interests. The implicit assumption is
that accepting a contract of employment entails accepting
all of its implied conditions. It is assumed that a member
joins an organization of her own free will and in so doing,
must accept the rule of the organization. She must do so
regardless of whether she considers the ways in which she
is being ruled are ethical. It is also assumed that whatever
sovereign powers of autonomous reasoning she may have
will require subordination to the judgments embedded in
the ethical codes.
In the private sector, there is an explicit set of power
relations framing contracts of employments and the submission of the contracting agent to all that they imply
corporately. In the private sector, Capital hires Labour and,
for the time the capabilities of the person are rented, those
employed must respect Capital’s preferences as expressed
in a code of ethics. If there is a conflict between the ethics
of the individual and those of the code, then the common
assumption is that the individual’s preferences must be
secondary and subordinate. That this is the case requires
that individual employees cannot have ethical autonomy;
where their preferences, values and interests conflict with
those of the employing organization, and that whatever
ethical autonomy they can exercise will be constrained by
the implicit framework of their contract of employment.
Such contracts are an unarticulated strategy for organizational risk management.
Limitations to an individual’s ethical choice can have
profound effects on both the individual and subsequently
the organization. Organizational members may see such
limits as belittling and patronizing, leaving them with one
or other of Hirschman’s (1970) three options of exit
(leaving the organization), voice (speaking out) or loyalty
(abiding by the management’s declarations), or Goffman’s
(1961) secondary adjustment, where management’s declarations are enacted in the letter but in spirit are quietly
subverted. Management faces compliance issues around
codes of ethics and ensuring that negative consequences do
not ensue. The potential detrimental effects inherent within
codes that prescribe employee behaviour and disciplinary
actions while at the same time denying organizational
Code of Ethics
member’s moral choices and autonomy need to be recognized if potential problems are to be addressed before they
arise. We see four possible resolutions that we will explore:
first, that organizational members be encouraged to participate to some extent in the formulation and development
of the code; second, that the topic of ethics and ethical
decision-making becomes a prominent and ongoing conversation within organizations; third, that organizational
members be empowered to make ethical decisions rather
than follow rules premised on being merely organizationally risk averse; and fourth, that the code not be stratified
according to organizational roles. While codes of ethics
may be a contested terrain, management can ease potential
conflicts through communication and collaboration.
Codes of Ethics
Increasingly, in the wake of contemporary scandals from
Barings Bank (BBC News 1999) onwards, including Enron
(2000), Lehman Bros. (2004), Barclays (BBC News 2013)
and HSBC Switzerland (2015) (Treanor 2015) and continuing in the ongoing global financial crisis, many organizations have sought to link business interests, employee
ethics, and legal compliance in formal codes. The motivation is to ensure that an organization’s code of ethics has
high visibility (Basu and Palazzo 2008, p. 126) enabling
enhancement of corporate reputation (Fombrun 2005) or,
as Friedman (1970) described it, ‘‘hypocritical window
dressing’’ (Bartlett and Preston 2000). Much has already
been written about how the concern with codes of ethics
emerged (Phillips and Margolis 1999; Raar 2002; Schwartz
2004; Trevino 1986; Waddock 2000), so we will not deal
with it here.
Analytically, a corporation’s code of ethics is the
documented, formal, and legal manifestation of that organization’s expectations of ethical behaviours by its employees. It is the visibility that a code offers that enables an
organization to be judged as ethical. Indeed, according to
one institution that benchmarks codes of ethics, scoring
organizations’ performances against this benchmark and
encouraging them to broadcast the results are the criteria
for consideration as an ethical company. Such criteria include having an ‘‘ethics and compliance program, governance and corporate responsibility’’ (Ethisphere 2014).1
Implicit within such corporate prescription of employees’
ethical behaviours is the organization’s ability to manage
any allegedly ‘deviant’ behaviour by organizational
members (Trevino 1986) effectively for the benefit of the
organization. There is a strong normalizing function in the
1
Ethisphere Institute is an US-based influential ethics think tank that
surveys and publicly recognizes ethical companies.
55
deployment of these codes that suggest strategic risk is
being managed (Fombrun et al. 2000; Husted 2005).
