Business ethical decision making in Central Asia: preliminary evidence from Kazakhstan.

• Author: Erdener, Carolyn

1. INTRODUCTION

   The analysis reported here continues a progression of exploratory studies involving various aspects of business ethics in the Central Asian Republic of Kazakhstan. Each of these studies contributes to the development of an ongoing, evolving project. The reason for taking such an approach is that the relatively early stage of development of the field of international business ethics requires an exploratory approach.

   1.1 Purpose

   The purpose of the present study is to explore the extent to which mainstream theories from the field of business ethics in western countries are relevant to attitudes in Central Asia involving ethical concerns. We do this by applying various ethical philosophies or theories to the analysis of results of statistical tests of subjects' responses to ethical in two particular problem cases. The larger purpose is to shed light on the underlying attitudes that influence business ethical decision making in Central Asia.

2. LITERATURE

   2.1 Ethics

   Three philosophies of ethical decision making are used to frame the analysis in this paper: Utilitarianism; Justice; and Rights. Utilitarian theories evaluate behavior as ethical or unethical according to the consequences of the behavior for society at large. Ethical acts are defined as those that provide the greatest amount of total benefit to the largest number of members of society. Following Fritzsche and Becker (1984), we use two concepts of utilitarianism: Act utilitarianism, which focuses on the immediate benefit of a single example of a specific act; and rule utilitarianism, which focuses on the total long-term benefit of a particular behavior if it were repeated widely. According to a philosophy or theory of justice, ethical acts are defined as those that promote equity, equality, fairness, and impartiality (Rawls, 1971). According to a philosophy or theory of rights, ethical acts are defined as those that respect and protect the basic rights of individual human beings. Another important stream that is relevant to Business Ethics in Kazakhstan includes international business ethics in general (Donaldson, 1990; Etheredge and Erdener, 1996) and in the former soviet union in particular (Armstrong, 1996; Erdener, 2010; Erdener and Garkavenko, 2011; Filatov, 1995).; Fritzsche; Getz and Volkema, 2001).

3. RESEARCH METHOD AND DESIGN

   Subjects in this study were enrolled in an American-style MBA program at the Bang College of Business of KIMEP University in Almaty, Kazakhstan. This is a modern academic environment where the language of instruction is English. Data were gathered in fall 2010 and spring 2011 by the authors.

   The questionnaire was adapted from the original instrument developed by Fritzsche and Becker (1984). Adaptations include simplifying the text of the scenarios, reducing the range of responses in part (a) from ten to seven, adding likert-type scales to give...