Looking Forward

Chapter 10 opens with three learning outcomes. After reading, you should be able to do the following.

1. Summarize potential ethical risks in business by recognizing relevant issues, performing environmental scanning, and identifying reliable resources for uncovering future misconduct risks.
2. Analyze how trends in the economic, geopolitical, social, and technological environment lead to ethical issues in business.
3. Evaluate how emerging ethical issues affect the ethics and compliance function in an organization.

The chapter opens with a mountain-pass scenario: a self-driving car rounds a blind curve and its sensors detect an obstacle an instant before a human driver could react. The automaker's algorithm — not the passenger — decides whether to brake or swerve. One study estimates 25% of new cars globally will have some degree of autonomy by 2035 (Statista, 2023). Figure 10.1 in the text defines five levels of driving automation; most vehicles sold today are Level 2, able to "take full control of driving responsibilities under certain specified conditions, but a driver is expected to take control when required" (Statista, 2023, p. 47). Mercedes-Benz and BMW already market Level 3 hands-off driving in Germany and some U.S. states.

Consumers are delaying electric-vehicle purchases with self-driving features until they trust the safety record (Deichmann et al., 2023), following publicized failures: a Tesla that collided with a truck reflecting the sky, self-driving cars crashing into highway barriers, failing to react to emergency vehicles, and fatally striking pedestrians or cyclists the sensors did not recognize (Kirkpatrick, 2022; Yu-Ju et al., 2022). The core ethical question is fault: who is responsible when the car advises the driver to take control and the driver cannot act in time, and how should the system choose between its own passenger's safety and the safety of people in an oncoming vehicle? As one researcher put it, "Every company wants to have the first self-driving car, but no one wants to have the first self-driving car crash" (Iozzio, 2014, p. 20).

The chapter frames the autonomous car as a robot — "a mechanical device having a reasonably high level of intelligence, the ability to make elementary decisions, and the dexterity and flexibility to perform an intricate sequence of different motions without human intervention" (Leap & Pizzolatto, 1983, p. 697) — and invokes Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics from the 1950s: a robot may not injure a human or allow harm through inaction; a robot must obey human orders unless they conflict with the first law; a robot must protect its own existence unless doing so conflicts with the first two laws (Anderson, 2008, pp. 477–478).

The Trolley Problem

First introduced by moral philosopher Philippa Foot in 1967, the trolley problem is a thought experiment used to probe the moral decisions imposed on a robotic car by its creators (Myers, 2014). A runaway trolley will kill five people unless you pull a lever to divert it to a side track, where it will instead kill one person. Do nothing and five die; act and you cause one death. Human subjects facing this dilemma typically rely on moral reasoning and moral emotions to decide (Lanteri et al., 2008). The chapter's open question: what could a robotic car rely on to make an equivalently sound decision, and who answers for the choice its programming makes?

Business leaders detect early warnings of future ethical risk by monitoring an organization's internal and external environments for the ethical dimensions of its strategies. Recall from Chapter 3 that ethical dimensions describe what ought to be and involve value judgments rather than data-driven facts (Grier, 2013). Chapter 3 also introduced environmental scanning — the organizational process of identifying political, social, and technological trends that could influence workplace misconduct — which business strategists treat, alongside stakeholder analysis, as foundational to corporate planning (Bouguerra et al., 2023; Kimiagari et al., 2013).

Social issue life cycle theory (introduced in Chapter 1) holds that attention to an ethical issue progresses over time: from relative inattention, to awareness, to an expectation of responsible behavior from the public and other stakeholders (Ackerman, 1975; Zyglidopoulos, 2003). Ethical issue intensity is the perceived relevance or importance of an ethical issue to individuals or groups (O. C. Ferrell et al., 2013) — and that intensity shifts as an issue moves through the life cycle, so managers need the capability to identify which issues require attention and action now.

Since managers cannot prepare for every potential ethical issue, C. Meyer and Kirby (2010) identify three factors that create demand for a business to address an issue: the growing scale of companies and their impacts, improvements in sensors that measure impacts, and heightened sensibilities of stakeholders (Figure 10.2).

Scale

Scale reflects that a firm or industry can have an outsized impact on the environment, people, and the economy — larger companies face greater scrutiny because irresponsible actions (pollution, labor violations, false advertising) affect more people. Walmart, with over two million employees and 240 million customers across 20 countries (Marketline, 2023), illustrates the pattern: Chinese regulators shut down 13 Walmart stores in 2010 after the retailer sold ordinary pork as organic, triggering a social-media backlash ("Insight: Brand Health Check," 2011); bribery allegations in Brazil, Mexico, India, and China later produced large settlements (Edelson, 2019); and the company has more recently faced lawsuits tied to the opioid crisis (Puko & Gurman, 2020) and discriminatory-practice charges (Shumway, 2024). Companies can predict scale-driven ethical issues by identifying the resource that makes up the largest part of their product or service — Starbucks' core resource is coffee and a reputation for ethical sourcing, and in 2024 a consumer advocacy group sued Starbucks for marketing fraud tied to unsafe supplier labor conditions in Brazil, Guatemala, and Kenya (Abou-Sabe & Kaplan, 2024). As Genevieve LeBaron of Simon Fraser University notes, "ethical commitments from large purchasing players like Starbucks can have an outsize impact on the integrity of supply chains if they are backed up" (Abou-Sabe & Kaplan, 2024, para. 19).

