Who's Who in Business Ethics Teaching Business Ethics in Post-Communist Prague

Management students at the Economic University of Prague have recently been introduced to the subject of Business Ethics. Lidmila Něemcová, who designed and teaches the course, describes their and her reactions.     

Stakeholder-Sensitive Business Ethics Teaching

Well-established, well-intended and well-designed business ethics teaching can still have little effect. This is not surprising, as long as business ethics does not undertake a business-school-wide dialogue about goals and obstacles, not least as an example of stakeholder participation. The article elaborates such views in a systematic fashion and formulates a list of thirteen premises and nine recommendations in thesis format.     

Teaching Business Ethics: The Role of Ethics in Business and in Business Education

The paper begins with an examination of traditional attitudes towards business ethics. I suggest that these attitudes fail to recognize that a principal function of ethics is to facilitate cooperation. Further that despite the emphasis on competition in modern market economies, business like all other forms of social activity is possible only where people are prepared to respect rules in the absence of which cooperation is rendered difficult or impossible. Rules or what I call the ethics of doing, however, constitute just one dimension of ethics. A second has to do with what we see and how we see it; a third with who we or what I describe as the ethics of being. Of these three dimensions, the first and the third have been most carefully explored by philosophers and are most frequently the focus of attention when teaching business ethics is being discussed. I argue that this focus is unfortunate in as much as it is the second dimension which falls most naturally into the ambit of modern secular educational institutions. It is here that moral education is most obviously unavoidable, and most clearly justifiable in modern secular teaching environments. I conclude by describing the importance of this second dimension for the modern world of business.     

Teaching Business Ethics Through Literature

America's economic ideology lacks a vocabulary of ethics. If, as we assume, an economic system requires a moral component for long-term survival, students in business schools must be exposed to a vocabulary of ethics that is consistent with the ideology of capitalism. We present a vocabulary of ethics and describe an approach to teaching business ethics based on business-related classic literature and moral philosophy.     

A Role for Ethics Theory in Speculative Business Ethics Teaching

The paper discusses the role that ethics theory might play in business ethics teaching. It is noted that little attention is devoted to the explanation and application of ethics theory in business ethics textbooks, which suggests that ethics theory is held in low esteem by business ethics educators. This relative disregard has been justified by some critics on the basis of the limited usefulness of ethics theory to business ethics pedagogy. Notwithstanding these criticisms, the paper argues that ethics theory can play an important role in business ethics teaching which conforms to a speculative agenda. A speculative agenda is described, and a contribution that ethics theory can make to it is explained. This constitutes a form of immanent critique, which enables putative statements of business ethicality to be subjected to critique against the cultural values upon which their credibility rests. Ethics theory is offered as a mediating resource to facilitate such critique. Some criteria that the presentation of ethics theory needs to meet if it is to fulfill this speculative agenda are also outlined.     

Effective Teaching of Ethics in International Business

A unique pedagogical tool using vignettes from international settings in a game format is presented to effectively teach business ethics. Using role playing, participants evaluate ethical dilemmas from the perspective of a business corporation, an employee of the organization, and as a member of the larger community. By having to recognize and adopt positions on a large variety of ethical situations, participants learn the particular, and sometimes unexpected aspects of social responsibility in international business.     

Emotion and Cognition in Business Ethics Teaching

This paper focuses specifically on taughtcourses in business ethics for post-experiencestudents. The theme of this paper is thatvalues have a dual nature, involving bothemotional and cognitive elements. This dualnature is not always clearly acknowledged byparticipants in business ethics courses. Thisleads to a range of different ways in whichmisunderstanding can arise, and which is oftennot well handled in ethics classes. Twoparticular examples are considered: theseparation of personal and professional ethics,and the tendency for people to manage risk inprobabilistic terms rather than in human. TheKohlberg model is critiqued briefly, andpreference is given to Forsyth's model ofethical decision ideologies. The paperconcludes with some suggestions of positiveapproaches to business ethics teaching,involving virtue ethics and the critical theoryof Jurgen Habermas. This involves abandoningclassroom based tutition for a more personaldevelopment oriented approach.     

Impacts of Teaching Business Ethics in Korea

This is the first study on the impact of teaching business ethics in a typical Asian culture, Korea. Eight scenarios involving business decision were administered to undergraduate management major students before (n = 120) and after (n = 128) a semester course titled Business Ethics, with control group (n = 91 before and after). The analysis indicated that teaching business ethics has positive impacts on the student as a whole, especially on younger male students who had no work experience.     

Business Ethics Teaching for Effective Learning

This paper is concerned with answering thequestion: ``How can business ethics be taught tostudents so that effective learning takesplace?'' It is the contention of this paperthat the question is best answered by focusingon six areas important to teaching businessethics: goals, relevancy, experientialpedagogy, classroom climate, debriefing, andoutcomes assessment.     

Teaching Business Ethics: Targeted Outputs

Business ethics is once again a hot topic as examples of improper business practices that violate commonly accepted ethical norms are brought to our attention. With the increasing number of scandals business schools find themselves on the defensive in explaining what they are doing to help respond to the call to teach ‘‘more’’ business ethics. This paper focuses on two issues germane to business ethics teaching efforts: the ‘‘targeted output’’ goals of teaching business ethics and when in the curriculum business ethics should be taught.     

A Framework for Teaching Business Ethics

What ethical framework should be used as a basis for teaching business ethics? Should business ethics be taught by ethicists in a separate course, by business faculty in business courses, or perhaps by both? These are some of the issues this paper will address. The paper begins with a review of the literature concerning approaches to teaching business ethics. Next, some ethical frameworks for teaching business ethics are considered. Finally, the paper proposes that students should apply their own personal values to business ethical issues in the classroom, thus providing future business leaders with a process for resolving ethical dilemmas.     

