Code of Conduct

Public Relations, 1991

Arbitrary rules intended to create and enforce a socially-engineered political orthodoxy within an organisation resembling professional ethics.

The hated scourge of the tech world, along with the endless ideological “statements” included on website footers and the so-called “contributor covenant”. Ethics are nothing new (nurses and psychologists were publishing codes of practice in the 50s), but the current social justice wrecking ball document style of defining “good behaviour” to replace actual law emerged in the late-eighties. In 1991, Levi Strauss adopted a “code” derived from the International Labour Organization and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 1992, Nike followed, in order to repair its lost reputation for using child labour.

• https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?&year_start=1950&year_end=2019&content=code+of+conduct
• https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22code+of+conduct%22
• https://itsfoss.com/linux-code-of-conduct/
• https://online.husson.edu/nursing-ethics/
• https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/looking-in-the-cultural-mirror/201603/is-psychologists-code-ethics-immoral
• https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/case-studies/levi-strauss-co-global-sourcing-guidelines