Sensors

Sensors are technologies that measure the actual outcomes of an industry or company and trace misconduct directly to its source. As covered in Chapter 3, keystroke monitoring, GPS, and RFID chips can detect misuse of proprietary data or fraud, and AI now extends this tracking across entire supply chains. During COVID-19, public-health tracking identified superspreader events — an international meeting at Boston-based Biogen in February 2020 spread the virus to 99 employees across Massachusetts and at least three other states (Stockman & Barker, 2020). Chapter 9's metrics for an effective ethics and compliance program serve the same sensor function: they can reveal systemic misconduct.

Sensibilities

Heightened sensibilities describe the public's or stakeholders' rising expectation of responsible behavior across the full value chain. Oxfam International and Human Rights Watch organized a boycott that forced Indian rug producers to abandon child labor (Ballet et al., 2014); Chapter 4's example of Bud Light's marketing partnership with influencer Dylan Mulvaney shows how a single association can trigger boycotts and reduced sales (Roush, 2023). Managers spot emerging issues by watching for shifts in stakeholder priorities, popular social issues, potential legal action, and internal ethical misconduct.

Consumer, labor, and investor stakeholders press companies on issues ranging from animal testing and climate change to gun control and social justice. Management should ask, "How have stakeholder expectations changed?" (C. Meyer & Kirby, 2010, p. 43) to track shifting attitudes. As an issue's intensity grows, stakeholders increase pressure — but a company cannot act on every stakeholder's moral judgment. Bowie and Dunfee (2002) supply a framework for categorizing moral pressures and choosing an appropriate response, reproduced in Table 10.1.

Benign moral pressures reflect widely accepted principles such as a safe workplace — described in Chapter 1 as hypernorms, "principles so fundamental that, by definition, they serve to evaluate lower-order norms, reaching to the root of what is ethical for humanity" (Donaldson & Dunfee, 1999, p. 46). The International Labour Organization recognizes a safe and healthy working environment as a fundamental human right (2023), and Bowie and Dunfee (2002) recommend complying with benign pressures, especially those backed by law — a principle tested when businesses navigated conflicting state and national COVID-19 rules on shutdowns, masks, and vaccine mandates (Harjani et al., 2024).

Disputed moral pressures arise when segments of the public disagree, including disputes over employee-policy fairness or corporate governance. The recommended response is to follow the company's core values. Google supported employees protesting sexual misconduct and racism internally, but fired employees who disrupted business by occupying office space to protest the company's dealings with Israel during the Gaza war — the firing was for the manner of protest, not the underlying view (Guynn, 2024).

Problematic moral pressures concern what is "ethical for humanity" (Donaldson & Dunfee, 1999, p. 46) and arise when a company or its stakeholders demand something that violates a universal standard, such as racial discrimination or slave labor. Even organizations with strong universal-value policies can face pressure from dominant stakeholders to bend — the chapter's example is Shein, the Chinese fashion e-tailer, whose low prices rest on suppliers paying below minimum wage, running 75-hour shifts, and exposing workers to unsafe conditions (Rajvanshi, 2023). Some research finds consumers weigh cost and style over labor-exploitation concerns when buying fashion (Stringer et al., 2022) — a reminder that problematic pressure from the market itself can run counter to universal ethical standards.

Responsive companies anticipate benign, disputed, and problematic pressures by regularly scanning credible internal and external resources. Internally, helpline topics, misconduct reports, exit interviews, and employee/supplier surveys surface emerging issues. Externally, managers should subscribe to newsfeeds from business, ethics, and compliance outlets to catch regulatory shifts, industry practices, and reported misconduct — generating internal dialogue about how each applies to the organization. Brian Beeghly of Ethisphere recommends investing in an automated enterprise risk system so information can be shared across units, and targeting collection toward recurring issues or evolving strategies such as mergers and acquisitions or third-party supplier human rights (Coffin, 2022a).

Credible public news outlets signal shifts in public opinion, but trust in media is low globally due to "fake news" and disinformation (Hameleers et al., 2022; Petratos & Faccia, 2023) — the manipulation of information through fabrication or distortion, sometimes called online deception (Aïmeur et al., 2023). Even reputable outlets have unknowingly published AI-generated content from fictitious reporters, including on CNET, Sports Illustrated, and a San Francisco news site (H. Gold, 2024). User-created content is defined by the OECD as content that is publicly available online, reflects genuine creative effort, and is created outside professional routines (OECD, 2007, p. 4).

