Ethical governance is crucially important for the well-being and survival of organizations in the 21 st century. Ethics have become the key reference values when drawing new pacts between various actors acting as governance agents within corporations. While the dynamics and potency of ethical conduct have morphed over the years, there is little denial as to the special importance of ethical governance. The new millennium has imposed relatively new transparency demands as technologies have advanced, and the public has demanded more information about the corporate world. Enforcement of values has become not just a publicity stunt but vital necessity in the age of information flow. Furthermore, globalization of information means that ethical violations by multinationals in one part of the world could have far-reaching repercussions in another. There is thus a clear nexus between ethical governance, transparency, and organizational stability or well-being. Exploration of this nexus is the focus of this paper.
Ethical conduct in governance can simply be understood to mean the way in which stakeholders in a company attempt to manage collective action in a manner that avoids damaging behaviors especially by the majority on the minority. The value of ethics in governance is, therefore, to raise awareness for the existence and well-being of others, their rights and needs and therefore the derivation and imposition of certain principles as the minimum requirements of conduct. To this extent, ethical governance presupposes a system of agreed values and guidelines that guide action. An ethical corporate environment would, therefore, be characterized by conformity to acceptable, reasonable and agreed values which constitute terms of reference. While governing behavior, these values must also ensure furtherance of organizational goals, with profit-making being the chief goal. This is because a company is a constituent part of the business world and as such is primarily concerned with the creation of value and generation of profits (Fung, 2014) . Most ethical standards today emphasize probity, professionalism, teamwork, transparency, and accountability. What is significant in the analysis of ethical governance is not so much the existence of these ethical demands but conformity to them.
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Transparency as an ethical demand seeks to ensure that both insiders and outsiders of an organization are adequately informed. Information that ought to be available to people should not be withdrawn from them without legitimate grounds. Corporate transparency, the extent to which actions of a corporation can be scrutinized by outsiders, forms a rich area of inquiry and its relative merits have been extensively analyzed. Three dimensions of corporate transparency are particularly important: clarity, accuracy and information disclosure. To increase their transparency index, corporations are finding it more necessary to have more disclosures, even those that may not be of immediate interest to the public (Fung, 2014) . Information, for instance , on the ecological impact of company activity is considered important for sustainable relations with key stakeholders.
Advancements in information technology make it nearly impossible for companies to sit on information with a surety it will not get out to the public. Corporations, perhaps learning from history, prefer to divulge information with the hope of mitigating the potential fallout. Transparency is, therefore, a way of gaining public trust but also a means of demonstrating its ethical nature. In the 20 th century organizations could-and statistical evidence attest to this- demonstrate their ethical nature by appealing to a range of regulatory approvals and external expert evaluations. High marks from watchdog agencies and government inspectors were adequate for corporations to engender social trust. These approvals take the form of better business bureau rating, audited financial statements, stamps of approval from watchdog agencies and government inspection certificates (Fung, 2014) . These ethical currencies have however lost their appeal to the public , and other evaluation criteria have more force today.
The public today demonstrates considerable skepticism for regulatory and watchdog agencies due to a history of lapses in vigilance and numerous instances of complicity in wrongdoing by these very entities. Declines in public trust towards regulatory and watchdog agencies were perhaps best evidenced towards the turn of the 20 th century. There was a proliferation of codes of conduct, principles, and standards that attempt to recalibrate relations between management and various stakeholders within the corporate environment. Surveys also indicated that the general American public was demonstrating more trust in small than big businesses. The willingness of big businesses to submit themselves to external regulations and various codes of conduct also contributed to the eroding of this trust. In the 21 st century, expert approval and official approval are subordinate to transparency in the race to garner social trust. The importance of social trust in business requires little emphasis here. It is however not outside the bounds of this paper to note that social trust is crucially important in ensuring the confidence of investors and workers, in mobilizing employees towards the attainment of social goals, in promoting cooperative and productive engagement with enforcement and watchdog agencies and more crucially members of the public who form the target market (Osula, 2012) . In the absence of social trust, organizational stability and well-being, as will be demonstrated, is seriously undermined.
The reallocation of trust away from the old guard regulatory agencies towards public evaluation has meant a demand not just for audit reforms but also a clamor for access to the same raw data that auditors see. This enables not just an evaluation of the company but also of evaluators themselves. With the increased appreciation of the role of transparency in getting value, stakeholders and shareholders are no longer willing to be left in the dark. Another impact of technology has been the democratization of transparency and ethical demands In general. No longer is the preserve of the chief executive officer to determine what information is to be made public. Boardroom discussions that bring together all actors are commonplace. Access to raw data means that everyone can make a contribution and thus shape policy. Even consumers demand more than window dressing. Undertaking philanthropic or volunteer initiatives that disguise, for instance, that supply chain policies allow overworking of workers or that products have undisclosed side effects or that the organization causes excessive pollution, is no longer permissible.
In such an environment, there is a fine line between which operations ought to be made public and those that ought to remain secret. There is a general acceptance that processes such as financial reporting are crucially important and have huge potential benefits more so in relation to customers and investors. For instance investors, creditors and other market participants use such information to evaluate the financial condition of an entity. Such transparency inspired disclosures also increase confidence in market fairness. Opaque disclosures, on the other hand, give no idea about the risks involved or the fundamentals of the company. Evidence indicates that companies with complex business structures and inscrutable financials are at greater risk and make less valuable investments. The more disturbing dilemma, however, is when not to make dilemmas. Failure to disclose product ingredients, for instance, may be easily construed as unnecessary opaqueness while it is a genuine attempt to protect access certain raw materials. Perhaps the greatest dilemma occurs when special events such as oil spills happen, and there are fears that divulgence of such information might put company profits or even relations with authorities in jeopardy thus impacting organizational stability.
Organizational stability denotes predictability and control. Stability is thus averse to shocks that tend to unsettle existing order. In fact, the role of routine, structures, policies and other guidelines is partially to avoid or purge uncertainty from the work environment. Transparency ensures clarity of goals and responsibility. Internal transparency helps avoid internal uncertainties while external transparency helps avoid both internal and external shocks. In the age of information flow, internal shocks may easily turn into external shocks and vice versa.
The role of shocks in disrupting organizational stability became most evident at the start of the new millennium when a series of scandals hit many corporate giants. Enron, Worldcom, and Andersen had a number of the executives found guilty of corruption and accounting fraud. In Europe, major scandals have hit Vivendi Universals in France, Parmalat in Italy and Volkswagen in Germany. These scandals saw not just the exit of many executives but also the imposition of hefty fines in numerous jurisdictions. For companies like Volkswagen, the requirement to recall thousands of cars after the mission scandal had major implications for the company. Many other scandals such as those involving Mitsubishi have proven quite disruptive for organizations. With the value of hindsight, some of these companies would have avoided some of the disastrous outcomes had they embraced a degree of transparency (Fung, 2014) . Away from these external shocks, lack of transparency accounts for numerous cases of employee boycotts, go-slows and other destabilizing activities that are quite inimical to a corporation.
There is a, therefore, a clear linkage between ethical governance, transparency, and organizational stability. This linkage, it has been argued, has evolved over the years as technologies have advanced and public concerns have morphed. The embrace of organizational transparency has thus been argued to be a prerequisite in the contemporary corporate environment.
References
Fung, B. (2014). The Demand and Need for Transparency and Disclosure in Corporate Governance. Universal Journal of Management .
Osula, B. (2012). Why Ethics Has No Place in 21st Century Organizations: How Transparency and the Internet Have Sent Watchdogs to the Pound. Journal of Strategic Leadership , 1-8.
