A second important factor in the growing concern over business ethics has been the increased awareness of environmental issues and the impact business can have on the physical environment typified by the Bhopal and Exxon Valdez incidents and the emissions of acid rain.
Again, the focus has been on large companies that pose a highly visible (in the physical and/or metaphorical sense) actual or potential threat to the environment.
These stories that have grabbed the headlines and provided the case material and examples for researchers and teachers of business ethics have almost invariably concerned the doings, indeed generally the misdoings, of large companies. So the study of business ethics has been largely, though not quite exclusively, the study of the ethics of large business. Despite this increased interest in business ethics, relatively little attention has been paid to issues of ethics and small businesses. But small as well as large businesses are having to respond to these changing attitudes towards ethical issues in areas as diverse as employment policies, health and safety, pollution and dealings with suppliers and customers. (There is, unfortunately, a dearth of literature on the form this pressure for change is taking in relation to small businesses and how they are responding).