Social Media Analytics

W. Fan and Gordon (2014) describe social media analytics as a three-stage process — capture, understand, and present (Figure 10.3) — that interprets social media data to "extract useful patterns and intelligence," going beyond simple traffic tracking (p. 74). The first stage, social media monitoring, discovers and collects messages, with the main challenge being the volume of irrelevant material. The second stage interprets meaning through sentiment and trend categorization to anticipate shifting stakeholder expectations (Kalampokis et al., 2013). The third stage presents the trends to identify risks and opportunities — the chapter's example is user-generated content analysis of Tesla's Autopilot accidents from 2016–2019, which fed directly into investment in safer autonomous-vehicle technology (Laurell & Sandstrom, 2022).

Beyond media, nonmedia organizations supply valuable early-warning information: the U.S.-based Ethics Resource Institute and the European Institute for Business Ethics research workplace misconduct; a community of practice is a group who "share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in the area by interacting on a regular basis" (Wenger et al., 2002, p. 4), such as the Conference Board's executive councils or BSR's network on sustainability and equity; the United Nations Global Compact, an NGO, offers working groups on responsible business practice; and think tanks — groups of experts researching problems to generate solutions — include the Council on Foreign Relations, whose interactive trackers cover global conflict, cyber operations, inflation, energy, and trade.

The World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report 2024 evaluates economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal, and technological risks that "would negatively impact a significant proportion of global GDP, population or natural resources" (2024, p. 5). Figure 10.4 in the text ranks these risks by severity, with misinformation from AI the leading near-term concern and extreme weather, societal polarization, cyber insecurity, and involuntary migration as persistent long-term concerns (World Economic Forum, 2024, p. 15). The report names four trends businesses should track: climate change, demographic bifurcation, technological acceleration, and geostrategic shifts (World Economic Forum, 2024, pp. 5–6). Many of these risks map onto Chapter 3's categories of honest communication, fairness, and workplace issues such as discrimination, harassment, and privacy breaches.

Morrison Foerster and Ethisphere (2023) surveyed ethics, compliance, risk, and communication staff worldwide and found the most common reputational-crisis risks are cyber breaches, workplace violence or harassment, environmental damage, and regulatory responses to geopolitical issues — matching the World Economic Forum's persistent risk list. As Alex Iftimie, now associate general counsel at OpenAI, put it: "When crisis strikes, the organizations that have fared best are those that anticipate the issues around the corner and have a plan to respond" (Morrison Foerster & Ethisphere, 2023, p. 11).

Global Trade

Geopolitical tensions and regional conflicts affect business through trade sanctions requiring immediate compliance, government limits on foreign investment, and rising cyber-incident risk from nation-state destabilization (Morrison Foerster & Ethisphere, 2023). Geostrategic shifts — a 2024 Global Risks Report theme — refer to "changing geopolitical power dynamics," encompassing alliances, the projection of economic and other power, and national attitudes toward key actors and governance (World Economic Forum, 2024, p. 95). Geopolitical risk includes armed conflict, restricted trade in goods and knowledge, biological/chemical/nuclear hazards, civil unrest, and terrorism.

Christian Hauser's (2022) study of trade-control compliance among small and medium enterprises (SMEs) finds that when supply chains are critical to a firm's success, SMEs are less likely to follow sanctions or embargoes, instead placing compliance responsibility on suppliers. Sanctions after Russia's invasion of Ukraine forced many businesses to withdraw (Gurkov et al., 2024), while others — notably in oil and gas — found ways to evade detection, including temporary shell companies in Dubai and Hong Kong; a shipping consultancy executive described it as "Everybody is trying to play hide and seek game as no one wants to be caught violating sanctions" (Cheong & Sharma, 2024, para. 6).

A business may unknowingly deal with organized crime, private militias, or terrorist groups, since such entities often own legitimate businesses or launder funds through real estate and luxury purchases (Lupton, 2023). Ethical procurement requires focused due diligence to avoid funding terrorist groups (Compin, 2018), and regional political instability — which lowers deterrence against organized crime engaged in illegal mining, logging, or fishing — complicates sourcing raw materials from reliable suppliers (World Economic Forum, 2024).

Cyber Breaches

Cybercrime and cyber insecurity rank in the World Economic Forum's (2024) top ten risks over the next 2 to 10 years, especially where political power is transitory. Cyber insecurity refers to the "use of cyber weapons and tools to conduct cyberwarfare, cyberespionage and cybercrime to gain control over a digital presence and/or cause operational disruption" (World Economic Forum, 2024, p. 98). In 2020, SolarWinds was found to have misrepresented its ability to protect against Russian attacks on critical software, exposing over 18,000 companies (Council on Foreign Relations Cyber Operations Tracker, 2024). IBM's (2023) Data Breach Report puts the average total cost of a breach at US$9.48 million in the U.S. and US$8.07 million in the Middle East for 2023, with healthcare the hardest-hit industry at US$10.93 million per breach. Legislation increasingly mandates breach reporting, requiring transparency to stakeholders (Wheeler & Walther-Puri, 2024).

