Ethical distance

An under developed field in cluster and proximity theory is the questions regarding ethics and value. The ethical distance in collaboration seems to be invisible as long as it is relatively low. This would mean that the collaborating parties share trust and value, and keep within the ethical borders the other party adheres to. But should this distance become to large the collaboration becomes almost impossible. In international cooperation it might also cause legal trouble. An example regarding this would be if a company producing a product uses child labor or other forms of unethical labor. This might have legal consequence for any Norwegian business trying to do business with the company. Also on a more personal level, a contact in the firm who produce false estimates and generally can't be trusted, might cause the trust between the businesses to deteriorate. This trust is usually built up over a long stretch of time, and will take even longer to rebuild. Ethics and value share many commonalities with other aspects of distance, and might be seen as a hygiene factor for clusters and similar innovation and knowledge sharing systems.

What I argue is that ethical proximity should be included as a proximity factor or further researched as an aspect in clustering and collaboration.