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Describes a study which examined the environmental scanning systems in 226 Russian companies. Reports the findings which indicate that more advanced scanning systems were associated with higher performance levels in Russia. Comparative analysis which followed the analysis of statistical data suggested that there were a number of Western management concepts which could be used to promote the development of more sophisticated environmental scanning systems in the context of the Russian culture. Argues that this could lead to improved business performance in Russia.

To investigate the innate reasons for one of the biggest business failures of a Western Multinational Corporation (WMNC) in Eastern Europe – the failure of Rover in Bulgaria. The main proposition of this study seeks to focus on the importance of gaining adequate knowledge about the prevailing economic ideology and specificity of the socio‐cultural value orientations in the host country as a critical factor to prevent a business failure in Eastern Europe.

Archival materials, including media publications, company documents, and government records (1991‐1998), along with personal interviews providing pieces of information about what actually happened with Rover in Bulgaria during the 1990s. Questionnaire‐based surveys were also used to do a cross‐cultural comparison between the UK and Bulgaria.

Recognising that the failure of Rover in Bulgaria that appeared to be caused by bad luck could be actually pointed out as a case showing that the lack of adequate knowledge of the prevailing economic ideology and cultural‐value orientations would likely lead to a fiasco in Eastern Europe.

Proactively learning from mistakes can secure successful performance of WMNC in Eastern Europe and make these companies much less vulnerable to occurrence of (unlikely) events or accidents in this part of the world.

The case study presents insights from an original investigation in the form of lessons for WMNC.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an interdisciplinary review of the existing research on ethical behavior – informed by philosophical theories, social sciences, and applied business research – and identifies the merits and limitations of the extant theories, including the applicability of prescriptive frameworks and models to business practice.

Following the review, the paper advances a descriptive model of ethical decision‐making criteria that elucidates how individual, organizational, and environmental variables interact to influence attitude formation across critical components of an ethical issue.

The model advanced expands upon other existing frameworks and provides a comprehensive and simultaneous assessment of the interplay between individual‐level variables (e.g. demographic variables, position in the organisation), the structure and climate of the organisation in which the decisions are made, and the social and political features of the business environment.

The proposed model can be used as a training tool and it holds several advantages over the extant alternatives, namely versatility (it is adaptable to the specific organizational context in which respondents are required to conceptualize the dilemma and generate courses of action), and scope (the model allows for the simultaneous assessment of a myriad of cross‐level variables).

The paper offers a comprehensive decision‐making model that can be used to examine ethical decisions in business settings, to investigate potential differences in decision‐making accuracy and ethical reasoning between groups and individuals, and to examine the impact of changing ethical climates in organizational strategy.