Acceptability of operations as an indicator of corporate social performance Mirja MikkilÌ Introduction The main manufacturing industries have expanded intensively in recent decades to create multinational enterprises, with simultaneous rapid globalisation of the world economy as a whole. Although the political sector has been changing through altera- tions to and some elimination of geographical and political borders (Payne et al. 1997), the political and societal sectors have not entirely been able to keep pace with the changing world. The decisions made by multinational enterprises in their national- level operations have so far continued to be in- fluenced by national legislation, standards, norms, values and cultures, but that influence is decreas- ing as economic power is increasingly passing out of the hands of national governments to be vested in global corporations (Korten 1995). This process of economic internationalisation and globalisation has made business ethics a fast-growing research field in Europe over the last ten or twenty years. Simultaneously with their increasing power, the field of environmental and socio-cultural opera- tions open to the corporations has been diversify- ing. Globalisation has increased calls for them to use their resources to help alleviate a wide variety of social problems, e.g. the proposal of Hilman & Keim (2001) that firms should apply laws and norms of a developed nation to issues such as child labour and environmental pollution in less devel- oped countries, regardless of local laws or customs. The willingness of corporations to behave in an ethically acceptable manner and to carry their share of the common responsibility is also increasing, although their tendency to apply the ethical system of their country of origin may turn out to be problematic. Multinational corporations must be aware of the legal, political and ethical climates of host countries, in addition to which the grow- ing interdependence between a body of socially, politically, economically and legally diverse coun- tries has caused multinational corporate entities to re-examine many of their existing policies (Payne et al. 1997). The choice of behaviour that is ethically ‘right’ is problematic, as there is no model that defines how to behave in different operational environments. Ethical behaviour and socially re- sponsible practices in business have been discussed extensively in recent years by numerous authors and have been accepted as significant aspects of management practice and decision-making (Ether- edge 1999). The concepts involved have never- theless been applied in a highly flexible manner, especially at the practical level. There was a great deal of theoretical debate on issues of business ethics during the latter half of the twentieth century, but little research related to specific branches or industries was carried out. Such work could help in outlining many abstract ethical issues and concretising the meaning of these concepts in practical business terms. This paper aims to contribute to the discussion by proposing an indicator, referred to as ‘accept- ability of operations’, for assessing corporate social performance within internationalising cor- porations. Many branches have already been 78 # Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Volume 12 Number 1 January 2003