The Business Ethics Blog

Gotta admit, I’m at a loss for words:

Pharmaceutical companies the world’s most ethical, says Swiss study

The three most ethical companies in the world are innovative pharmaceutical manufacturers according to a new and independent study by a Swiss-based organisation.
The Geneva-based organisation, Covalence, has released its 2005 annual ethical ranking of multinational companies across ten major sectors.

It found that the top three companies with the best ethical score, across ALL sectors, were GlaxoSmithKline, Merck and Bristol Myers Squibb.

If anyone has any thoughts on how companies in a nearly-universally-villified industry end up getting top marks for ethics, let me know.
Actually, I’d rather not hear guesses. But Covalence has some stuff about methodology on its website. [Link updated Nov. ’08] Their approach as a lot to do with corporate reputation (rather than measures of actual performance). A quick look suggests to me that a lot of the criteria have to do with stuff that doesn’t touch on the controversial aspects of the pharmaceutical industry (i.e., its effect on human health). So, if pharma companies do well at stuff like labour relations (which they might well — I’ve never heard of a pharma scandal in that realm), they might well score highly, especially if there isn’t also a category on, say, manipulation of research results.