Commerce is by its very nature a normative enterprise. It is concerned with
creating value for owners and other constituencies, ranging from the firm's
immediate stakeholders, such as employees, customers, and suppliers, to the
entire society within which the business operates. As a field of study,
business ethics aims to specify the principles under which businesses
must operate to behave ethically. Thus, business ethics focuses on issues such
as those that have recently attracted so much public scrutiny: executive
compensation, honesty in accounting, transparency, treatment of stakeholders,
and respect for the environment. These are, in fact, perennial questions that
accompany the long history of human economic activity and that will also be
present through an indeterminate future.
Business and society is a distinct field of study closely related to
business ethics. Business and society explores the entire range of interactions
between business entities and the societies in which they operate. Almost all
the questions addressed by business and society have a normative dimension. But
in contrast to business ethics, the discipline of business and society relies
much more strongly on the tools of the social sciences. Thus, business and
society scholars frequently examine the effects of business on society using
empirical tools such as surveys, empirical data, and statistics.