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Will the return of high inflation fuel concerns that businesses don’t behave fairly? IBE’s Associate Director (Research), Prof. Chris Cowton, delves into the results of our recent survey of the Attitudes of the British Public to Business Ethics.
“It’s not fair!” is one of the first ethical complaints we make as children, perhaps aimed at a parent or a teacher. But there’s nothing childish about this. It’s an indication of just how basic fairness is to our conception of right behaviour and good social relations.
Now, when we get older, it might dawn on us that there’s more to fairness than we realised when we made our first utterances on the subject. There’s certainly a very grown-up literature in philosophy on fairness and its close relation, justice. However, many of our everyday reactions to unfairness are founded on a fairly (if you’ll excuse the pun) simple intuition – and not necessarily any the worse for that.
Fairness matters in business. It provides a solid foundation for positive, trustworthy relations with stakeholders such as suppliers, customers and employees. And it probably underlies some of the concerns revealed in our recent survey of the Attitudes of the British Public to Business Ethics. For the 10th consecutive year, corporate tax avoidance came out top when respondents selected what they regarded as the three most important ethical issues. I think this could be interpreted as a perception on the part of ordinary people that business is not paying its fair share. And third on the list was executive pay, against a backdrop of the increasingly unequal distribution of economic rewards that appears to have driven the growth of populism. Fairness again – or rather, it’s evil twin, unfairness.
But one particular result in this year’s findings caught my eye. I confess that ‘Fair and open pricing of products and services’ didn’t make it into the top six ethical concerns, but I wonder if the increase from 12% to 15% of respondents selecting it is a foretaste of things to come. As we experience the highest inflation rates in 40 years and hit record prices for fuel and energy costs, I think it might be. Inflation has pernicious effects, and many people will feel hard done by and doubt the justifications for the price changes that they see. If I’m right, expect “It’s not fair!” to be an increasingly common complaint over the months ahead.
In some ways, this will bring us back to business ethics basics. For centuries, apart from the charging of interest (or usury), the big moral question around economic transactions was what constituted a fair or just price, of which fair or just wages (the price of labour) were a particular case.
As prices and pay enter a period of turbulence, are you prepared for the fairness challenge? It never really went away, but my suspicion is that we are going to be hearing a lot more of it.
Download the survey here...
Author
Professor Chris Cowton
Associate
Chris served the IBE as part-time Associate Director from 2019 to 2023, having previously been a Trustee. He continues to contribute to our work from time to time as an Associate.
Chris originally joined the IBE staff following a long career of leadership, research and teaching in the higher education sector. He is Emeritus Professor at the University of Huddersfield, where he served as Professor of Accounting (1996-2016), Professor of Financial Ethics (2016-2019) and Dean of the Business School (2008-2016). He moved to Huddersfield after ten years lecturing at the University of Oxford. He has also been a Visiting Professor at Leeds University’s Inter-Disciplinary Ethics Applied Centre, the University of Bergamo (Italy) and the University of the Basque Country, Bilbao (Spain).
He is internationally recognised for his contributions to business ethics, especially his pioneering work on financial ethics. In 2013 he was awarded the University of Huddersfield’s first DLitt (Doctor of Letters, a higher doctorate) in recognition of his contribution to the advancement of knowledge in business and financial ethics.
He is the author of more than 70 journal papers, has edited three books and has written many book chapters and other publications. He served 10-year terms as Editor of the journal Business Ethics: A European Review (2004-2013) and as a member of the Ethics Standards Committee of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (2009-2018). He continues to write extensively and to speak to both academic and practitioner audiences.