Dubious trade and corporate connections: Moral imperative versus academic silence.

Abstract

Advocacy against the dark side of trade comes to us via investigative journalism by the mainstream news media, rather than the business media. Formal research on these dubious trades is lacking and what little is done is primarily by non-government organisations {NGOs) and intergovernmental organisations (IGOs), not academic institutions. Within academia, research on the phenomenon is published primarily by researchers from the humanities and social sciences, even the physical sciences, rather than those in business and management disciplines, with the possible exception of economists who have done some amoral research on the arms trade. Utilising limited secondary data on the extent of the trade and its consequences, this paper aims to make the case for why corporations cannot ignore such matters of global socio-economic justice.