nds that the key to the Body Shop's success has been its ethical way of doing business. The Body Shop, like most organisations worldwide, understands the importance of a clear business strategy. But unlike most other organisations, The Body has developed their own unique ethical strategy that for many years has enabled them to hold a very strong position in cosmetic and toiletry industries worldwide. At the core of the Body Shop's business ethics is the idea of profits with principles. Anita Roddick believes that "the companies values are every bit as important as its products and profits." (Taken from the company profile of Anita Roddick on www.bodyshop.co.uk).
             Now that we have discussed a brief history of the Bodyshop, the next step is to go into more detail about what business ethics actually is. Defining business ethics in an enlightening way is not an easy task and any simple definition merely provides us with an alternative form of words. Chryssides & Kaler (1993) articulate that Business ethics is concerned with "looking at the problems which raise moral issues in business, and critically examining the various proposals for solving them."
             Business ethics, like ethics in general, is mainly concerned with conduct and ethical questions are essentially questions about whether we ought or ought not to perform certain kinds of actions; about whether those actions are right or wrong, good or bad, virtuous or vicious, worthy of reward or punishment, praise or blame, and so on. Therefore studying business ethics has practical purposes and should provide a better and sounder basis on which to operate than they might have otherwise had.
             But this does not mean that there are a list of do's and don'ts that will guide us to morally good business practices. Because if this were the case then ethics in business would be a lot less complex and a decision about whether a company was being ethi...