Teaching Business Ethics

Teaching business ethics at universities involves delivering instructional material on the social value of commerce aimed at helping students understand society's expectations of business responsibilities and the responses of corporations and their agents. Although investigation into the role of commerce in society has been a topic of discussion throughout recorded history, teaching ethics in university business schools is largely a product of the latter part of the 20th century. Specifically, interest in teaching business ethics grew in the 1960s as a result of business school reform spurred by the publication of the Ford Foundation study Higher Education for Business and the Carnegie Corporation report Education of American Businessmen. This development was reinforced in the 1970s when the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business (now the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business) revised its accrediting standards to grant business and society course work common-body-of-knowledge status in business schools. This revision occurred around the same time that Social Issues in Management became a separate division of the Academy of Management and a partnership was established between philosophers and business and society scholars to explore a common interest in business ethics. As a scholarly enterprise, teaching business ethics has been shaped by a crossfertilization of ideas from this partnership, as well as by insights from the social, political, and management sciences.

While the number of stand-alone business and society and ethics courses peaked in the late 1980s, interest in teaching business ethics was rekindled by an unprecedented eruption of corporate scandals around the turn of the new millennium. As news of corporate malfeasance and indictments of corporate executives for breaching their fiduciary responsibilities unfolded, many knowledgeable observers called for business schools to do more in educating students about their future responsibilities to society. While there are many methods for doing so, a common challenge for business ethics educators is to blend philosophical notions of right and wrong with the practical realities organizational decision makers face. One approach is to begin instruction with a broad notion of a social contract between business and society as a backdrop for helping students understand the social value of commerce and how ethics relates to it.