Codes of conduct play an important role in a corporation's effort to institutionalize ethics. The imperative of their implementation and compliance has been widely recognized by corporations across the world. Given this backdrop, a survey has been conducted in India to ascertain: (a) how many corporations have codes of conduct; ( b) whether common ethical issues/themes exist among them; (c) whether they have proper ‘ethics management systems’ in place; and (d) whether codes of conduct reflect any distinctive national character. This article reports the findings of the survey based on content analysis and offers suggestions as to how corporations can make their code an ‘ideal code’ and also scope for further research.
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