Examination of the Role of Business Ethics with Google Trends

Ethics has existed in religion and philosophy for thousands of years and has been applied to business activities in the same way ethical values and norms have been applied to everyday life. This article summarizes the arguments and counterarguments within the scientific discussion on the study of business ethics as the form of applied ethics, which studies morals, ethical principles and problems in the business environment. The main goal of the study is to analyze business ethics from the point of view of integration of general morals and ethical norms to business, a combination of key signs of the right (good) or wrong behavior while doing business, determined on the basis of expected behavior approved by the society. The study of the role of business ethics in the corporate sector of the economy allowed to determine the most general principles of business ethics, namely awareness, caring, compliance, consideration, fairness, honesty, implementation, integrity, integration, loyalty, responsibility, and trustworthiness. The methodological basis of the research is analytical, statistical and comparative methods based on the use of Google Trends. In general, in Google Books, the use of the term business ethics shows an exponential trend. The findings show that the highest search frequency of business ethics is in the “all” category, after that in the “business and industry” category, then in the “science” category, finally in the “law and government” category. On average, the highest interest frequency was in 2004 in all examined categories. The author has proved that a third-degree polynomial downward trend can be fitted to each time series. The analysis of this concept on a geographical basis showed that the interest frequency of the principles of business ethics was most significant in South and Central East Africa, in South and Southeast Asia, over and above in the Caribbean.