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The Role of Voluntary Codes of Practice in Setting Ethics

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The Role of Business Ethics in Economic Performance
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Abstract

Having spent a good deal of my time since 1992 on codes of practice, I am understandably deeply interested in whether they work! This seems to me to be the first question to be attempted, before moving on to whether they advance standards of behaviour in an ethical sense. I take ‘voluntary’ to cover all forms of code which are not statutorily enforced. While the chapter will touch on the, perhaps surprisingly, wide range of codes which fall under this definition of voluntary, it will focus on those like the Code of Best Practice of the Committee on the Financial Aspects of Corporate Governance (referred to as the ‘Corporate Governance Committee’) and on company codes.

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© 1998 Adrian Cadbury

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Cadbury, A. (1998). The Role of Voluntary Codes of Practice in Setting Ethics. In: Jones, I., Pollitt, M. (eds) The Role of Business Ethics in Economic Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230379794_5

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