FOCUS: Using a Computerised Game in Teaching Business Ethics

Games have become a standard tool in management education. The authors have cooperated on developing just such a teaching aid for business people and management students interested in playing the business game ethically. Dr Higginson is Director of The Ridley Hall Foundation, Ridley Hall, Cambridge, CB3 9HG and Geoff Moore is Principal Lecturer at Newcastle Business School, University of Northumbria at Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 8ST.     

Integrating business ethics into an undergraduate curriculum

The paper describes the approach by which ethics are integrated into the undergraduate curriculum at Northern Illinois University's College of Business. Literature is reviewed to identify conceptual frameworks for, and issues associated with, the teaching of business ethics. From the review, a set of guidelines for teaching ethics is developed and proposed. The objectives and strategies implemented for teaching ethics is discussed. Foundation and follow-up coursework, measurement issues and ancillary programs are also discussed.Dr. Bishop teaches in the Management Department of Northern Illinois University's College of Business. He teaches managerial principles, human resource management and strategic management. His research interests have focused on applied human resource issues and managerial ethics, including the professional ethics of human resource managers.     

Ethics programs and their dimensions

All organizations have ethics programs which consist of both explicit and implicit parts. This paper defines corporate ethics programs and identifies a number of their components. Corporate ethics programs' structural and behavioral dimensions are proposed which may allow further examination of such program components and their impacts. Finally, fifteen propositions are suggested which describe the influence of founder values, competitive pressures, leadership, and organizational problems on corporate ethics programs and the manageability of such programs.Steven N. Brenner is currently Sponsored Professor of Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility at Portland State University, Portland, Oregon. He served from 1983 through 1987 as Associate Dean for Graduate Programs in its School of Business Administration. Dr. Brenner has written articles forHarvard Business Review, The Academy of Management national MeetingsProceedings, The JAI PressResearch on Corporate Social Performance and Policy, and other publications. He has served as the Chairman and Program Chairman for the Social Issues in Management Division of the Academy of Management and is Chairman of the International Association of Business and Society's 1992 meeting to be held in Leuven, Belgium. He teaches courses in corporate social responsibility, business ethics, managing in a regulated world, business/government relations, business policy and organizational politics. During 1989–90 he was on a sabbatical leave doing research on corporate social responsibility and acting as Chair of the Academy of Management's Ethics Task Force which wrote the Academy's Code of Ethical Conduct.This work was supported in part by a grant from the Chiles Foundation, Portland, Oregon.     

The course in business ethics: Can it work?

An examination of ninety-nine syllabi for undergraduate courses in business ethics, collected by the Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College, reveals that half the courses are offered to freshmen and sophomores. Because of the fact that these students will have minimal knowledge of the functional areas of business firms, and because these courses rely heavily on case analysis, it is likely that the students in these courses are not able to deal effectively with the material in the course. Therefore, any expectation that the business ethics course will raise the students' ethical sensitivity when considering business problems or decisions is unrealistic.Dr. Pamental teaches Business, Government and Society and Business Ethics in Literature at Rhode Island College, and is a Research Fellow of the Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College. He has written extensively on the subject of business ethics and its relationship to business programs.     

The market ethic: Moral dilemmas and microeconomics

Brief cases written as multiple choice questions can provide the basis for a classroom game based on business ethics. This teaching note describes the organization of such a game and provides five sample cases.Julianne Nelson is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Stern School of Business of New York University. She has also taught at the Ecole Superieure de Commerce in Tours, France. Her publications have appeared in theInternational Economic Review, Economics Letters, theJournal of Regulatory Economics, theJournal of Business Ethics, andJapan and the World Economy.I would like to thank my students for their suggestions and support of this project. This research was supported by a grant from the Rundin Foundation.     

