About the Authors

Dr Attracta Lagan is Director of Corporate Citizenship and Ethics at KPMG, Sydney. She is an industrial sociologist and is passionate about bringing individual and corporate personalities closer together. She is an entertaining and challenging conference speaker writing extensively on the ethical dimension of business in 21st Century society. Attracta is a frequent visitor to the boardrooms of Australia, challenging corporations to step up to their social responsibilities.

Attracta is on the Sustainability Advisory Council of the Minerals Council of Australia and member of two community boards. She has an honours degree in sociology, master's degree in social ecology and PhD, which reviewed how the organisational context compromises personal values.

Brian Moran is an industrial ecologist and university lecturer. He works inside organisations in the areas of culture, values and ethics. Brian has also developed innovative, experiential learning programs in ethics training. An experienced facilitator, has has applied these skills to strategic planning programs for several government departments and agencies, not-for-profit organisations and many large corporations.

Brian holds a Masters Degree in Social Ecology and lectures in Managing for Sustainability (MBA) at University of Technology, Sydney and in Small Business Management (MComm) at Sydney University.

The Inner and Outer Ecology of Business

At one level, business may be seen as a set of relationships. It is the two-way nature of these relationships that establishes their ethical dimension. As communities of people, organisations live their ethics through their values. Business ethics, therefore, begin with institutional integrity and the effort invested by leaders in ensuring the organisation's stated values are embedded in its core culture and business systems.These values are dynamic; they both shape and are shaped by the wider environment in which the organisation operates. The company's global footprint, therefore, also begins inside the organisation - as it aligns its values to its governance, recruitment and reward systems - then extends outwards into the wider operating environment as these values flow into its sourcing, manufacturing and distribution systems. As major organisations establish sustainable practices in the new millennium, these same core values underpin their corporate citizenship commitments.

In the above diagram, we seek to show how all these relationships are impacting on each other to shape ongoing governance, corporate citizenship and sustainable business development agendas. Each of these agendas is part of the ethical debate about the role and accountabilities of business to the societies which provide its legal and social licence to operate. An ethical organisation is one that strives to live its values and be accountable to them in its relationships with others.