Since the 1990s, the formulation of codes of business
ethics has been seen as a delimiter of misconduct and
prescriber of unethical behaviour perpetrated by organizational members; in effect, such codes are represented as
tools for risk management, limiting opportunities for ethical malfeasance. Most major corporations have instituted a
corporate code of ethics stating their publicly mandated
commitment to corporate governance, business ethics, and
legal compliance. Codes of ethics frame the risk that
members’ behaviours might potentially hold for an organization; hence, codes of ethics are Janus-like in their
purpose, both protecting an organization from the actions
of its members and providing a public declaration of its
ethical practices in documented form. In neither case, the
operationalizing of the code and its implementation is in
question.
Discourse and Codes of Ethics
We will now tease apart the rhetoric of a code of ethics to
enable us to understand fully its effects, assumptions and
purposes using Foucault’s genealogical discourse analysis
(1972, 1980, 1981, 1988). In doing so, we describe the
‘surfaces of emergence’ or historical contexts, in which
‘authorities of delimitation’ function to define what is included and excluded from discourse. Such authorities are
those individuals or groups who have the imprimatur of
authority within their field of knowledge. In addition, we
address ‘grids of specification’ that explain how a discourse
is disseminated and links with other discourses by other
authorities and is constituted in terms of the power relations that position various interests framed in the discourse.
The text is the object of enquiry.
Organizationally, codes typically fall within the ambit of
the Office of Compliance (usually within an organization’s
legal structure), the institutional gatekeeper that promotes
the official management discursive positions, sometimes
against alternative interpretations. Given that the corporation is a legal entity, this assignment of responsibility is
appropriate. However, one effect of this is that ethical
questions tend to be interpreted through the prism of a legal
framework in service to the corporation and how its
counsel defines its legally framed responsibilities. Hence,
alternative conceptions of ethics by employees or others
who may have different interpretations of ethical behaviours in organizations tend to be excluded from official
interpretation. The compliance gatekeepers have legitimacy through their standing and high regard as authorities
whose expertise organizational management acknowledges. Codes are updated when deemed necessary by the
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Office of Compliance to limit the range of interpretive
possibilities. Closure can only ever be temporary, given the
inherent indexicality of meaning and openness of interpretive horizons (Garfinkel 1967), and so gatekeepers must
maintain vigilance against the emergence and development
of unauthorized understandings that can cause interpretive
drift. Compliance is managed by limiting the variety of
alternative conceptions, thus minimizing drift from official
discursive positions.
Authorities of delimitation are not just internal to organizations: they are supported by others in different fields
of knowledge, who not only take up the discourse but also
try to delimit alternative conceptions of the discourse. For
example, in the discourse of ethical codes there exists think
tanks such as the Ethisphere Institute,2 which has the imprimatur of authority to decide on and award prizes to
ethical corporations based on consideration of the codes of
ethics of more than 1000 companies, thereby supporting its
position through quantitative data comparison. Through its
system of awards, Ethisphere’s role is not only as official
external arbiter of organizational codes of ethics but also as
a disseminator of the normalized view of what a ‘good’
code of ethics should include. In this way, Ethisphere plays
an institutionally isomorphic role as organizations
2
Ethisphere Institute describes itself as a ‘‘leading international
think-tank dedicated to the research and promotion of best practices in
corporate ethics and compliance… honorees not only promote ethical
business standards and practices internally, they exceed legal
compliance minimums and shape future industry standards by
introducing best practices today’’ (http://ethisphere.com/worldsmost-ethical/wme-honorees). One of Ethisphere’s areas of research
is to examine codes of business conduct and score them for best
practices. Its website states that the Institute has scored the codes of
the Fortune 1000 companies and other global companies. (http://
www.ethisphere.com/history). Microsoft has been ranked in the
category of one of the ‘‘World’s Most Ethical (WME) Companies’’
between 2011 and 2014. Since 2007, Ethisphere has run an annual
survey of the World’s Most Ethical Companies. Its rating system is
based on a comprehensive questionnaire that includes self-rating
questions, awards/recognition by other institutions, board governance
activities, board oversight of compliance and ethics, job title of person
responsible for the compliance and ethics program, the code of ethics,
and ethics training. The questionnaire has five core categories: Ethics
and Compliance program (worth 25 per cent of the total score);
Reputation, Leadership and Innovation (20 per cent); Governance (10
per cent); Corporate Citizenship and Responsibility (25 per cent); and
Culture of Ethics (20 per cent). It is this last category that interests us
in this paper. It ‘‘looks at the culture of ethics at the organization
concerning widely accepted or unaccepted norms as it pertains to
ethical conduct. Starting with adoption of a values-based culture and
building on those core guidelines by having the workforce buy into
the culture and not only know it, but live it’’ (http://ethisphere.com/
worlds-most-ethical/scoring-methodology. However, the survey does
not address the issue of potential moral conflict or moral integrity
between a corporation and its employees. It is this prickly area that is
the subject of this paper.