The role of ethics in gathering corporate intelligence

This paper analyzes business people's attitudes towards the tactics used for gathering competitive corporate intelligence both within their own and their competitors' corporations. Business people in large corporations are highly motivated to gather such intelligence. Their attitudes towards the ethicality of specific practices, however, are influenced by the corporate culture, their perceived effectiveness of the techniques, and their perception of the competitors' tactics. Interestingly enough, the most popular technique for securing information is socializing with competitors in nonbusiness settings. Business people generally view their competitors negatively, believing that they go to much further lengths than does their own corporation in gathering competitive intelligence. William Cohen is Professor and Chairman of the Marketing Department at California State University, Los Angeles. He has won the Outstanding Professor Award 1982–83 and Freedom Foundation of Valley Forge Medal for Excellence in Economic Education 1985. He is the author of some 15 books in marketing and business of which the most recent is Developing a Winning Marketing Plan.Helena Czepiec is Associate Professor at California State University, Hayward. She is the author of several articles which appeared in various journals on marketing and advertising.     

Conflict of Interest and the Talmud

A core value of Judaism is leading an ethical life. The Talmud, an authoritative source on Jewish law and tradition, has a number of discussions that deal with honesty in business and decision-making. One motive that can cause individuals to be unscrupulous is the presence of a conflict of interest. This paper will define, discuss, and review five Talmudic concepts relevant to conflict of interest. They are (1) Nogea B’Davar (being an interested party), (2) V’hiyitem N’keyim (behaving to ensure that one is above suspicion) (3) Lifnei Iver (placing a stumbling block before the blind), (4) Shokhad (accepting a bribe), and (5) Geneivat Da’at (deception and undeserved goodwill). Case examples will be used to apply these Talmudic principles to contemporary business practice. This will include discussion of these Talmudic concepts as it applies to specific contemporary business examples relevant to the boardroom, accounting firms, investment banking, politics, and government. It may be impossible to eliminate all conflicts of interest. However, knowledge and awareness of these Talmudic principles can help individuals in business settings better address the ethical issues that they confront. Joshua Fogel, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Business Program of the Department of Economics at Brooklyn College. He is the Business Program’s behavioral scientist. He has an interest in the interface of religion and business ethics and can be contacted at joshua.fogel@gmail.com. Hershey H. Friedman, PhD, is a Professor in the Business Program of the Department of Economics at Brooklyn College. He has interest in business ethics and also the interface of religion and entrepreneurship. He currently is funded with a grant by the Kauffman Foundation to study religion and entrepreneurship.     

Leadership in the promotion of peace: Interviews with the 2015 Business for Peace honorees

Ethical leadership can lead to many positive organizational outcomes. Previous studies have shown a correlation between ethical conduct and profitability; in addition, firms that have high ethical standards have fewer legal issues. The existing ethical leadership literature assumes a stable external environment. The business and peace literature, on the other hand, assumes instability but has thus far largely ignored the role of leadership within companies as a possible driver of peacebuilding activities. The practitioner community has already begun to recognize that leaders of organizations are the key drivers of change in the peacebuilding context. The Business for Peace Foundation, the foremost organization in the practitioner community, gives its annual award to business leaders who promote peace within their organizations and communities. These Business for Peace honorees represent the ‘ethical leadership’ qualities of peace promotion, without reference to academic theories in either area. We conducted semi-structured interviews with the 2015 Business for Peace honorees and combined those with their public speeches at the Business for Peace events to examine what role these business and peace leaders saw between ethical leadership and peace promotion. Unlike the academic research that suggests only a theoretical and sometimes a direct but tangential connection to peacebuilding, the honorees highlight the direct and visible connection of ethical leadership to peace in unstable environments. We begin by describing the relevant business for peace and ethical leadership literatures. Then we highlight the significant aspects of the interviews and speeches and relate these to the prevailing theories of both business and peace and ethical leadership. Our findings suggest that ethical leadership may be an important missing link within the business and peace literature as an avenue for peace promotion, and that the leadership literature may be ignoring an important positive impact of ethical leadership.     

