When a company writes its code of ethics, isn’t it wrong to plagiarize?
It is common practice for companies to copy others’ ethics codes, sometimes word for word, according to research by University of Notre Dame finance professors Tim Loughran and Bill McDonald and finance associate professional specialist Margaret Forster. But is that ethical? The professors presented a talk on the topic of copying ethics codes on Nov. 6 at a conference titled “Ethical Dimensions in Business: Reflections from the Business Academic Community.” The two-day conference was sponsored by the Institute for Ethical Business Worldwide and was held at Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.When the professors created a database of ethics codes comparing 2.5 billion sentences, they found that more than half of publicly traded companies had sentence correlations greater than 75 percent. The database is located at http://www.nd.edu/~ethicsdb.In part, copying is understandable: Public firms must disclose whether they have adopted a code of ethics for management or explain why not. L