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J. Adelstein, S. Clegg
mimetically normalize their codes on the models that win
approval. As organizations adjust to the specific rhetoric of
Ethisphere’s ethics framework within their own codes of
ethics, these awards gain credence, thus further institutionalizing the legitimacy of Ethisphere and the discourse
of ethics that it prescribes. Indeed, legitimacy by both
Ethisphere and the organizations that participate in the
award systems is gained through mutual ‘‘cultural alignment and imitation of that which is already deemed to be
legitimate’’ (Long and Driscoll 2008, p. 174). Such awards
affirm the literalness of dominant interpretations of the
codes. Ambiguities in interpretation can be resolved by the
Office of Compliance which, as the official gatekeeper,
arbitrates and enacts any disciplinary procedures they deem
to be necessary.
Ethics as Control: The Dominant Discourse
of Integrity-Based Approaches
An organizational code of ethics may be interpreted as a
means of managing and controlling employee behaviours
desired by management. In their efforts to control employee behaviours some organizations increase the
numbers of business practice officers, include ethical
values and compliance in performance assessments in a
tick-box fashion and investigate infractions and take remedial action (Paine 2010). For other organizations that
are less active, the code of ethics is assumed to provide
legitimacy (Long and Driscoll 2008; Meyer and Rowan
1977).
Paine (1994, p. 106) argues that in an integrity-based
approach, ‘‘ethics has everything to do with management’’
because it reflects an organization’s ‘operating culture’.
Culturally oriented ethics rely on managerial responsibility
for ethical behaviours in combination with legal compliance, a position also argued by Christensen (2008). Paine’s
concern is what ought to be done rather than what is done
or may be done by organizational members. She describes
various corporate initiatives such as those related to ‘‘diversity, quality, customer service, health and safety, the
environment, legal compliance, professionalism, corporate
culture, stakeholder engagement, reputation management,
corporate identity…’’ and more (Paine 2003, p. 3).
Some elements of codes have the force of national
regulation and law behind them. Such is the case with
occupational health and safety legislation, equal employment opportunity and other areas where the state mandates
acceptable behaviours. However, Paine (2003) dissolves
the discursive boundaries between legal compliance (such
as diversity, health and safety, and the environment) and
self-governance strictures (quality, customer service, professionalism, corporate culture, reputation, corporate
Code of Ethics
identity, etc.). Being locally preferential rules, the latter are
not legally constitutive as would be the case of those
mandated by juridical decree, with legislative authority.
These rules or structured ‘‘guiding principles’’ (Paine 2003,
p. 111) in codes of ethics are a key part of a top-down
strategy: they express strategic preferences with respect to
areas of behaviour deemed significant.
In essence, reciprocity between the organization and
its members is neither presumed nor left to chance. What
are promoted are routines that seek to align the moral
integrity of the individual with that of the organization.
Organizational members rarely arrive at these routines as
a result of any form of democratic participation. That the
organization sets out the frame for ethical behaviour
presumes a great deal about the ethicality of the organization. Moreover, it is a frame that has to deal with
the extreme contingency of events; its ethicality is tested
for each new event that the organization encounters
(Deroy and Clegg 2011). To the extent that organizational members predicate organizational ethicality on
rule-following behaviour, there is no necessity for decision and judgment, and hence no ethicality is at stake
(Clegg et al. 2007). It is only when events occur, defined
as matter for which no rule is present, that these issues
come into play.
