Hyper Norms: Searching for a Global Code of Conduct

As organizations continue to increase their level of operations across international borders, their ethical conduct becomes a greater social concern. A global code of ethics allows organizations to follow one code for all countries rather than creating and administering multiple separate codes. Currently, there are several thoughtful global codes of ethics developed by different stakeholders. This paper provides an analysis of some of the major global codes of ethics available to multinational corporations. Their shared norms are identified and synthesized into three Hyper Norms that can both aid marketing organizations in formu-lating their core principles and be applied to research dealing with macromarketing systems. Keywords global codes of ethics, macromarketing ethics, hyper norms, governance of MNCs, core business values, corporate social responsibility Themarch toward greater global integration ofworld economies appears inevitable. The dehabilitating ‘‘Great Recession’ ’ of 2008-2009, despite triggering some protectionist tendencies, mostly served to illustrate how tightly connected world economies have become. Almost all the world’s economie