Magazines

Magazines can offer valuable insights in the current trends and up to date ideas in the business community. Come sit back in the library for a selection of print magazines or click through to the online versions below:

• Barron’s
  Provides in-depth analysis and commentary on the markets.
• Forbes
  “Business news and financial news. Core topics include business, technology, stock markets, personal finance, and lifestyle.”
• BusinessWeek
  Reports on news, ideas and trends affecting industry and the economy for those in business management, with national and international coverage. Reports on news, ideas and trends affecting industry and the economy for those in business management, with national and international coverage.
• Fortune
  “Fortune 500 daily & breaking business news.”
• The Economist
  “Offers authoritative insight and opinion on international news, politics, business, finance, science and technology.”
• Financial Times
  (FT) is one of the world’s leading business news and information organizations, recognized internationally for its authority, integrity and accuracy.
• Harvard Business Review
  “Written for upper level management. Presents analysis of management problems and helpful commentary on advanced thinking and practice in all fields of management and administration.”
• Inc.
  “Advice, tools, and services that help your small business grow.” Available in print in the library.
• Money
  “Personal finance news and advice.” Available in print in the library.
• Wall Street Journal

Many corporations today have public websites that contain a lot of pertinent information about the company and it can be worthwhile to locate this important source of information when conducting research on any company.

Public Companies

An important document produced by public corporations is the Annual Corporate Report. This documents describes the corporations operations and fiscal conditions over the past year. The Annual Corporate Report is a reporting requirement that was put in place after the stock market crash of 1929. You can find them by searching sites such as:

• AnnualReports.com Boasts of having the most complete and up-to-date listings of annual reports on the internet.

Northwest Historical Annual Reports Collection

This site publishes Annual financial reports of companies currently or historically based in the Pacific Northwest. The collection includes annual reports dating from the 1930s and provides a continuous run of annual reports for most of the companies up to the 1990s.

Federal Government

The federal government SEC¹ also provides copies of “10-K” forms (which provides more detail than the Annual Corporate Report) through the EDGAR database. 10-K forms can contain information such as the company history, organizational structure, financial statements, earnings per share, subsidiaries, executive compensation and more.

Here are some tips on using EDGAR:

1. Use the ‘Company and Person Lookup’ search box.
2. On the returned listing of filings for the company, enter “10-K” in the Filing Type box near the top of the page to filter for only 10-K forms that have been filed.

Privately Owned Companies

Are not required to make information about their financial condition public. Private companies usually do not produce annual reports which are available to the public.

So, where can you find some information about them?

The best search strategy is to look for articles in newspapers and journals, search business directories, consult trade associations, find local sources, and search the Internet for information.

1. U.S. Security and Exchange Commision ↩︎

C. Patton, a WCC student in Philosophy 301, decided to explore the factors that lead to ethical or motivated blindness, specifically in the business realm.

Patton says “‘Ethical blindness” is a term that has become used to describe a temporary state of inability to recognize the ethicality of a decision” (Kump, 2022).

Patton’s thesis was that “an isolated incident of motivated blindness may never come to light, but if such incidents persist within a culture, they pile and escalate, leading to larger and more conspicuous ethical collapses.”

When Patton used OneSearch for his specific topic, he likely searched “motivated blindness” using quotation marks, so his result list brought up that specific phrase.

His final project included a literature review, interviews, and an original survey that could monitor an organization’s ethical culture.

Patton gave as examples the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and the story of the Ford Pinto (citing Max H. Bazerman’s articles from 2011, from Harvard Business Review; and from a 2020 book, “Whistleblowing, Communication and Consequences: Lessons from the Norwegian National Lottery.”

Business databases, particularly Business Source Premier and JSTOR Business Journals, will have peer-reviewed articles on business ethics including the Journal of Corporate Citizenship and the Journal of Business Ethics.

A few useful book titles in our library (on the second floor of the Learning Commons) include “The Sage Encyclopedia of Business Ethics and Society,” “Business Ethics: What Everyone Needs to Know,”  and “Complexity: A Key Idea for Business and Society.”

For more current research, browse WCC’s business journals, including:

• Accounting journals
• Finance journals
• Management journals
• Marketing journals

Start here to find scholarly articles, magazines and more.