Codes of ethics are closely tied to organizational objectives since managerial and organizational objectives are
enshrined in them. As Rasche and Esser (2007) argue,
these objectives have a relation to matters of compliance
both externally (compliance with the law) and internally
(compliance with organizational regulations) (Rasche and
Esser 2007, p. 109). Christensen (2008) argues that while
models of ethical decision-making typically do not include
the law, legal norms are implicit even if they are exogenous
to moral thinking. While law and ethics may be related,
they are not the same (Christensen 2008, p. 451). Yet by
folding both corporate rules and legal compliance into a
strategic discourse of integrity-based ethics, managerial
preferences become a natural and normal part of what is
constituted as legal compliance. While such compliance is
stipulative, managerial preferences are not: they lack legal
sanction and remit and are preferential rather than constitutive rules for conduct (Shwayder 1965). Such strategic
ethics not only require organizational members to make
interpretations that management deems correct and then to
take appropriate action but also that as a matter of ethical
principle each employee should accept the legitimacy of
doing so by virtue of accepting her contract of employment. The capacity of the individual to act according to
personal ethical choices is removed, and discursive
boundaries are closed to alternative interpretations. Corporate governance and legal compliance are entwined
within the code of ethics.
57
Unpacking Assumptions About Integrity-Based
Practice
The overarching culture of the organization in question
may be inherently coherent, robust and freely shared by its
employees, such that they will feel free to give voice
(Hirschman 1970) or it may be characterized by differentiation or fragmentation (Martin 1992). Where employees
do not tacitly or explicitly resist the imposition of ethical
codes, they hold their counsel. Acquiescence may be taken
to be loyalty but could just as easily be the result of being
dominated and subordinated. An absence of dissent may
signal either authentic consensus, or one that is more apparent than real. The conditions for democratic consensus
are rarely to be encountered in the normal conditions of
organizational life; more likely, preferences will be compromised in the interests of established authority and its
power relations. The simple management response is: if
you don’t like the way we operate, you can work somewhere else. However, this may not always be possible.
Essentially, within the organizational ambit we are
dealing with a localized problem of order and management
intentionality. Codes of ethics per se are not legally binding
enactments but local social contracts in a Hobbesian sense.
They are preferential rather than constitutive rules. While
Hobbes argued such social contracts, between sovereign
authorities and ordinary people, were a necessary fiction
with which to preserve peace and order, we prefer the realism of Machiavelli’s arguments in the Prince. Organizations align the authority of legality with organizational
self-interest embedded in a ‘code of ethics’ to define the
limits and extension of their sovereignty. Such codes are
not the result of a founding social contract but rather
constitutive of the place of employment. The aim is to
restrict organizational members from articulating ‘unauthorized’ behaviours either by conduct not contained in the
code’s preferences or by their interpretations of the code.
To counter any such tendencies, the code prescribes the
authorized and ‘appropriate’ behaviours that it licenses as
sovereign accounts. It is proposed that such licensing will
create a stable organizational order within a disciplinary
structure. In political theory, it is the ideological and repressive state apparatuses that enforce sovereign will; in
commercial organizations, it is an alliance between an organization’s legal department and its management to enforce, monitor and discipline that serves to legitimize
organizational self-interest within a legal framework.
When considered as a sphere for strategic risk management, a code of ethics presents an ethical problem. How
ethical is it for an organization to serve up a utilitarian
mélange of legal compliance inseparable from management-designed governance through which organizational
members’ moral autonomy is filtered? In other words, is it
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58
ethical for organizations to try to influence the ethical
subjectivity (Clegg et al. 2007, p. 107) of their members
and persuade them to act in particular ways to protect the
interests of the organization, if doing so denies employees’
own ethical views?
While rhetoric about the organization may well seduce
top management teams, it is rare that rank-and-file employees will be so easily pleased. Many ethnographic
studies detail the considerable cynicism and distance in
‘the ranks’ (Collinson 2003; Collinson and Ackroyd 2005;
Collier and Esteban 2007; Fleming and Spicer 2002, 2003,
2007; Mumby 2005; Trevino and Nelson 2011). The gap
between prescribed business codes of ethics and their
subjective interpretation by organizational members hinges
on mundane practices (Clegg et al. 2007; see also Gordon
et al. 2009a, b). The relationship between rule following
and rule violation is an indication of ethics-as-practice
(Clegg et al. 2007, pp. 107–108). In context, ethics do not
exist on paper or in a virtual space but in concrete practices: it is not what the rules stipulate but what the actors do
that is important (Gordon et al. 2009a, b). Daily practices
by organizational members rather than executive management’s dictates frame mundane organizational behaviour,
and it is in this mundanity that the practice of ethics
resides.
