Marketing-Ethics in Swedish Universities : Perceived importance and implementation of ethics in marketing courses

Abstract: As a result of recent corporate scandals, a stronger environmental movement and increased transparency of companies’ overseas activities, the demand of higher ethics has impacted all of society. With a current situation where companies need to be viewed as responsible, fair and more ethical in order to compete, new initiatives towards extensive Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is taken on a daily basis. When even oil companies such as BP are taking steps to be perceived as more green no one can doubt that something is changing. With this trend of increased ethical standards and requirements throughout society, we have conducted a research where we investigate the role of universities related to these issues. Our aim was to find out what importance Sweden’s universities give to ethics within marketing education and, if this importance is reflected in how it is implemented in the courses. Our approach to answering these questions was to interview representatives of four different Swedish universities. We chose interview subjects that were involved in the planning and execution of marketing courses. We used a qualitative research method in order to not only see the level of implementation of ethics, but also to get to know the underlying thoughts determining how it is implemented. Our analysis showed us a rather unanimous way of thinking between the universities. What we found was that the universities do indeed view ethics as something important that should be implemented in education as well as in business. On the actual implementation however, the responses we got showed that it didn’t precisely reflect the importance given to ethics. The need of more ethics was not only visible in the analysis but also to some degree verbalized by some of the respondents.