Even as companies harden defenses, criminals adapt — using AI for more convincing multilingual phishing and private generative-AI tools such as WormGPT to produce malware and phishing emails. IBM's (2024) cyber-threat report found AI and GPT mentioned in over 800,000 posts on illicit markets and dark web forums in 2023, evidence of cybercriminal interest in the technology (p. 31). Criminals use phishing results and dark-web data to gain system access and disrupt operations or steal assets.

Employee wellbeing, health, and safety directly affect company reputation. OSHA (2024) defines workplace violence as "any act or threat of physical violence, harassment, intimidation, or other threatening disruptive behavior that occurs at the work site" (para. 2), encompassing threats, verbal abuse, physical assault, and homicide — the third-largest cause of fatal workplace injuries in the U.S. Morrison Foerster and Ethisphere (2023) find workplace violence a leading concern among surveyed companies, with rising harassment and violence against health professionals partly tied to pandemic-era patient/visitor attitudes, bias, and mental health strain (Meese et al., 2024).

Harassment — offensive comments, jokes, or images tied to race, religion, ethnicity, gender, or age — is illegal and exposes organizations to legal, financial, and reputational harm. The ILO finds young women, migrants, and women generally more likely to experience workplace harassment (2022). Since the #MeToo movement raised awareness of sexual harassment, 298 executives have been fired or held accountable for unwanted sexual advances that damaged personal and organizational reputations (Temin, 2018), and one study found 40% of LGBTQ employees experience some degree of sexual harassment at work, varying by country (Dupreelle et al., 2023).

Organizations often underestimate how much harassment or violence occurs, since victims frequently do not report it — a global study found only half of workplace-violence victims discuss the attacks at all, usually with friends or family only after repeated abuse (International Labour Organization, 2022). SHRM research finds employees less satisfied and more likely to leave when they perceive the workplace as uncivil (Gonzales, 2024), and undetected incivility and violence create a spiraling effect where an informal culture of mistreatment normalizes bullying and violence (Von Bergen & Bressler, 2023).

Environmental Risk

Environmental conditions create opportunities for misconduct, especially where a business operates or sources in a region prone to natural disasters — extreme weather (wildfires, floods, tornadoes), natural resource shortages (food, water, energy), natural disasters (earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis), and pollution (industrial output, accidents, oil spills, contamination) will all grow more frequent as climate change intensifies (World Economic Forum, 2024). The chapter's example: after Turkish earthquakes damaged buildings for decades, payments to regulatory agencies led to "lower quality materials [being] used, fewer professionals [being] hired to supervise projects, and several safety regulations [not being] complied with" (Cifuentes‐Faura, 2024, p. 1881). Evidence on post-disaster price gouging is mixed, but the public perceives that businesses raise prices during a crisis regardless (Beatty et al., 2021).

A written crisis-management plan is not enough on its own. Timothy Coombs (2007) offers the Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) for evaluating the proper response to a reputational crisis, stressing that "the first priority in any crisis is to protect stakeholders from harm, not to protect the reputation" of the business (p. 165). SCCT works from a company's crisis history, a typology of crisis types, and communication responses. Table 10.3 lays out the three crisis types a business should plan for.

Whether the public holds a company responsible for a crisis depends heavily on how the company communicates through the media, how it navigates moral outrage, and how responsible the company (or its suppliers) is perceived to be for the misconduct (Amengual et al., 2023; Coombs & Tachkova, 2023). Morrison Foerster and Ethisphere (2023) recommend concrete preparation steps: form a dedicated crisis management team; have corporate leadership, legal counsel, and the board advise and identify government contacts in advance; involve functional areas (operations, technology, legal, HR, media relations, risk/compliance, finance, investor relations) from the start; bring in outside advisors as needed; create and annually review response processes tailored to organizational and industry risk; plan responses by crisis type (victim, accidental, preventable); train employees on key risk areas and escalation contacts; run response drills to find flaws; and adopt risk or crisis-management software.

During COVID-19, grocery stores used data-driven, programmable algorithmic decision-making tools to adjust to unexpected hoarding, allowing leaders to "better anticipate and model future crisis scenarios" (Browder et al., 2024, p. 147). Morrison Foerster and Ethisphere (2023) found 64% of companies now use technology for crisis management, 48% feel prepared to respond to a crisis, 48% have leadership and board support, and only 20% conduct drills to test their plans — a readiness gap between having a plan and having tested one.

