Ethikos Traces 'Business Ethics' From the 1880s -- With an Assist From Google

MAMARONECK, N.Y., Jan. 21, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Teddy Roosevelt was president when "business ethics" first entered the public consciousness—during the Progressive Era. Interest grew in the 1920s leading up to the Great Crash, but attention dwindled during the Depression and for years after.

"Business ethics" got a boost in the mid-1970s with the Lockheed bribery hearings. The trend steepened with implementation of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines for Organizations in 1991. A peak was reached as the millennium turned, around 2002.

That scenario was drawn by the publication Ethikos in its most recent issue using Google's new "Books Ngram Viewer." (For story, click here.) Ethikos, which focuses on ethics and compliance issues in business, tracked the frequency of the bigram "business ethics" in books published between 1500 and 2008.  It discovered:

• The first sustained mention of "business ethics" in the corpus of English books occurred in the early 1900s, during the Progressive Era, with a peak in 1905.
• Four subsequent spikes in "business ethics" occurred in 1926, 1982, 1998, and 2002.
• The trend line began to climb upward in the mid-1970s, around the time of the Lockheed bribery hearings, and more steeply around the time of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines for Organizations (1991), which provided incentives for corporations to implement ethics and compliance programs.
• "Business ethics" references reached an all-time peak in 2002 with a 0.0000600% share (i.e., percentage of all "bigrams"-two word phrases-contained in Google's sample of books written in English).
• Business ethics is primarily an American preoccupation. No national corpus of books has as high a percentage of references to business ethics, although the Germans, ranking second, appear to be gaining. If one specifies the Chinese "corpus," by comparison, the graph is totally flat; there are no references to "business ethics" at all from 1800 to 2008.

"Business Ethics (Googled) Through The Ages" is the lead story (http://EthikosPublication.com/html/google.html) in Ethikos' January/February 2011 issue.  Stories on Kraft Foods and Pratt & Whitney are also featured.

Now in its 24th year, Ethikos (www.EthikosPublication.com) takes a unique case-study approach to corporate ethics. Recent issues have included profiles of Cummins Inc., General Electric, Fluor, Coca-Cola, Cisco, McDonald's, British Telecom, Xerox, Duke Energy, KPMG, and Novartis, among others. For recent articles, go to: http://www.ethikospublication.com/html/selectedarticles.html

SOURCE Ethikos