Abstract
It is familiar fact of contemporary practice in business ethics that many _business and public sector organizations have embraced the articulation of codes of ethics and conduct as indispensable to successful management. Increasing statistics for the number of businesses with a code of ethics1 indicate strong support for their importance. Ninety percent of Fortune 500 firms and almost half of US companies have codes, mission statements or practice statements (Brien 1996), While surveys of UK businesses suggest more than fifty percent of respondents have codes (Kitson and Campbell 1996). It is not so clear, however, how many of these organizations would endorse the view that ethics can be encapsulated in systematic, precise and determinate statements, or that codes can provide answers to ethical problems. In this paper we suggest that some of the practical difficulties associated with the implementation of codes of ethics may be due to certain misconceptions concerning the function and significance of codes. In the first section we explore the way in which the connection between the use of codes, and the requirement for uniformity and control of ethical behavior, is held in place by a number of assumptions relating to the 'function of codes. We explain how this framework for ethics tends to alienate code users…