New ethical issues arise as work modes evolve, workplace civility shifts, and workforce skills transform. When offices closed during COVID-19, commuting to a physical location gave way to Work from Anywhere (WFA), where employees choose their work location while still contributing to company success (Choudhury, 2021). Alongside this stress, workplace incivility — disrespectful and unkind comments among coworkers — has risen (Jacobson, 2024), and Morrison Foerster and Ethisphere (2023) find workplace misconduct and employee safety a leading concern among surveyed companies.

Future work will keep changing as AI, digitization, and automation expand. The "Fourth Industrial Revolution" requires workers to continuously learn new skills (Miah et al., 2024), and workforce planning for future ethical concerns means understanding the workforce, identifying challenges in future work, and anticipating legal obligations for managing employees (Crush et al., 2014).

Work modality refers to "the ways in which work is coordinated, performed, and compensated over time and space" (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, 2024, para. 1), covering work location, schedule, electronic allocation and supervision of tasks, remuneration, and collaboration level. Work location itself spans "fixed places of work outside the home, no fixed place of work, and work at home" (UNECE, 2024, para. 6). Changes in location often follow a crisis such as COVID-19, and commitment, trust, and respect during such transitions keep employees engaged, appreciated, and loyal (Mokhtarifar et al., 2024).

Ethical tension persists as flexible arrangements outlast the pandemic that created them. Managers who equate visible activity with productivity resist remote work; managers who measure outcomes instead extend mutual trust to remote and hybrid arrangements (Elliott, 2024). Return-to-office mandates at Boeing, UPS, Apple, and Microsoft have met resistance, sometimes losing top performers and managers (Elliott, 2024; McGregor, 2024; Thier, 2024) — though not all workers can afford to quit over the issue, and flexible arrangements often remain at management's discretion, limiting employees' real ability to seek alternatives (Erickson & Norlander, 2022).

The chapter lists specific ethical issues surfacing in remote and hybrid work.

• Knowledge hiding — not responding to requests for information through communication technology (Z. Zhang & Ji, 2023).
• Discrimination — easier for supervisors and peers to hide when communicating virtually (S. Gupta & Pathak, 2024).
• Privacy of sensitive conversations, especially for counseling and therapy.
• Threatened work–life balance and burnout — management expecting immediate attention outside normal working hours.
• Employee use of company equipment, time, and expense accounts for personal purposes.
• Intrusive surveillance of remote work (Blackman, 2020).
• Location-based wages, raising fair-compensation concerns and honesty issues about where work is actually performed.
• Use of technology such as AI, which may exclude employees unfamiliar with or resistant to such tools.
• Taking vacations while working — "workcations" or "hush trips" (McGregor, 2024).

The shift away from physical workplaces accelerated automation and digitization of tasks once done in person — payroll and expense forms once needing a physical signature now route through digital signature software. Sison (2024) identifies benefits of this shift: greater standardization and disintermediation of tasks while reducing monitoring and surveillance costs, especially for virtual jobs; increased competition requiring HR flexibility and outsourcing of noncore activities; enabling online and outsourced work through platforms (ridesharing, food delivery); increasing worker mobility to work anywhere, anytime, on demand; and empowering self-employed micro-entrepreneurs through e-commerce platforms such as Etsy (p. 171).

The ethical tension is direct: if the goal of AI adoption is to make work easier, it may eliminate the job altogether — fewer supervisors are needed to monitor virtual or remote workers, and some remaining work becomes demeaning once the application does the thinking. Erickson and Norlander (2022) find resistance to remote-work technology mirrors the fear of job loss from outsourcing and offshoring. Building workforce trust requires including employees in developing fair, transparent procedures for new work modalities.

Workplace-misconduct risk evolves as societal tensions bleed into the workforce. Societal and political polarization combined with economic strain produce discontent expressed through "violent protest, riots, and strikes" (World Economic Forum, 2024, p. 6). The Council on Foreign Relations' (2024b) Preventative Priorities survey predicts growing U.S. political polarization "leads to acts of domestic terrorism and political violence" (p. 6), and globally people express discontent over racism, discrimination, shootings, and other issues through protest (Stajkovic & Stajkovic, 2024). Employees and customers bring these polarized views into the workplace, creating hostile or unsafe environments.

Workers and HR professionals expect incivility to worsen as political disagreement escalates. Workplace incivility includes disrespectful and unkind comments, interrupting or silencing others, unprofessional or rude gestures, and excessive monitoring of work (Gonzales, 2024). Employees who observe disrespectful coworkers or managers are more likely to behave rudely themselves, and "little acts of incivility (microaggressions) that go unchecked by authority figures can spiral into bullying and even workplace violence" (Von Bergen & Bressler, 2023, p. 9).

