Research into ethics in personal selling and sales management has increased substantially over the preceding decade by investigating complex dimensions of ethical decision-making in greater depth and with more analytical sophistication. This review of the recent conceptual and empirical literature provides insight into the extent and the direction of this knowledge, recommends managerial action, and discusses areas for future exploration. Future direction is also provided through research propositions. The type of sales practitioner investigated, the main variables examined, and the key (...) findings are summarized in an Appendix. (shrink)

Multi-level marketing companies such as Amway, Herbalife, or Tupperware differ from most other companies. They market their products and services by means of self-employed distributors who typically work from home, sell products to end consumers, and recruit, motivate, and educate new distributors to do the same. Although the industry’s growth seems to illustrate the attractiveness of MLMs, the industry has been facing several legal and ethical problems. In this paper, we focus on these problems and argue that an extended MLM (...) model may help us to understand why such problems continue to occur, despite the countermeasures that have been implemented. By explicating how problems relate to a specific but often overlooked characteristic of MLMs, i.e., the so-called distributor network, we provide an extended understanding of MLMs’ mode of operation, the sources of their legal and ethical problems, and the reason that currently implemented and suggested countermeasures may not suffice. Moreover, based on our extended understanding of MLMs and their problems, we propose additional countermeasures. (shrink)