Aims of this site
The broad aim of this website is to encourage and support the teaching and studying of business ethics in business and management schools. Courses in Business Ethics have multiplied in recent years alongside a growing concern with the ethical practices of business. There has been a proliferation in the number of books on the subject and the creation of specialist journals devoted to the subject.

Although in the USA (Kelly 2003) there have been some worrying signs, that business ethics may be falling out of fashion in business schools, there are other indications that business ethics is expanding its place in the business curriculum. There are, for example, moves to make business ethics a compulsory part of business degrees in California (Anon 2003).The intention of this website is to encourage and support such trends.

Who will benefit from this site?
This web-site is for academics and students interested in teaching and research in Business Ethics. Business ethics is taught in UK universities by academics with a range of diverse backgrounds, some with a grounding in management and others with a grounding in ethics and philosophy. It appears that business ethics in the USA is dominated by philosophers whereas in the UK sociologists and business studies specialists are more likely to teach business ethics. The curriculum of business ethics courses reflects this diversity.

Topics
It is possible that the field of business ethics is beginning to break into a series of sub-specialisms including,

• corporate responsibility
• corporate governance
• environmental sustainability
• ethics of human resource management
• ethics of marketing
• ethics of accounting
• ethics of information communications and technology

However this website is designed on the premise that business ethics is best treated as a single, if diverse, field of study. This website will deal with all of the above topics and more

This web-site aims to gather together the range of issues taught and the materials used and provide a 'meeting place' for those of us who are interested in the subject. The web-site will provide case studies, book reviews, links to relevant web-sites and any other material that is useful to the teacher and the student of business ethics. The web-site will be regularly updated.

The web-site is provided by the Institute of Business Ethics. It is edited by the European Business Ethics Network -UK (EBEN-UK).

The editors of this website on behalf of EBEN-UK are Colin Fisher at Nottingham Business School and John Kaler at Plymouth University Business School. If you have any suggestions for improvements to this website or contributions to it, please contact them. Contributions by way of New areas of study and Book reviews should be sent to John Kaler, Case studies to Colin Fisher. Contributors will receive payment from EBEN-UK.

References
Anon (2003) 'From the Academy: Business ethics classes, to require or not', Business Ethics, Vol. 17, no 2, Summer.
Kelly, M. (2003) 'It's a heckuva time to be dropping business ethics course', in Business Ethics [Online] Available at http://www.business-ethics.com/BizSchlsDropEthics.htm. Accessed 2nd. September 2003.