Recall from Chapter 3 that bullying is a form of harassment creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive environment. Bullying rose globally during the pandemic (Ethisphere Institute, 2023), and nearly 18% of global employees report experiencing workplace bullying (International Labour Organization, 2022); the Institute of Business Ethics (2024) finds U.K. businesses rank sexual harassment and bullying higher in larger firms than in small or medium ones. Bullying takes forms such as verbal abuse, rumors, and coordinated negative gossip that socially excludes a targeted employee — workers who overhear such comments may try to prove the critics wrong or retaliate in anger (Zong et al., 2024), and bullying as a form of workplace violence can escalate to physical harm (Faldetta & Gervasi, 2023).

Heightened public sensibility around unjust treatment focuses attention on discrimination by race, ethnicity, gender identity, social class, migration status, foreign origin, and religion. A Sephora (2021) study on racial bias in retail found BIPOC customers face exclusionary treatment and called for greater diversity and inclusion industry-wide. Even where DEI programs and antidiscrimination regulation exist, LGBTQ individuals continue to experience discrimination, aggressive behavior, and incivility at work and in retail settings (Dupreelle et al., 2023; Durkee, 2023). At bottom, discrimination and bullying are ethical issues about whether employees and customers feel respected, safe, and that they belong.

Accelerating employment change is making workers anxious about job security, and skills/labor shortages are predicted to hurt profitability and slow adaptation to new technology. The World Economic Forum's Future of Work Report (2023a) predicts shortages in green energy, digital technology, cybersecurity, teaching, social and health, and supply-chain skills.

A PwC global survey finds 60% of employees believe "few people will have stable, long-term employment in the future" (2018, p. 13), and one older U.S. employee summarized the stakes: "workers with skills in demand will prosper, those with outdated skills will be abandoned" (PwC, 2018, p. 14). College graduates in China without wealthy, connected families report similar anxiety about gainful employment (Wan et al., 2024). Over 70% of companies use work experience as their primary hiring criterion, while nearly half still require a higher-education degree.

The World Economic Forum (2023b) estimates 15% global average workforce underutilization — "the combined share of individuals who consider themselves under-employed in their current job, who are currently in unemployment, and who would like to work but have currently given up looking for a job due to lack of hope of success" (p. 7). Access to traditional employment is uneven: refugees, migrants, and immigrants face bias as presumed unskilled even when their professional qualifications go unrecognized abroad (Chowdhury et al., 2024); people with disabilities struggle to match skills to changing job requirements and face hiring and promotion bias (Jetha et al., 2023); and caregivers who take time away from work may struggle to find jobs matching their education or skills. These barriers raise ethical issues of fairness, transparency, and respect for vulnerable populations without access to skill-development resources.

The World Economic Forum partnered with PwC to build a skills-first framework for hiring and developing talent while removing employment barriers and tapping a larger talent pool (2023b; Figure 10.5). Skills-first describes "an approach to talent management that emphasizes a person's skills and competencies—rather than degrees, job histories or job titles—with regard to attracting, hiring, developing and redeploying talent" (World Economic Forum, 2023b, p. 4). The framework organizes action items by key enablers and practical steps, and recommends educating HR and business managers on the benefits of a skills-first mindset, since it requires continuous reassessment as new information arrives. The related Reskilling Revolution initiative convenes business leaders to advance future workforce skills.

Innovations in communication and technology create ethical issues that are not obvious to managers at first. Personal computers, PDAs, and cell phones once seemed like novelties (Huber, 2005) before becoming essential and reshaping workplace tasks in unanticipated ways. Emerging technology refers to "digitally enabled tools representing new and significant developments within a particular field" (Deloitte, 2023, p. 6), and such technologies advance rapidly enough to routinely outpace the ethical frameworks meant to govern them.

Autonomous vehicles are a leading emerging issue for the automotive, aerial, and maritime industries. Robotics is advancing offshoring (Beaubouef, 2021), meat cutting (Ruberg, 2021), manufacturing (Caldwell & Mellish, 2023), and warehouse order processes (Tadumadze et al., 2023). Blockchain, known mainly for cryptocurrency, can automate HR functions (Sharif & Ghodoosi, 2022). Virtual reality has moved from gaming into employee training and virtual meetings. Quantum computing is still early-stage but already ranks among the top three technologies raising ethical concern (Deloitte, 2023); the World Economic Forum (2024) warns that criminal use of quantum computing power would increase hacking of trade secrets, health records, financial data, and power grids.

Generative AI advanced rapidly in 2023, raising concerns about data privacy and accuracy — some companies fear their data is intentionally "poisoned," producing inaccurate results (Deloitte, 2023). Being able to explain how an AI system produced its output builds trust in the outcome, especially where AI affects customers directly (Burkhardt et al., 2019).

Deloitte's (2023) State of Ethics and Trust in Technology report catalogs the damage from ignoring ethical issues in emerging technology: reputational (customer distrust), human (privacy violation, discrimination, job displacement), regulatory (lawsuits), financial (sales loss, lawsuits), and employee (dissatisfaction, turnover). In collaboration with business leaders, Deloitte developed a ten-principle framework for diagnosing the ethical dimensions of emerging technology.

