> Every culture has its own unwritten rules and customs.
Many cultures have bribery as an unwritten rule and custom. Every official you run across is expecting a small bribe.
Should companies adopt that culture as well?
Many cultures have bribery as an unwritten rule and custom. Every official you run across is expecting a small bribe.
Should companies adopt that culture as well?
Coiuntries are sovereign. Foreigners don't decide, that's a key outcome of the thirty years' war. So if you go to X, the polite, proper, non-imperialist thing is to follow accepted custom.
Of course, that raises the question of what "accepted custom" means. It's not clear to me that bribing is really accepted in the countries where it's a custom, widely accepted, rather than being something people do reluctantly.
For example: Will you use oil from Saudi Arabia for your business? You could refrain because so much of the payment gets sidetracked to those 4000 princes, or because refraining brakes the climate changes a little bit, or even both.
The list goes on. There's much that's bad in the world.
Deciding to be principled about bribes and morally flexible about the rest seems… okay to me. Not particularly bad.
The only reason international firms are sometimes a little circumspect about that is because they also operate in home countries where bribery even in foreign countries is often against the socially enforced (written, in this case, but what is important is the enforced part, not written vs. unwritten) rules and customs.
E.g., https://www.trade.gov/us-foreign-corrupt-practices-act