Direct Selling Ethics at the Top: An Industry Audit and Status Report |
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| Authors: | Lawrence B. Chonko Thomas R. Wotruba Terry W. Loe |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Lawrence B. Chonko (Ph.D., University of Houston) is Holloway Professor of Marketing, Baylor University. Dr. Chonko is author or coauthor of five books, Direct Marketing, Direct Selling, and the Mature Consumer, Professional Selling, Managing Salespeople, Business, The Economy and World Affairs, and Ethics and Marketing Decision Making. He has also served as editor of the Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management. Author of over 150 papers, his articles have appeared in leading journals including Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and the Academy of Management Journal. Throughout his career, Prof. Chonko has served as a consultant to industrial products, consumer products, service, and non-profit organizations.;2. Thomas R. Wotruba (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin) is Emeritus Professor of Marketing, San Diego State University, where he taught for 38 years. He has authored or coauthored six textbooks and published more than 80 research monographs and professional journal articles. He is the former editor of the Journal of Personal Selling &3. Sales Management and served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Management, Journal of Business &4. Industrial Marketing, and Journal of Personal Selling &5. Sales Management. He has been actively involved in direct selling research since 1985 and received the Circle of Honor award from the US Direct Selling Education Foundation in 2000. He has traveled internationally addressing conferences or meetings in Berlin, Budapest, London, Malta, Melbourne, Montreal, Prague, Sao Paulo, and Singapore, and taught for a semester in the MBA program for the Czechoslovak Management Center near Prague. (twotruba@mail.sdsu.edu).;6. Terry W. Loe (Ph.D., University of Memphis) is Assistant Professor of Marketing at Baylor University and Associate Director of the Baylor University Center for Professional Selling. His research interests include ethics in marketing, professionalism in sales and sales management. His research has appeared in the Journal of Professional Selling and Sales Management, Journal of Business Ethics, Journal of Marketing Management, Journal of Marketing Education, and the Journal of Contemporary Business Issues, as well as numerous national and international conference proceedings. |
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| Abstract: | Unethical conduct by salespeople contributes to loss to the bottom line directly through misuse of expense reports and indirectly through lost customers who are disenchanted with questionable business practices. Self-regulation by industry has become an important strategy in improving the ethical environment of the industry as well as to establish standards that meet or exceed existing statutory or regulatory requirements. Audits of industry regulatory programs provide a mechanism to uncover weaknesses, heighten awareness of the importance of ethics and allow for improvements to be made and risks reduced. This study audits the Direct Selling Industry's code of ethics as it complies with the Federal Sentencing Guidelines (FSG) and establishes a benchmark against which subsequent ethics research in the Direct Selling Industry can be compared. |
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