Ethical Ideologies: Efficient Assessment and Influence on Ethical Judgments of Marketing Practices

Abstract

Individuals often differ with respect to their ethical judgments of marketing practices. Personal beliefs are presumably important sources of such differences. This article reports on the development and testing of an original, parsimonious measure of personal moral beliefs based on Forsyth's (1980) taxonomy of ethical ideologies. In contrast to Forsyth's longer, more general measure, the short scale presented here is designed specifically for application in marketing ethics research. Results of three studies suggest that Idealism and Ideological Relativism dimensions can be reliably distinguished and represented by the authors' 7-item MEI (Marketing Ethical Ideology) scale. Moreover, ethical ideology is shown to influence evaluations of representative ethical problems in marketing. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.