Preface

We are pleased to place in your hands this book Corporate Ethics, Governance, and Social Responsibility: Precepts and Practices. It is the fruit of the international conference on business ethics, corporate governance and corporate social responsibility held at Hotel Le Meridian in Chennai on 15–16 March 2007. The conference, which was organized by the Loyola Institute of Business Administration and was christened Beacon 2007, had a captivating motto: ‘To illuminate, to imbibe, to inspire business with integrity.’ True to its motto, Beacon indeed inspired the 500-odd delegates who chose to attend the conference. The 18 speakers who participated at Beacon are eminent and undisputed leaders in their respective professional areas and their speeches on the ethical trilogy were so meaningful and substantial that we thought it would be worthwhile to capture the proceedings of the conference in a book form for the benefit of both the contemporary society and its posterity. With this objective in view, the speeches, almost all of which were delivered extempore, were transcribed by our students and were then edited. Additionally, these edited speeches were sent to the speakers themselves for their perusal, corrections, if warranted, and approval, just in case there were divergences between what they thought they spoke at the conference and what the edited version read.

The whole process of organizing the conference, getting the speeches transcribed, edited and sending them for approval by the concerned speakers involved enormous resources in terms of time and manpower. Therefore, we thought that all these strenuous efforts should not be wasted without being made useful for people and, hence, we have come up with this book.

Before one goes into the details of the conference and its proceedings, one might be tempted to question the relevance of ethics, corporate governance and corporate social responsibility in the context of modern business and why such great emphasis is being placed on these. The conference was organized to get the answers to these questions for the benefit of students and delegates, all of whom were exposed to an intellectual treat in the form of years of accumulated expertise and experiences articulated eloquently by a team of experts who spoke what they practised.

We sincerely believe that those who are earnest about learning the principles and practices of business ethics, corporate governance and corporate social responsibility from the masters on the subject and from an Indian perspective will benefit immensely from the book. With such fond hope, we present it to our readers.