BUSINESS ETHICAL ASPECTS FOR SUSTAINABILITY: CONTEMPORARY ANALYSIS AND ASSESSMENT

Abstract

The research deals with assessment of business ethical aspects for such international companies as Starbucks and Ueshima Coffee Company (UCC), which is relevant in the context of the global business community's focus on achieving the sustainable development indicators of the Agenda 2030 and digital business transformations, which correlate with new ethical challenges associated with ensuring fairness, transparency, privacy, security and accountability in the implementation of digital technologies. We defined the notion of business ethics, its main elements and relations to other categories. Also, cause-effect links were established between cultural features of the USA and Japan and their business ethical aspects. In particular, we focused on certain social basic values: how they influence the business readiness to accept ethical norms. Besides, we estimated the efficiency of corporate social responsibility (CSR) for Starbucks and Ueshima Coffee Company. Their ethical awareness is quite high with minor violations as to five parameters. For example, the Starbucks unethical behavior is confirmed by no open-access data on employees’ CSR training, low progress in environment protection (coffee cup recycling, carbon dioxide decreasing). On the other hand, there is no person to check the CSR observance while reports on social-ecological indexes are not complete. Simultaneously, the Ueshima Coffee Company does not provide any open reports with financial and social-ecological data. No documents of anti-corruption policy are available. Moreover, the social inequality fall is not included unto the Ueshima Coffee Company agenda. Finally, we defined recommendations to improve the corporate ethics and to standardize business ethical principles.