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Teaching Business Ethics: The Attractions and the Myths
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17186 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1990 |
2,564 Words |
| Author
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Mary Gentile
Mary Gentile is a senior research fellow in the Values,
Leadership, and Corporate Responsibility Program at the
Harvard Business School. Among her publications is an
instructor's manual that she coauthored, Managerial Decision
Making and Ethical Values. |
It has not been difficult of late to locate critics of the American business scene. Dramatic events such as the precipitous decline of the stock market in October 1987, the record-breaking leveraged buyout of RJR Reynolds in 1988, or the much-publicized insider trading scandals of the last few years have provided fuel for those who would question our capital market system and the behaviors it seemingly rewards. Add to this our growing awareness of a decline in U.S. competitiveness and manufacturing productivity, the gradual erosion of our natural resources, and the pollution of our environment. Whenever these topics arise - and they surface frequently - the conversation eventually turns to our educational system and a diagnosis of its ills.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that "after two years of study, a top-level panel of business school deans and others concludes that many M.B.A.s today are merely number-crunchers, ill-prepared to manage in the rapidly changing global marketplace." Other commonly heard criticisms of management education include charges of parochialism, short-term orientation, a lack of leadership ability and "vision," and a narrow focus on personal career growth with little commitment to any larger purpose.
In response to these varied charges, business schools have identified just as varied a list of "solutions." In an end-of-the-decade discussion with the New York Times, the deans of three top business schools identified some of their priorities for the 1990s. Don Jacobs of Northwestern University named competitiveness as the major challenge for the nation and therefore for his school, stressing that this meant greater curricular attention to quality, negotiation, and managing people. John Rosenblum of the University of Virginia talked about changing demographics with regard to the growing populations of developing countries, an aging population in the United States, and the increasing racial and gender diversity of our workforce. In addition to educating business graduates about these demographic developments, he stressed the need to prepare future managers to face an evolving regulatory environment. Finally, Mayer Feldberg of Columbia University identified the need to internationalize management education, as well as to find the "correct mechanism for introducing morality and ethics into our curriculum."
Obviously, the introduction of business ethics course is only one of a list of proposed suggestions for management education. It certainly is not the latest or most current one. Throughout the history of graduate management education, both formal and informal attention has been paid to
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