• Responsible
• Safe & Secure
• Accountable
• Transparent & Explainable
• Fair & Impartial
• Private
• Collaborative
• Robust & Reliable
• Adaptable
• Controlled

Ethics and compliance professionals must anticipate future demands from workplace change, regulatory trends, and new innovation. The function has evolved since its 1990s origin as a response to the U.S. Defense Industry Initiative (DII), covered in Chapter 1. Chapter 4 explored how laws and guidelines shaped the ethics and compliance officer's role in coordinating a company's legal, ethics, audit, training, and risk functions; this chapter looks at how emerging issues will reshape both the ethics and compliance program and the profession itself.

Demand for the profession is rising: the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2024) estimated 383,620 compliance officers in 2023, and 72% of surveyed companies expect to increase ethics and compliance staffing (KPMG, 2024). Professionals report growing confidence after managing a pandemic, civil dissent, global supply disruption, and trade pivots (Coffin, 2022b). A 2011 survey found over half of ethics and compliance professionals suffered job-related stress, with 60% considering leaving the field (SCCE, 2012); a decade later, Corporate Compliance Insights (2022) found similar stress levels but a striking shift — only 20% were job-hunting and just 6% considered leaving the profession, since "they may feel stress to a significant degree, and their job likely plays a role in this stress, but nevertheless, they love what they do and have high levels of satisfaction" (Corporate Compliance Insights, 2022, p. 6).

The sources of stress have stayed consistent across studies: pressure to comply with new and changing regulation, challenges preventing violations amid demographic change, demands for continuous program improvement, and constraints on financial, relational, and technology resources (Coffin, 2022b; Corporate Compliance Insights, 2022; KPMG, 2024). As Ethisphere president Erica Salmon Byrne puts it, "within every challenge lies an opportunity" (Coffin, 2022b, p. 12).

The Ethics and Compliance Professional in the Future

The function's legitimacy is essential to establishing a culture of integrity — organizational legitimacy being "a generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper, or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions" (Suchman, 1995, p. 574). Actions inconsistent with stated company values erode that legitimacy and the trust the function depends on. The chapter lists concrete actions to strengthen the ethics and compliance role: understand the company's main audiences, operations, partners, and suppliers; build a holistic view of company decision-making by connecting with other control functions; invest in data-driven compliance programs; lead ESG initiatives and consider stakeholder impact; draw on research from communication, psychology, and neurology to improve training and build an integrity culture; and set an ethical narrative that reaches future employee demographics (Coffin, 2022b; KPMG, 2024).

The function must also adapt to shifting industry pressure around ESG. U.S. backlash to the ESG label is pushing companies toward framing the same work as stakeholder engagement and impact analysis (Coffin, 2022a), while European companies continue to advocate ESG strategy directly. As Annabel Reoch, Global Head of Ethics and Compliance at KPMG UK, states: "As companies are increasingly being held to account by multiple stakeholders, it's critical to embed controls to help address environmental and social impact and avoid greenwashing. CCOs have a key role in the design and implementation of a robust framework that's aligned to the Corporate ESG Strategy, helping to ensure ESG risk is monitored and reported data is complete and accurate" (KPMG, 2024, p. 16).

Ethics and compliance professionals face pressure to demonstrate their value both internally and externally. Internal pressure comes from budget constraints during economic uncertainty, addressed by linking the ethics program to strategic goals, quantifying risk mitigation, and connecting with other control functions (Coffin, 2022b). External pressure is regulatory and public scrutiny "to show that they deliver value from compliance through ethically strong cultures, the use of cutting-edge technology and clear accountability" (KPMG, 2024, p. 15) — with the caveat that the compliance message must stay consistent with the organization's actual behavior (KPMG, 2024).

Data analytics increasingly carries this value story. LRN's (2024) Ethics & Compliance Program Effectiveness Report finds that companies with strong programs "leverage data from a variety of sources to guide E&C program focus and development as part of ongoing evaluation—including risk analysis, misconduct trends and patterns, root cause analysis data, ethical culture surveys, training content retention, and benchmarking" (p. 11). Brian Beeghly, former VP of Compliance at Johnson Controls, recommends hiring for data analytics and visualization skills to gain productivity and cost efficiencies (Coffin, 2022a). Lem Chin Kok, KPMG's Asia-Pacific Forensic Leader, frames the stakes directly: "It's important for companies to have a proactive detection mechanism so they can take action. In an increasingly digitalized world, the control environment has lagged, leaving CCOs short of the data they need. Fully digitized controls, augmented by AI and machine learning (ML), can drive efficiency up and costs down and quickly detect fraud, misconduct and money laundering" (KPMG, 2024, p. 10).

