European Difference

The European Difference: Business Ethics in the Community of European Management Schools aims to present the business ethics provisions, programs and experiences of member universities of the Community of European Management Schools (CEMS). This book also attempts to demonstrate the distinctiveness and cultural integrity of European business ethics. Not surprisingly, the character and the level of development of business ethics in the represented European countries are diverse. However, common characteristics can be discovered in the business ethics experiences described in this volume. One principal theme that emerges is that European business ethics is deeply rooted in culture and less influenced by abstract principles and ideas. Some critical distance from the mainstream American approach to business ethics is also a common characteristic of contributions in this book. This book was born from the fruitful exchange of the CEMS Inter-faculty Group in Business Ethics. CEMS was founded in 1988 as an association of top-level schools of management education throughout Europe, and inter-faculty groups were established to develop joint teaching materials and to encourage collaboration among the researchers at the various CEMS schools.