Having a long history dating back to 1896, the Olympics established an image of honor and sportsmanship in the minds of its stakeholders, including its supporters, sponsors, employees, athletes, and the people that wait to watch its events impatiently. Therefore, the Olympics organization has a duty to everyone that strives to make its events memorable to act in a trustworthy, honest, and ethical manner, so that it wouldn't allow anything to shake its great foundation. But since ethics is a broad word that people use to define what is right and what is wrong, it is necessary to note that ethical ideas vary from one country to another, one organization to another, one person to another, and most importantly, from one society to another. Yet, and according to our book, Business and Society, "Ethics is a universal human trait found everywhere" (Post, Lawrence, Weber, 2002, p. 103), or as I think, it should be.
             The reason that different people have different ethical standards is attributed to the fact that they come from different cultures. To emphasize on this point, our book suggests that ethical problems occur in business for several reasons, one of them being "cross-cultural contradictions". This means that, when corporations do business in other societies where ethical and cultural standards differ from those applied at home, problems might occur. I think that this justification is very essential in my discussion, as it applies on the Salt Lake City case, where members of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee (SLOC) were accused of spoiling the image of the Olympics by performing an unethical action, bribery, in order to be selected as the location for the Olympic Winter Games in year 2002. Furthermore, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) members were blamed for taking part in this immoral scandal by accepting very expensive gifts amounting to one million dollars from the SLOC members in order to vote fo...