Digesting the Raisins of Wrath: Business, Ethics, and the Archival Profession

Can one be an ethical archivist and work for a corporation? Richard Cox, in his letter to the editor about the contested Sun Mad poster published on the cover of the Fall/Winter 2003 American Archivist, contended that this is not possible because of the tension between maintaining the integrity of the archives and the pressure to bury any information that casts an unfavorable light upon the corporation.¹ The purpose of this paper is, first, to argue that if it is challenging to be an ethical archivist working for a corporation, the challenge is not due to something inherently unethical about corporations, but to difficulties with the field of ethics itself. The secondary purpose is to suggest what can be done to foster continued improvements in the ethical climate of the archival profession in the face of these difficulties in the field of ethics.