Economics and ethics

Business theory and management practices are outgrowths of basic economic principles. To evaluate the proper place of ethics in business, the meaning of ethics as defined by economic theory must be assessed. This paper contends that classical economic thought advocates a nonethical decision-making context and is not functional for a modern complex, interdependent environment. Bernard J. Reilly, Professor of Management and Health Policy, came to Widener in September of 1980. Since coming to Widener he has published and presented over 90 professional papers in the fields of management and health administration, in such journals as Academy of Management Review, Inquiry, Journal of Health Politics Policy and Law, Human Relations, Hospital and Health Services Administration, Social Science and Medicine, Personnel, etc., and at several national conferences on organizational behavior and health policy. He is presently working on two books, the first on modern management principles, and the second on corporate business ethics. Recently, Dr. Reilly was awarded the Christian R. and Mary K. Lindback Foundation Award for distinguished teaching. Forthcoming articles will appear in Business and Professional Ethics Journal and Technology Management. Myroslaw J. Kyj, Associate Professor of Marketing at Widener University, has been involved in the research areas of the use of customer service in competition, pre-conditions for marketing channels and the inter-play between marketing, ethics, and social responsibility. Dr. Kyj has recently published several articles in such journals as Industrial Marketing Management, International Journal of Physical Distribution and Marketing, Journal of Services Marketing, Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing, and a forthcoming article in Business Horizons.     

Integrating ethics into the business school curriculum

A project on teaching business ethics at The Wharton School concluded that ethics should be directly incorporated into key MBA courses and taught by the core business faculty. The project team, comprised of students, ethics faculty and functional business faculty, designed a model program for integrating ethics. The project was funded by the Exxon Education Foundation.The program originates with a general introduction designed to familiarize students with literature and concepts pertaining to professional and business ethics and corporate social responsibility. This may be accomplished through orientation sessions, readings, packages, short classes and lectures.The key segment of the plan is to have ethics modules developed and systematically integrated throughout key business courses. In the project experiment, sample modules were developed for courses in introductory marketing, introductory management, corporate finance and business policy.The modules are designed to respond to the concerns of functional business faculty that they cannot be sufficiently authoritative in teaching ethics and that inserting coverage of ethics will displace critically important topics in their already crowded courses. On the other hand, the functional instructors found that, once encouraged, students were very willing to discuss ethical issues and that their sophistication increased throughout the course. Thomas W. Dunfee is the Kolodny Professor of Social Responsibility at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Author of numerous textbooks (Random House, Prentice-Hall, John Wiley), he teaches courses on business ethics and commercial law. He has published numerous articles in law reviews and business periodicals and has consulted to many corporations, government agencies and law firms. Currently President-Elect of the American Business Law Association, he is a former editor-in-chief of the American Business Law Journal. Diana C. Robertson is a Senior Fellow in Business Ethics in the Department of Legal Studies at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Her publications in business ethics include Corporate Restructuring and Employee Interests: The Tin Parachute, The Ethics of Organizational Transformation: Mergers, Takeovers and Corporate Restructuring, Quorum Books, 1988, Why Superimposing Ethics on the Corporation Won't Work, Corporate University Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1, July 1988, 18–23, and Work-Related Ethical Attitudes: Impact on Business Profitability with Thomas W. Dunfee, Business and Professional Ethics Journal, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Winter 1984), 25–40.     

Business ethics in a competitive market

Consequentialist reasoning and neoclassical assumptions about perfectly competitive markets encourage business school faculty and students to overlook the role of ethics in a market system. In a perfectly competitive economy, self-interest suffices to bring about a desirable outcome. However, discrepancies between an economist's assumptions and the realities of a market economy establish a need for business ethics. This essay, written as a lecture for MBA students, first reviews Pareto optimality as an argument in favor of market allocations. It then uses the discrepancies between actual and hypothetical markets to derive a Rawlsian duty of civility. This neoclassical case for business ethics requires individuals to avoid exploiting the defects that are inevitable in any social structure.Julianne Nelson is an Assistant Professor of Justice at the School of Public Affairs in the American University in Washington, D.C. She has also taught at the Stern School of Business of the New York University and at the Ecole Superieure de Commerce in Tours, France. Her publications have appeared in theInternational Economic Review, Economics Letters, The Journal of Regulatory Economics, Japan and the World Economy, The Journal of Business Ethics andEconomics and Philosophy.Editorial note: Date of acceptance July 4, 1991. This article follows the article published in Volume 11 (4), pp. 317–320.My thanks go to Tom Donaldson, Bob Lindsay and Kerry Whiteside for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this work. This research was supported by a grant from the Rundin Foundation.     

