Do we research the right things?

The amount of academic research being conducted and published on business ethics has expanded greatly. I believe this is a good thing. However, such is the importance of business and the ethical challenges that it faces, our work as academics will never be done. There will always be a need for further research – of course! In fact, impressive though the advances have been, the business ethics scholarly community is still small compared to many cognate areas, whether they be academic disciplines (such as economics) or particular fields within management (such as marketing). Our capacity is still very limited when set against what needs to be done, so we need to be wise about how we allocate our scarce resources. A piece of research might be of some value, but does it come at a high opportunity cost?