Profit Vs. Freedom of Speech: a Cross-Cultural Perspective
It is no secret that in a business profit is the bottom line. It is the reason someone starts a company, the reason employees crawl out of bed each morning, and the reason why sometimes ethical values are bent or broken. On the small scale, such as a local grocery, ethics of the owners and employees can be easily maintained because the area they are operating in shares the same values. This, however, is not the case with global businesses. Instead of a local community for profits large businesses rely on the global market, thus exposing and challenging their original ethics for the sake of continued profits. This cross-cultural perspective will examine a recent example of this challenge when the company Google began to expand into the Chinese and other Asian markets.
Google is a multi-billion dollar company that was started in the garage of two Stanford students in 1997 (Google, 2012). The initial goal was to produce an internet search engine that would be able to find and provide access to an immeasurable amount of information. Since its inception, Google published several values that were believed to be the essence of the company. Among them were that all focus should be on the user of the product and that any ad revenue should not come at the users cost, examples include pop-up advertising and manipulated searches (Google, 2012). Google also started with a relaxed approach to business, believing that employees worked better when comfortable, and that information should be shared.
As Google expanded from its humble beginning, the company took on a larger and larger role in the community as a role model for business ethics. The company stayed true to their initial objectives, focused on honesty and putting out a product only when it surpassed expectations. The company expanded with new products including