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Logistics not only has very close relations with the entire organization, but it necessarily connects with the surrounding environment and with other organizations, which exchange with the different areas of the respective activity center. This constant external contact, unfortunately, allows logistics to be a possible source of corruption and unethical behavior.
Following, mainly Hernández, García & Hernández (2020), some general aspects about ethics in the business world will be presented below. The importance of ethical conduct is frequently studied in many different fields, including the sciences. In particular in biology, is bioethics (Evans, 2014), which is responsible for many ethical aspects of this science. In the sciences, as a whole, when talking about the dissemination of knowledge, in this case from the point of view of geography, says Evans (2016), who, in order to have an ethical behavior, must investigate and disseminate what is really important and not what concerns the interests of the researcher.
Another aspect, common to many doctoral theses, is the one raised by Childs (2017) and Mohammed (2017), among others, who, in the elaboration of their own doctoral thesis, review a series of ethical principles to take into account, in the investigation process.
It is also relevant to mention another field, which the sciences claim an ethical behavior, it is in the one of the mathematical models, there Mittelstadt et al. (2016), analyze the importance of ethics and algorithms, and in a work very close to it, in the field of handling new information technologies, Mittelstadt & Floridi (2015), study ethics in the management of Big Data.
But ethics is also found in the business world and organizations in general. In this last sense, recently Rowlands et al. (2021) and previously Chakrabarty & Bass (2014) handle the expression Positive Organizational Ethics (POE), which they define as those ethical principles and declarations of value that guide an organization towards its maximum ethical potential.
But when talking about POE, there is another term that organizations take a lot into consideration, because it contributes to improving ethical performance. There is talk of expression Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) (Ferman, Mehmet & Simbarashe, 2021; Smith, 2020; Wojtkowiak, 2018). A term that is not only used in large and small and medium sized companies (Mangani, 2021; Sousa, 2020), but is also often mentioned when making references to government entities (Abdulnaser, Abdel-Aziz & Khitam, 2020), financial institutions (Boachie, 2020; Sousa, 2020) and with aspects related to the environment (Harsh, Raiswa & Richa, 2018; Heiko & Karsten, 2020). Remember that for many authors (Carroll, 2016), one of the basic components of the CSR is the ethical aspects.
On the other hand, Bergman, Bergman & Berger (2017), present a broad discussion of business ethics and it is curious to highlight that, in a work, on this topic (Berger et al., 2017), they conclude that group of students interviewed in China do not mention the importance of this aspect, at least from the perspective of the western world.
It can also cite the work of Pinar & Peksoy (2016), who analyze the use of simulation, to improve ethical performance in organizations responsible for health care. And also, in the services sector, but in this case in the attention to tourism, it can see in the work of Ivanuša & Hribar (2016), the relationship with the ethical. The ethical aspects should also be taken into account when talking about the abuse of temporary jobs and unemployment among young people (Wojtkowiak, 2018).