On the dynamics of corporate size and illegal activity: An empirical assessment

This research, relying on companies continuously listed on the Fortune 500 over a five-year period (n=384), provides an empirical assessment of two hypotheses. Based on 334 violations over the period the results indicate: (1) gross differences in illegal activity based on corporate size, and (2) similar differences in corporate recidivism also based on size. Discussion includes a number of size related dynamics which may account in part for such results. Dan R. Dalton is an Associate Professor of Management and Director of Doctoral Programs, Graduate School of Business, Indiana University. Formerly with General Telephone & Electronics(GT&E) for thirteen years, he received his Ph.D. from the University of California. Widely published in business and psychology, his articles have appeared in the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Journal of Applied Psychology, Strategic Management Journal, Journal of Business Strategy, Behavioral Science, and Human Relations, as well as many others. He is the co-author of Case Problems in Management, Applied Readings in Personnel and Human Resource Management, and the forthcoming Absenteeism, Transfer, Turnover: An Interdependent Perspective. Professor Dalton is also co-principal investigator working on a five year grant provided by the General Motors Foundation in the general area of personnel policy.Idalene F. Kesner received her Ph.D. degree from the Graduate School of Business, Indiana University. She is currently an assistant professor of business policy and environment in the School of Business Administration, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is continuing her research in the area of corporate boards and is also working in the areas of CEO succession and corporate takeovers     

Teaching business ethics

Business ethics should be taught in business schools as an integrated part of core curricula in MBA programs with a dual focus on both analytical frameworks and their applications to the business disciplines. To overcome the reluctance of many faculty to handle ethical issues, a critical mass of faculty must develop suitable materials, educate their peers in its use, and take the lead by introducing it in their own courses and on senior management programs.Jeffrey Gandz is an Associate Professor in the School of Business Administration, The University of Western Ontario. Following ten years of management experience in Europe and North America, Professor Gandz completed his Ph.D. at York University. He is active as a mediator and arbitrator in labour disputes, teaches Organizational Behavior, Human Resource Management, and Labour Relations at Western, and has published widely in those fields.Nadine Hayes is a Ph.D. candidate at The University of Western Ontario and a graduate of Western's Honors Business Administration Program. She has written several case studies in the field of Business Ethics and has worked with Jeffrey Gandz in developing the School's approach to the teaching of business ethics.     

Business Ethics in South Africa

In this paper an assessment will be made of the state of Business Ethics as an academic discipline as well as on the extent to which theory on Business Ethics has been translated into practice within the South African society. First the way in which Business Ethics is defined will be examined. Then the issues within the field of Business Ethics that is considered to be most important will be addressed, as well as the reasons why it is believed to be important to address them. From there the attention will be shifted to the way in which Business Ethics has been institutionalised at tertiary education level. An overview of important initiatives taken by the business sector themselves will also be reviewed. Then co-operation between business and academia on Business Ethics will be discussed. Finally an assessment will be made of what can be learned from Business Ethics elsewhere in the world and what can be offered in this regard. Also some future prospects of Business Ethics in South Africa will be explored.     