A Systematic Approach to Teaching Ethics in Business

In the field of business ethics, expositions of ethical theory have tended to focus on deontology and utilitarianism. More inclusive reviews of ethical theory tend to be historical and unsystematic. This paper approaches the task of representing the variety of ethical theories systematically. It does so by constructing a schema of possibilities in ethical theory which maps out six "voices", or theoretical positions, all of which are relevant and important for understanding ethics in business. This approach helps to account for the continual presence of dilemmas and conflicts in ethics.     

Teaching Business Ethics Through Strategically Integrated Micro-Insertions

This article identifies an integrated teaching strategy that was originally developed for engineers, the so-called ‘micro-insertion’ approach, as a practical and effective means to teach ethics at business schools. It is argued that instructors can incorporate not only generic or thematic learning objectives for students into this method (i.e., the intended content of what is being taught: in our case, an underlying ethical base for doing business), but also do so via a strategically integrated approach regarding the appropriate mix and timing of these micro-insertions. With this in mind, we propose a qualitative and example-based approach that endeavors to provide a versatile way for business teachers to incorporate ethics into their general business classes. We also present a conceptual and theoretical framework that underpins this method, and we further provide a set of specific examples and a practical table that show how business instructors might integrate ethics-oriented micro-insertions into their teaching.     

An Experiential Approach for Teaching Business Ethics

Despite the recognition in the business literature of the need to include ethics in all business courses, ethics is still given at best a perfunctory treatment by many instructors. This paper presents two pedagogical methodologies that the authors have used with success for teaching ethics to undergraduate business students. The approaches described in this paper are founded on the belief that in order to raise students' consciousness about ethical issues, students must be challenged to experience conscious ethical conflicts and to incorporate their own values into solving ethical problems. The power of working through ethical conflicts lies in its ability to force such a confrontation and, through it, to achieve enhanced self understanding.     

Teaching Business Ethics: Theory and Practice

Business ethics teaching can be improved when ethicists integrate the ethical theories they apply to business with the organizational design of the course. By utilizing three techniques – implementing a Total Quality Management-style survey and review, nominating and electing class virtues, and telling personal stories of moral action – classes can be organized to operate by the social contract, rights, stakeholder, and virtue theories that dominate business ethics literature. Classes then become laboratories for the practical articulation and application of the theories as well as providing real examples of the theories in action. This methodology produces benefits for the particular class and for the development and refinement of the theories themselves.This paper describes each of the three pedagogical techniques; and then explicitly relates them to these leading business ethics theories to demonstrate how the integration can lead to a community seeking and discovering moral truth in the classroom.     

Australian Business Majors and Their Attitudes Toward the Teaching of Business Ethics

Seven hundred seventy-three questionnaires were completed by students enrolled in an undergraduate business administration program at a university in Victoria. The survey instrument was adapted from one used by Professor John Milton-Smith (1992) in his Australian Business Ethics Project. The results indicated that (a) students place importance on business ethics education, (b) students who have taken a business ethics course found that experience to be valuable, (c) students view ethical behavior as leading to positive outcomes for the corporation and (d) some measures are underway in Australian higher education and in the community at large to enhance learning in this area.     

The Effectiveness of Corporate Ethics On-site Visits for Teaching Business Ethics

This paper describes and reports the evaluation ofusing corporate ethics field site visits in a businessethics course. The dilemma of how to design ameaningful business ethics course has been the subjectof debate for business school ethics instructors andis reviewed here. The structure of the site visitsand how student work is evaluated is presented. Twostudies evaluating the field site visits were done. The first study utilized qualitative methods toevaluate students' reactions as well as comments fromthe corporate ethics officers who host the visits. The second study utilized a pretest-posttest surveydesign to quantitatively evaluate student reactions tothe site visits. Results showed a statisticallysignificant, positive change in students' attitudes. This effect was moderated by gender, showing astronger positive effect for females than for males.     

Moral Identity as Leverage Point in Teaching Business Ethics

This paper examines whether appealing to learners’ moral identity makes a significant contribution to improving their ethical decision making beyond traditional, rule-based teaching. In response to criticisms leveled at rule-based ethics teaching by alternative approaches, we identify moral identity theory and experiments in moral psychology as useful sources to draw on for the creation of a new, identity-based ethics teaching approach. We develop and apply a set of regular self-reflection focused writing tasks added to the traditional teaching program over a one-semester period, and assess the outcomes of an overall sample of 149 postgraduate business school students, who were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: exposure to both identity-based tasks and rule-based teaching, exposure to rule-based teaching only, and the control condition (i.e., no exposure to ethics teaching). Our findings show that, while the three groups reported the same level of ethical decision making at the beginning of the semester, at the end of the semester the students who were exposed to both identity-based and rule-based teaching reported higher level of ethical decision making compared to those who were only exposed to rule-based education. In addition, the students who received rule-based teaching reported higher ethical decision making compared to those in the control condition. These results suggest that a teaching approach which appeals to the learner’s moral identity can act as an effective leverage point when complementing rule-based teaching. This simple approach should be widely adopted as common practice in graduate business schools.     

An Experiential Approach to Teaching Ethics in International Business

Ethics training in academia and corporations have grown as expansion in international business activities has lead to frequent inter-cultural exchanges. An effective instructional tool in theform of an experiential exercise is presented. The exercise using role-playing enables participants to recognize, confront, and understand business quandaries. A scoring system allows participants to compare the ethical standards of employers, employees, customers, and the society-at-large on a set of predetermined ethical events.