pardon .....But ...Is marketing really an ethical function ?

Please,

look at  scale developed by Vitell, Rallapalli and Singhapakdi (1993).

"Marketing Norms: The influence of Personal Moral Philosphies and Organizational Ethical Culture", Journal of Marketing Science, 21 (4), p. 331-37.

or:

Ethics- Corporate Ethical Scale: CEP,

Hunt, Shelby D., Van R. Wood, Lawrance B. Chonko (1989), Corporate Ethical values and Organizational Commitment in Marketing, Journal of Marketing, 53, p. 79-90

Best wishes

Magda

First we would have to agree as to what constitutes the ethical dimensions. For example: One observer might conclude that a solar-panel manufacturer is ethical based on the nature of the industry and because it treats its employees well (assuming it does). Another observer may note that the same company's CEO was a major donor to the politicians who provided the firm with substantial state subsidies (if, again, such has occurred).

The number of schools, frameworks, etc. make that task somewhere between fraught and daunting, but I think it may be worth trying. I am not an expert in this area, but it may be that "contextually bound" measures will be possible, e.g. "We define it this way, and here is what our measures yield in that context."

I believe it is possible.  First of all, there has to be some preliminary research in order to find the different ethical frameworks.  This is so that you can find some major themes in ethics.  Although the themes may not list major instances, they can still be used to create a mass survey.  With this survey the research can use yes no, true false and multiple choice options and number the categories to fall in line with the themes for answering in excel through which ever equation is pertinent to the data.  There can also be a short answer section of the survey.  Instead of requiring yourself to actually read all of the short answers, the research can be used to predict the possible answers and then keywords can be coded as notifiers from the short answers and then mapped and then linearized into an equation.  I'm not the expert on how to do this, but I know it's methods that people have done in the past according to other research I've read.  It tests patterns and strings in the data.  There will have to be a randomization of respondents chosen and also a large number of surveys administered so that the outcomes can be validated such that there is confidence that re-doing the experiment will develop the same or similar results.  In other words, there needs to be a large reach.

En el estudio anual de MERCO que realiza anualmente en España y otros países por Villafañe & Asociados y encontrarás algunas referencias útiles. El enlace es http://www.merco.info/es/countries/4-es

I agree with Ken on this one, it is a difficult task because what I think you are asking is what are the things that the marketing function within a firm does that can be catorgized as ethical or not and based on some reasonably exhaustive list come up with some score that is indicative of the totality of the ethical behavior of that firm.  So you have mutliple issues here; what are the activities, how do you score them as ethical or not and how do you combine them and finally what or how do we define ethical behavior in terms of general drivers.  The most common ethical frameworks seem to me to revolve around ends and means or just ends.  Back in about 1966 Gardner wrote a book where he argued that it was intentions means and ends and I generally use that model in the classroom to talk about what it means to be ethical.  Sorry I can't be more definitive on this, having done just a bit of work on ethics in purchasing back in the middle 90's I am far from an expert.

Also see "Improving evaluations of business ethics" by Reidenback and Robin 1990, Journal of Business Ethics, 9, 639-653.

You may want to look at the work done by Tim Devinney (now at Leeds University), who has published several conceptual and empirical articles on this. A good start is his 2009 article in Academy of Management Perspectives: T. Devinney (2009), “Is the Socially Responsible Corporation a Myth? The Good, Bad and Ugly of Corporate Social Responsibility,” Academy of Management Perspectives, 23(2): 44-56. 

I disagree. The index is just a list of factors to be ticked, or even be given a point score The choice of factors, of what points to be given, and of the aggregation procedures (additive, compensatory, minimax etc, arithmetic multiplicative etc) are all arbitrary. There is an infinite number of possible indices, all arbitrary and indefensible. See the literature on grades to get some idea of the possibilities, e.g. Bowbrick, The economics of grades, The Economics of Quality, Grades and Brands.

How for example do you fit Nestle's belief that it is ok to kill black babies, as long as they make money out of selling the babyfood into an index that is designed for normal firms?

I think first of all it is a difficult topic and it will be difficult to start with a quantitative one, before to that you can have some preliminary research like an exploratory one in a detailed manner, then from the results you can have the appropriate quantitative tools. 

Hago la misma pegunta para organizaciones del Estado, instituciones públicas. Es posible medir su evolución ética cuantitativamente? Alguien conoceuna experiencia o artículos de investigadores? Same question but regarding official o public institutions. Does somebody know an article or reaserch?

pardon .....But ...Is marketing really an ethical function ?

Sir, functioning of marketing is and has been under review for ethical issues. But the rules of ethics do apply to marketing as a function also.