Is it legal? Is it moral? The training of ethics and compliance officers in the private sector

Paper presented at Swedish Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Lund, April 2015, panel on Business ethics. Abstract: Under the influence of U.S. government regulations, new anti-bribery laws and embarrassing corruption scandals, major global corporations have realized that unethical conduct may affect their reputations and ultimately, their profits. This development has given rise to a new position within the traditional management team: the ethics and compliance officer (who is different from the CSR function). Who are these people? How are they trained? And how do the ethics and compliance officers function as the moral compass of firms that need to sell goods on a world market where rules can be bent and anything goes? How do we study the anthropology of corporate morality without seeing it purely as an instrument? Are there indeed genuine moral enclaves within corporations? paper available in april