CONSUMERS’ ETHICAL BEHAVIOUR, CONSUMERS’ KNOWLEDGE AND MORAL IDEOLOGY AMONG MINISTRY OF DOMESTRIC TRADE, CO-OPERATIVES AND CONSUMERISM, PUTRAJAYA EMPLOYEES

Abstract

Consumers are major participants in the business process and Rao and Al- Wugayan (2005) pointed out that there is a growing interest in researching consumer ethics. Despite this, there seems to be a dearth of consumer ethics studies in the context of Malaysia. Taylor (1975) defines ethics as the “inquiry into the nature and grounds of morality where the term morality is taken to mean moral judgments, standards and rules of conduct”. Ethical issues involving consumers are as important as ethical issues concerning major corporations as consumers are a major partaker in market interaction. Dodge et al. (1996) define consumer ethics as the “rightness as opposed to the wrongness of certain actions on the part of the buyer or potential buyer in consumer situations.” Consumers are able to involve in unethical and illegal consumer behaviour in market place such as shoplifting, buying counterfeit product, changing price-tag on merchandise in store. (Mosclis and Powell, 1986; Albers-Miller, 1999).
Consumers’ ethical behaviour could be influenced by several factors which are among others are moral ideology. Forsyth (1992) identified two distinct dimensions of moral ideology which are idealism and relativism. Many researchers have found that idealism and relativism are important ideologies in explaining ethical discrepancies between individuals. Vitell et al. (1991) found that ethical ideology is a significant overall determinant of consumers’ ethical behaviour.