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Essay about Business Ethics at Gap Inc.

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Company Report: Gap Inc. and Business Ethics

Depestel Caroline Milijana Zlatic s0101027 s0100470

Professor S. Hughes
Year: 2012-2013
3th Bachelor Applied Economics

1. Executive Summary

The topic of this paper is business ethics within Gap Inc., a multinational retail – clothing company. The foundation of its corporate ethical approach is summarized in the Code of Conduct . This paper outlines the ethical problems Gap Inc. faced in the last years and more important, the solutions they found in order to remain a successful company. It shows how large companies deal with common issues like child labour and sweatshops.
In the first place, …show more content…

Monitoring 8 6. Conclusion 9 7. Recommendations 9 8. References 10

3. Introduction

Business ethics is a very extensive subject that is not easy to define. According to Andrew Crane and Dirk Matten (2004: 5), business ethics is the study of business situations, activities and decisions where issues of right and wrong are addressed. With an increasing globalization, environmental and social issues have amplified and therefore companies have to take full responsibility for the wrong impact their actions have. Gap pays a lot of attention to the social issues and challenges that large companies face, although it had some ethical issues in the past.
Gap Inc. is a large company in the clothing business with over 3,300 stores worldwide. As one of the World’s Most Ethical Companies in 2012 for the sixth straight year, it might be interesting to investigate the ethical issues that have risen in the past years (Gap Inc., 2013a).
In the first section, this report outlines several ethical difficulties that occurred. Subsequently, some of Gap Inc.’s solutions for a better ethical policy are described. To conclude, some recommendations are made, but those are limited because of the quick and good solutions Gap came up with in response to its problems.

4. Proof of insufficiency Code of Conduct (1999-2007)

Since the creation of the Code of Vendor Conduct in 1996, Gap Inc. had to deal with different scandals concerning

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