Mental Models, Moral Imagination and System Thinking in the Age of Globalization

After experiments with various economic systems, we appear to have conceded, to misquote Winston Churchill that “free enterprise is the worst economic system, except all the others that have been tried.” Affirming that conclusion, I shall argue that in today’s expanding global economy, we need to revisit our mind-sets about corporate governance and leadership to fit what will be new kinds of free enterprise. The aim is to develop a values-based model for corporate governance in this age of globalization that will be appropriate in a variety of challenging cultural and economic settings. I shall present an analysis of mental models from a social constructivist perspective. I shall then develop the notion of moral imagination as one way to revisit traditional mind-sets about values-based corporate governance and outline what I mean by systems thinking. I shall conclude with examples for modeling corporate governance in multi-cultural settings and draw tentative conclusions about globalization. Patricia H. Werhane is the Wicklander Chair of Business Ethics and Director of the Institute for Business and Professional Ethics at DePaul University with a joint appointment as the Peter and Adeline Ruffin Professor of Business Ethics in the Darden School at the University of Virginia. Professor Werhane has published numerous articles and is the author or editor of twenty books including Persons, Rights and Corporations, Adam Smith and His Legacy for Modern Capitalism, Moral Imagination and Managerial Decision-Making with Oxford University Press and Employment and Employee Rights (with Tara J. Radin and Norman Bowie) with Blackwell’s. She is the founder and former Editor-in-Chief of Business Ethics Quarterly, the journal of the Society for Business Ethics.