Different cultural and historical perspectives make it particularly difficult to define and teach business ethics.

Business ethics can function as a buffer zone in organizations to assist employees in avoiding legal and social problems. Of course, laws, cultures and histories play a major role in this context. This can create a significant challenge in developing appropriate teaching materials, as the relationship of law to ethics to society varies greatly across countries. Schools might turn to an expanding set of global resources and international business research to overcome this challenge. For example, cultural differences are compared through Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, relating countries on a scale from least corrupt to most corrupt (www.transparency.org). Scandinavian countries rank very low in perceived corruption whereas countries such as Nigeria, Bangladesh, Haiti and Myanmar rank very high in their perceived level of corruption.