Western business culture is primarily "profit is the end that justifies the means" - exploit any person, resource or environment to their|it's detriment as longer as you make more profit for the owners/shareholders.

Many times I've seen on HN "the purpose of a business is to make profit; stat".

Equality, helping those in poverty, cultural benefit, elimination of crime - none of these are Western business ideals; they're cultural constraints placed on businesses that they do their best to avoid losing profit to.

Now not all businesses are so immoral - but I'd say immorality is indicative of "Western business practices"; they only appear better because of cultural constraint, when those businesses get to exploit people and environments that aren't being monitored and aren't subject to legal protection that's when the abuses of the business ethic rear their head.

This is certainly not true as otherwise there weren't as many charitable funds sponsored by businesses and as many publicly useful things done by those.

>>> exploit any person, resource or environment to their|it's detriment

That is not true either, moreover - this is not true even if we accept your previous premise. There's nothing in making profit that mandates that it would be to the detriment of any person, resource or environment. Moreover, not ruining the resource supporting your business is certainly more conductive to the profit than ruining it, since it allows to extract profits for the longer period of time, so even from pure profit-driven approach you are wrong.

>>> Equality, helping those in poverty, cultural benefit, elimination of crime - none of these are Western business ideals; they're cultural constraints placed on businesses

Equality taken as equality of citizens before the law is certainly good for business, since inequality usually means inability to conduct certain profitable deals. E.g. when there were place "for white people only" in US, it meant profitable business involving non-white persons could not be conducted there. Crime is obviously bad for almost every business (maybe excluding security guard and alarm systems business).

>>> Now not all businesses are so immoral - but I'd say immorality is indicative of "Western business practices"

Since western business practices is nothing more but Western people conducting a set of voluntary transactions, you've just called the whole set of Western people inherently immoral. Not only this smacks of racism, it is certainly not matching the observable truth of Western people having a lot of morals guiding them.

>>> when those businesses get to exploit people and environments that aren't being monitored and aren't subject to legal protection that's when the abuses of the business ethic rear their head.

Oh, I see what you mean. Western people are immoral in general, but there is a tiny sliver of them - those that enact and enforce the "legal protection" - i.e. the government - that are the moral backbone of the Western society. As soon as the person joins the government, they become moral, and able to enact the protections derived from their freshly gained morality, and as soon as they leave the governmental aegis, they revert to their natural immoral state and only the "legal protections" keep them from running rampant exploiting people around them.

Westerners are descended from all races and creeds, they just happen to be part of a certain geo-political and financial region now.

There is a minute proportion of the population of the "Western World" that has any control over the business process beyond that they're able to leverage by voting with their dollars, through their unions or when voting.

>but there is a tiny sliver of them - those that enact and enforce the "legal protection" //

On the contrary, the established culture - moulded most recently through democratic process - has created an environment that limits the extremes that remain profitable. Most major companies in my Western country will [seemingly have] flout[ed] the law if the fines are sufficiently low; they're limited largely by what is going to be considered reprehensible enough to prevent people buying their goods/services. Directors receive multi-million dollar remuneration packages whilst they employ children and women at extremely low wages and often in situations in which they're effectively captive - we're talking companies like Adidas¹, Unilever, Nestle, those with the most recognised brands.

Many of the members of the controlling sections of Western government demonstrate at times a, shall we say, fluid approach to morality too. They often seem almost equally willing to lie and cheat and exploit the good of others to their own ends without due regard for the effect on the populous or environment.

tl;dr Power is oft to corrupt.

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1 -- example, http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/ethicalcompanyratings/adidase..., Adidas's employment practices are illegal in Bangladesh imagine how out of sync with the moral mores of USA they are.