Salespeople have long been considered unique employees. They tend to work apart from each other and experience little daily contact with supervisors and other organizational employees. Additionally, salespeople interact with customers in an increasingly complex and multifunctional environment. This provides numerous opportunities for unethical behavior which has been chronicled in the popular press as well as academic research. Much of the research in sales ethics has relied on conceptual foundations which focus on individual and organizational influencers on ethical decision making. (...) While significant, contributors to this research suggest that alternative theoretical perspectives and methods of investigation should be utilized and call for more research on the status of professional selling as a whole. We answer this call by exploring an alternative and complementary perspective based on the theory of occupational choice, social learning, and work groups to gain insight on how the sales profession evolves as its own subculture that extends beyond individual and organizational boundaries. First, we discuss the characteristics of the sales profession and empirically examine the relationship between typical individual and organizational factors and sales professionals’ perceptions of ethical behavior. Second, we offer a theoretical explanation that our findings may be due to how salespeople choose and are socialized into the subculture of the sales profession. Third, we examine this theoretical perspective via qualitative in-depth interviews with experienced sales professionals. Results and implications are discussed in terms of a sales profession code of ethics and future research directions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 30.2 (2000) 70-87 [Access article in PDF] Overhearing Hollander's Hyphens Poet-Critic, American-Jew Andrew Bush in memory of Maria TorokJohn Hollander. The Work Of Poetry. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Hyphens Mordecai Kaplan's grand quest romance, Judaism as a Civilization (1934), finds its nadir midway through his argument. He had set out not from Judaism in search of, say, God, but from America in search of Judaism, an altogether (...) less auspicious quest. But having slain his rivals--gashed and gory Reformists, Orthodox and Conservatives Right and Left--he stops to survey the field in the section "Implications of the Proposed Version of Judaism." It is a dismal sight.Kaplan reached that perch by his unswerving loyalty to a reality principle that dictated a revised conceptualization of the "other-worldly." First, he called for a franker acknowledgment that Jewish civilization since the destruction of the second Temple was governed by "other-worldly sanctions" (primarily, reward beyond death for mitzvoth performed in this life): "the only plausible excuse for failing to recognize the predominance of other-worldliness in Judaism," writes Kaplan in a typically feisty moment, "is that it fills Judaism like an atmosphere, and is so ubiquitous as to escape notice" [213]. The proposition does not seem, on the face of it, to require a sharpened polemical edge. But Kaplan was arguing that the "other-worldly stage" of Jewish history was at an end. His position is not an outright rejection of the reality of the other-worldly, but rather an acceptance of the reality of a faith so diminished amongst the majority of modern Jews that otherworldly sanctions had ceased to function as an effective means of binding the community. If the future of Judaism was to be more than an illusion, he asserted, then a new form of coherence was necessary. Hence, the quest.The same reality principle operated with respect to the whole religious language of Judaism. Modernity had stripped "chosen-ness," "revelation," and even the "God-term" of their literal referents, leaving the central tenets of Judaism accessible to Kaplan's contemporaries only as metaphors. Kaplan's "proposed version of Judaism," which would of course become the platform for Reconstructionism, includes a powerful reading of those metaphors for modern Jews. No deconstructionist avant la lettre, for Kaplan the vitality of those metaphors depends upon some literal grounding, for which he offers the reconstructed literalism of the kehilla. Often a designation for congregations, thus closely associated with worship, and so a term vitiated by lapsed practice and intra-Jewish [End Page 70] strife, Kaplan's fundamental proposal is the establishment of the kehilla--which he translates as "community"--as a literal dwelling together in the neighborhood of a multipurpose "community center." 1 The proposal to build a voluntary ghetto without walls, to make community life binding again by giving it more than a virtual space, looks well beyond the subsequent realization in the form of America's numerous JCCs; but it presupposed a form of political organization at odds with American life, as Kaplan indicated through his mapping of Jewish political geography of the post-World War I era with respect to relative autonomy.The first zone on such a map was Palestine, "where the Jews are to be given the opportunity to develop their own civilization on the same terms as any other nation," which is to say, "if [a Jew] so chooses, to live entirely within his people's civilization" [215]. A second zone included those countries that admitted political identity to ethnic minorities, including Jews, where cultural autonomy was sufficient to allow for the "survival of the civilization of the Jew on a basis co-ordinate with the native civilization" [216]. In those cases, the Jew may live not only as a Jew, dwelling within a Jewish community, but may live a life no less Jewish than Czech, for instance. But in America, even for the Jew within walking distance of the proposed community center, that degree of autonomy does not exist; and with this realization, in a book directed specifically "toward a reconstruction of... (shrink)

The astonishing growth of the Internet coupled with its unique capabilities has captured the attention of the marketing community. Although many businesses are acknowledging the importance of a Web site, to date, little attention has been given to the business community'sperceptions of the ethicality of this new medium. A national sample of marketing executives was surveyed regarding their perceptions of: (1) regulation of the Internet, (2) the potential ethical issues via Internet marketing facing their industry, and (3) the role of (...) ethics and Internet marketing in their organization. Results and recommendations for incorporating Internet ethical guidelines into organizations are discussed. (shrink)

The use of technology in marketing has become an increasingly important competitive tool in developing and maintaining efficient and productive customer relationships. However, the ethics of using this technology has received little attention. This study investigates how and if marketing organizations are adapting their ethics policies to incorporate use of sales technology (ST). Based on in-depth interviews with executives from a variety of highly regulated to nonregulated business-to-business and business-to-consumer industries, our results show that, although most organizations indeed have codes (...) of ethics, there appears to be a gray area of how these codes address ST. Further, it appears that monitoring the ethical use of ST varies and can be a frustrating and time-consuming issue for marketing and sales executives. Implications of our findings are discussed for the benefit of marketing practitioners, ethics managers, and researchers. (shrink)