Legislated Ethics or Ethics Education?: Faculty Views in the Post-Enron Era

The tension between external forces for better ethics in organizations, represented by legislation such as the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (SOX), and the call for internal forces represented by increased educational coverage, has never been as apparent. This study examines business school faculty attitudes about recent corporate ethics lapses, including opinions about root causes, potential solutions, and ethics coverage in their courses. In assessing root causes, faculty point to a failure of systems such as legal/professional and management (external) and declining personal values (internal). We also found that faculty recommend external forces as a remedy more often than increased ethics educational coverage; we contextualize this finding with recent ethics education literature. We conclude by proposing that neither legislation nor ethics education alone are complete when addressing widespread unethical corporate acts and offer a multi-faceted approach to ethics educational opportunities. Jeri Mullins Beggs is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Illinois State University. She earned her Ph.D. in marketing at Saint Louis University. Her current research interests are ethics education, health care marketing, and social marketing. Her work has been presented and published at various conferences and journals including most recently the Journal of Management Education, Marketing and Public Policy conference and the Consumer Satisfaction, Dissatisfaction, and Complaining Behavior conference. She also recently served as co-editor of a special issue of Journal of Management Education on Teaching Business ethics. Kathy Lund Dean is a member of the management department at Idaho State University. She earned her Ph.D. in organizational behavior and philosophy from Saint Louis University. Her current research interests lie in operationalizing non-traditional research methodologies, immersion pedagogies such as service-learning, and spiritual wholeness and authenticity in work place. Her research has appeared in multiple journals including Journal of Management Education, Journal of Management, Spirituality, and Religion, Journal of Organizational Change Management, International Journal of Public Administration, and Academy of Management Executive. She serves as the Associate Editor for the Journal of Management Education.