Although research into how organizational members can
and do interpret codes of ethics day-to-day is relevant and
worthwhile, this is not our intention here. In this paper, our
attention is drawn to the codes of ethics themselves and the
rhetoric that is inscribed within them. Such rhetoric
typically incorporates both prescriptive behaviours and
disciplinary actions for deviance with clear warnings about
levels of tolerance and reveals the tacit domain assumptions made by management in the organization in question.
Such codes may have little to do with the ethical world of
the individuals employed: they do not serve to enhance the
moral autonomy and integrity of organizational members
so much as bind them in subservience. Ethics become
another face of domination through their capacity to restrict
organizational practices.
Many management and organization studies scholars, as
well as students of ethics, are concerned with the way organizations deal with ethical issues through formalizing
and enforcing ethical rules (see, Bauman 1993; Bowie
1999; Jackson 2000; Jones 2003; Kjonstad and Willmott
1995; Ten Bos 1997). Organizations typically prescribe
forms of ethical behaviour through rules that focus on
framing members’ intentions and limiting the consequences of their actions (Rasche and Esser 2007; Trevino
et al. 1999; Trevino and Nelson 2011). Such formal rules
tend to focus exclusively on motivating employee behaviours that benefit the organization and serve to protect
management from blame and legal consequences (Trevino
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J. Adelstein, S. Clegg
et al. 1999, p. 133). Indeed, the primary objective of codes
of ethics is often to minimize business risk rather than
produce ethicality. The reduction of risk is sought through
corporate affairs guardians’ monitoring and auditing of
compliance to enforce ethical rules (Donaldson 2003; Microsoft 2014b).
What is defined as acceptable seeks to protect the
business from unethical consequences as well as signalling
business priorities. Kjonstad and Willmott (1995, p. 446)
argue, ‘‘the provision of codes of conduct is an insufficient,
and possibly a perverse, means of recognizing the significance, and promoting the development, of ethical corporate behaviour’’. Having set the scene for ethics as a
managerial preference, we now move on to analyse the
Microsoft Code of Ethics discursively to elaborate our argument. Again, it should be stressed that the argument is
wholly one of discursive analysis in which the text is the
thing under consideration.
Microsoft: A Case of Integrity-Based Ethics
Microsoft is named by Ethisphere Institute as ‘‘one of the
world’s most ethical companies’’ (Ethisphere 2014, Nerney
2011). It is for this reason, as well as its evident significance in the contemporary global economy, that we
chose this firm as our empirical example. Microsoft’s code
of ethics embodies certain artefacts and cultural objects
that become visible when interrogated. To understand
Microsoft’s code of ethics more deeply, we conducted a
genealogical discourse analysis of three documents that
collectively comprise Microsoft’s ersatz code of ethics: the
Microsoft Finance Code of Professional Conduct (2014a),
Microsoft Values (2014b), and Microsoft’s Standards of
Business Conduct (2014c). Microsoft describes its Standards of Business Conduct as an extension of its Values
(Microsoft 2014b) and its ‘‘commitment to ethical business
practices and regulatory compliance’’ (Microsoft 2014c)
and its Finance Code of Professional Conduct as ‘‘principles of ethical business conduct’’ (Microsoft 2014a). The
code has not been updated since 2010 (as stated on the
website) except for the removal of any reference to formerCEO Steve Ballmer who was signatory on a personalized
letter to Microsoft employees. The substance of his letter is
now incorporated in a generalized section on Microsoft
values.
Our argument is that Microsoft’s code of ethics aims to
ensure compliance not only with the law but also its own
corporate rules. Given that this is the case, how does the
code frame intentions in such a way that subjects (employees) will be governable, ethical, and biddable? First,
according to Microsoft’s Code of Professional Conduct
(Microsoft 2014a), the intertwining of legal compliance
Code of Ethics
and Microsoft’s corporate issues are such that any violations of Microsoft’s ethical codes ‘‘may result in disciplinary action, up to and including termination of
employment’’ (Microsoft 2014a, b, c). The edict includes
such activities as to ‘‘share knowledge and maintain professional skills important and relevant to stakeholders’
needs’’ (Microsoft 2014a). Interpreting
