ROMANCING THE STONE: IS IT REALLY ALL THAT ROMANTIC?

Establishing a new business to make and sell jewelry with rocks and colored gemstones with accurate provenance and identification has proven more difficult than expected. Today’s gemstone industry, defined here to include gemstones as well as rocks shaped for personal ornament, is extremely complex. The industry’s practices have developed over the centuries in reaction to new and depleted sources of stones, political and economic fluctuations, and the advent of new technologies. Today, the probability is high that a customer will not be able to evaluate the journey of a specific stone. However, deconstructing these processes provides an opportunity for consumer education as well as formal and informal education relating natural resources to a global context, illustrative of many industries providing goods, e.g. food, electronics, transportation and others to customers around the world. This is truly an interdisciplinary subject relating to defining a sustainable Earth.

This paper explores aspects of the colored gemstone industry:

• Legality – taxes, import/export, fraud
• Commercial – business costs, fair wage, transparency with customers
• Political – embargoes,
• Economic – global economy, labor
• Philosophical- ethics, motivation
• Social – human rights
• Scientific- health, environmental protection, accurate source and material identification
• Education – knowledge as power for change

As supplies of colored gemstones and relatively easily identified authenticity of stones have decreased, there is an increase in customers’ interest in the concept of ‘fair trade’ (Braunwart, 2015). Industry leaders who acknowledge and educate the industry and customers in the complexities of current practice are faced with moral, business, and practical decisions. Business ethics provides support in answering ‘Why we should do the right thing’ (Geva, 2006; de Colle and Werhane, 2008). We provide new educational materials for commercial and educational use that provide insights into these sometime controversial issues.

Ref: Braunwart, E., The Gem Guide, Feb. 2015, p 1-8.; DeColle, S. and P. Werhane, 2008, Jour. Bus. Ethics, v 81, 751-764; Geva, A., 2006, Jour. Bus. Ethics, v 69, 133-147.