Managing for Compliance and Integrity in Practice

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the appropriateness of accountability standards (e.g., SA 8000, AA 1000) for compliance and integrity driven ethics management. Based on an overview of compliance and integ-rity as two distinct strategies for ethics management, we develop a simple framework to analyze the suitability of accountability standards with respect to the specific requirements for both approaches. We thus try to provide an answer to the practical question of standard choice and seek to clarify the underlying theoretical assumptions and logics that inform both the design of standards and the decision-making process for or against a specific ethics tool at the organizational level. The chapter also provides practitioners with guidance on how to align their targets in the area of ethics management in the context of the implementation of accountability standards with a compliance or an integrity cen-tered strategy, or — as often found in practice — a mix of both. Our conceptual framework is sufficiently flexible to be applied to a variety of ethics tools; however, in our empirical review towards the end of this chapter, we focus on SA 8000 since this initiative is one of the most widely used tools for social accounting.

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