Facing internal budget scrutiny, Ethisphere CEO Erica Salmon Byrne recommends leaning on human resources, internal audit, information technology, and other control functions as "extensions of yours so that you're all working together" (Coffin, 2022b, p. 15). Richmond and Jiles (2022) argue managerial accountants are natural partners here: "If management accountants are fully integrated into the compliance program, their holistic view of the organization and its existing information systems can aid in the design and execution of compliance programs" (p. 30).

Building Trust in the Profession

Trust underpins a business's reputation. SCCE CEO Roy Snell (2013) considers building trust through an ethical culture the most important role an ethics professional can play in supporting organizational and economic success. Joseph Murphy, SCCE's director of public policy, frames the profession's duty as protecting the public interest: "When C&E (Compliance and Ethics) violations occur in major companies, there is the potential for dramatic negative consequences with more widespread impact (e.g., the Bhopal disaster, Enron debacle, BP oil spill). Organizational misconduct can result in high-stakes harm to society" (Murphy, 2014, p. 9).

The profession has advanced considerably since the 1980s DII, when General Dynamics introduced the first formal standards of business ethics and conduct — today's programs are far more comprehensive. Patrick J. Gnazzo offers this advice: "No matter what career you choose after you leave Bentley, an effective chief ethics and compliance officer (CECO) will make your job all the more enjoyable. An effective CECO has your back, and he or she will make it easier to say 'no' to the inevitable pressure to cut corners or bend the rules. An effective CECO allows employees to devote their energies to being productive rather than protective" (Gnazzo, 2011, p. 534). An ethical business ultimately requires employees and managers to hold each other accountable, recognize ethical issues, mitigate bias and pressure, and lead by example — creating long-term value for customers, employees, shareholders, suppliers, and the community.

Chapter 10 closes with four critical thinking and discussion questions, each paired below with a concise model answer grounded in the chapter's content.

1. Search current news sites or trade journals for reports of new technologies. Select one technology and identify the ethical considerations that a company adopting the technology should address.

Using Deloitte's (2023) ten-principle framework as a checklist works well for any technology chosen — for generative AI specifically, the chapter flags data privacy and accuracy ("poisoned" training data) and the need for explainability to build customer trust (Burkhardt et al., 2019). A strong answer names a specific, current technology, then maps its risks explicitly onto principles such as Transparent & Explainable, Fair & Impartial, Safe & Secure, and Controlled rather than describing the technology in the abstract.

2. Select a global risk from the World Economic Forum Global Risk Report (Figure 10.4) or another future risk to business. Find three credible sources of information that would highlight ethical issues that organizations should consider incorporating into their ethics and compliance program. Identify any underlying biases in the source material that might skew a recommended action.

Table 10.2 supplies the source menu: pairing a news outlet, an industry/professional association (e.g., Ethisphere, SHRM), and an NGO or think tank (e.g., CFR, World Economic Forum) gives three genuinely different vantage points. Bias-checking should be concrete: news coverage carries outlet-specific editorial slant, industry associations may underweight risks to their own membership's practices, and think tanks funded by corporate sponsors may frame findings favorably toward sponsor interests — the chapter's own caution about user-generated content (skewed toward strongly opinionated, younger users) applies equally to any single-source reliance.

3. Envision the workplace of the future. What ethical issues arise from robot technology performing reasoning and decision-making tasks like performing surgery? Who would be accountable for misconduct or unethical actions?

The chapter's self-driving-car and trolley-problem framing extends directly here: as with autonomous vehicles, the central ethical issue is that a machine now makes decisions with life-or-death consequences that a human previously made, using programming set by people far removed from the moment of harm. Asimov's three laws (Anderson, 2008) offer a starting ethical structure but do not resolve accountability — a defensible answer argues accountability should trace through the full chain (device manufacturer, software developer, deploying hospital or institution, and supervising human professional), similar to how Binning-and-Barrett-style traceability works in other domains: the further removed a decision-maker is from the harm, the more the analysis must rely on documented design and testing evidence rather than intent.

4. What skills will ethics and compliance professionals require to handle demands to manage future ethical issues? How can an organization prepare its workforce to anticipate and respond to emerging ethical issues?

The chapter points to data analytics and data visualization skills (Coffin, 2022a), cross-functional fluency to connect with HR, audit, IT, and finance (Coffin, 2022b), and the softer skills of building organizational legitimacy and trust (Suchman, 1995; Snell, 2013). To prepare the broader workforce, organizations should invest in skills-first development (World Economic Forum, 2023b), maintain active environmental scanning using the credible-source menu in Table 10.2, and run crisis-response drills — since only 20% of surveyed companies currently do so (Morrison Foerster & Ethisphere, 2023), this is also the most actionable, currently underused practice.

Every key term the chapter lists in its Key Terms section, plus the additional defined terms introduced along the way, one line each.

A single table capturing the chapter's core frameworks, its taxonomy of stakeholder pressure, its emerging-issue categories, and its outlook for the ethics and compliance profession.