Internationalizing the business ethics curriculum: A survey

This article reports on a telephone survey of business school faculty in the United Kingdom, Asia and North America concerning efforts to internationalize the teaching of business ethics. International dimensions of business ethics are currently given only limited coverage in the business school curriculum with over half of the faculty surveyed indicating that less then 10% of their ethics teaching focuses on global issues. Teaching objectives vary widely with some faculty emphasizing a relativistic, diversity oriented perspective while others stress the universality of values. The respondents identified a great need to develop teaching materials based upon non-U.S. corporations and/or non-U.S. incidents.Christopher J. Cowton is University Lecturer in Management Studies at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Templeton College. An author on many facets of management, his previous paper in theJournal of Business Ethics was on corporate philanthropy in the United Kingdom. Current research interests include the implications of just-in-time production for accounting, and ethical (or socially responsible) investment.Thomas W. Dunfee is the Kolodny Professor of Social Responsibility at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He was President of the American Business Law Association 1989–1990, served as Editor-in-Chief of theAmerican Business Law Journal 1975–1977 and is a member of the Executive Committee of the Society for Business Ethics. He has published articles in theAcademy of Management Review, Business Ethics Quarterly, theBusiness and Professional Ethics Journal, and theJournal of Social Philosophy in addition to a variety of business and legal journals.     

Business Books: Reading Between the Lines

Business books have emerged as a largescale global industry over the last 20 years. Their influence on the behaviour of managers is only matched by the high profiles accorded their best–selling authors. In an age in which ideas and information confer competitive advantages, business books matter as never before. In this special report, Business Strategy Review looks at the role of business books, their genesis, the originality of the ideas and presents a survey of the 20 most influential business books of all time.     

Toward the development of a multidimensional scale for improving evaluations of Business Ethics

This study represents an improvement in the ethics scales inventory published in a 1988 Journal of Business Ethics article. The article presents the distillation and validation process whereby the original 33 item inventory was reduced to eight items. These eight items comprise the following ethical dimensions: a moral equity dimension, a relativism dimension, and a contractualism dimension. The multidimensional ethics scale demonstrates significant predictive ability.Dr Reidenbach is the Director of the Center for Business Development and Research and Professor of Marketing at the University of Southern Mississippi. He is the co-author of two books on business ethics and has contributed numerous articles on ethics to various academic and applied business journals. Dr Donald P. Robin, Professor of Business Ethics and Professor of Marketing, is co-author with Dr R. Eric Reidenbach of two recent books (1989) on business ethics. Both books, Business Ethics: Where Profits Meet Value Systems and Ethics and Profits: A Convergence of Corporate America's Economic and Social Responsibilities were published by Prentice-Hall. Dr Robin is a frequent lecturer on business ethics and has written several articles on the subject for both ethics and business journals.     

The Role of Law in Models of Ethical Behavior

In attempting to improve ethical decision-making in business organizations, researchers have developed models of ethical decision-making processes. Most of these models do not include a role for law in ethical decision-making, or if law is mentioned, it is set as a boundary constraint, exogenous to the decision process. However, many decision models in business ethics are based on cognitive moral development theory, in which the law is thought to be the external referent of individuals at the level of cognitive development that most people have achieved. Other theoretical bases of ethical decision models, social learning, and experientialism, also imply a role for law that is rarely made explicit. Law is a more important aspect of ethical decision-process models than it appears to be in the models. This paper will derive explicit roles for the law from the cognition, experientialism, and social learning theories that are used to build ethical decision-making models for business behavior. Sandra Christensen is Professor of Management at Eastern Washington University, where she teaches courses in Business & Society, International Business, and Leadership & Ethics. She has published in Business and Society, Business Ethics Quarterly, the Journal of Business Ethics, and the Academy of Management Review.     

An international look at business ethics: Britain

Interest in business ethics is not new in Britain and has been increasing recently. Business companies have responded over the years with various organisational initiatives, including the British Institute of Management and the Christian Association of Business Executives; and interest in corporate mission statements and codes of conduct is growing. As a formal subject for study and teaching, however, business ethics is still in a rudimentary form, dependent on work in the United States. However, official reports, conferences, and new Centres are indicators of growing interest. As teaching begins to develop British business ethics has to identify its own agenda, and especially in the light of 1992 and the implementation of the Single European Act.Jack Mahoney is Director of the King's College Business Ethics Research Centre which he founded in 1987. He is also F. D. Maurice Professor of Moral and Social Theology at King's College, London University, and The Mercers' School Memorial Professor of Commerce at Gresham College, in the City of London. He writes, lectures and broadcasts frequently on modern business ethics.