Chapter 1: Ethics for Managing Business in a Global World
In this introductory chapter, the author describes the various chapters that make up this third volume of “Teaching Ethics across the Management Curriculum: A Handbook for International Faculty,” and point out their relevance to the different disciplines of business education.
The chapter, overall, encourages educators to be innovative and proactive in teaching ethics in a globalized and technologically advanced and advancing world. Technology in particular is a coin with two sides—for example, facilitating ethical behavior by affording greater transparency while simultaneously increasing vulnerability to unethical behavior such as hacking. This accentuates the need for business schools and other tertiary institutions to promote sustainable ethical cultures, by contributing to building the character of people who can establish responsible organizations, and, thereby, to bringing justice and development to the larger society.
Chapter 2: Incorporating Ethics into Entrepreneurship and Business Enterprise Education
Entrepreneurship is a dynamic and complex environment; in such environments, it can be easy for individuals to lose track of the ethical implications of their actions. Part of helping students learn about entrepreneurship is preparing them for this atmosphere by giving them signposts to follow and come back to as the overall process swirls around them. To help students build their ethical capacity in such a challenging setting, they need to be provided with two supports. The first of these is the opportunity to carefully think through what their own values are and how they see these as being drivers and “binders” for their venture. Engaging with these ideas in a safer space, before the maelstrom of the entrepreneurship process, can provide them with a powerful touchstone to come back to in more turbulent times. Related to this, students need to see ethics not as an add-on, but as something integral to the development and running of an effective and sustainable business. To do this, work needs to be done with students to enable them to see that, in all of the decisions they will be making as entrepreneurs, there are both direct and indirect connections to other people and processes. In each of these connections, thought needs to be given to just what ethical implications those decisions might have now and in the future.
Chapter 3: Doing Good Is Good Business: Embedding Ethics in Teaching Entrepreneurship and Business Venturing
This chapter proposes methods for embedding ethics in teaching entrepreneurship and venture creation. The topic is approached from three dimensions. The first uses case studies to provide examples of ethical challenges entrepreneurs face at different phases of their business operations. Here students are encouraged to critique the actions of the entrepreneurs in the cases they read, and propose preferred alternatives that take ethical considerations into account.
The second approach highlights how business can be used as a tool for social transformation. It reconciles profit-making with social impact. The students are made to think up and execute profitable business models that solve identified social problems. They are taught to make money from solving social problems. The consequence is that students leave the school as impact-driven entrepreneurs, who are driven by a social mission, while making money.
The third approach is based on learning through experience sharing by entrepreneurs who are invited to class to share real-life experiences. They discuss challenges faced and mistakes made along their entrepreneurial journey and students get a chance to learn, ask critical questions, and even adopt mentors for the future.
Finally, the chapter illustrates that ethical practices easily become a source of competitive advantage, especially in a context where its practice is uncommon. Assignment samples are provided with context-specific exercises to aid teaching and learning about Ethics in Entrepreneurship.
Chapter 4: Using Codes of Conduct to Integrate Ethics Education in the Accounting Curriculum
The study of ethics by business and accounting students was first emphasized within the curriculum by early 1970s. In the 1980s, ethics education had become a standard in many business schools. However, there has been little agreement in what courses ethics should be taught. A major decision for accounting education has been whether to teach ethics as a standalone course or to include ethics instruction within existing accounting courses. Ethics discussions within a course can help students see relationships of ethical issues with topics being taught. Hence, this chapter advocates that ethics instruction be integrated into existing curriculum. Discussion of the topics throughout the content coverage reinforces that the ethical decision-making concepts for the students can be beneficial in helping them to understand the context of issues they may face.
The chapter provides examples of ethical issues that might be associated with the different subdisciplines of accounting: financial, managerial, tax, and accounting information systems. For each subdiscipline, teaching strategies are suggested and cases are presented that could be integrated into a course in that subdiscipline.
The ethical issues differ somewhat within the subdisciplines. In financial accounting the emphasis is on financial reporting for external users. In managerial accounting the focus is on supporting decision making for internal users. Tax accounting involves attention to both legal issues and client desire to minimize taxes. In accounting information systems and auditing, accountants must balance the client’s needs with the public’s right to information.
Chapter 5: Teaching Ethics in Corporate Finance Courses
The chapter is a guide on how to teach ethics in corporate finance. Ethics is about how to act in pursuit of a given set of objectives in a manner that seeks to attain the best outcome for the collective good while causing the least harm to all stakeholders. Corporate finance involves decisions on wealth maximization by evaluating risks and returns trade-offs in the interest of the shareholders. Opportunities thus exist for decisions to be made in the narrow interest of the decision maker or that of the shareholder without regard to the harm caused to other stakeholders. The ever-growing number of reported cases of corporate finance scandals evidences this reality.
Our objective as instructors in teaching ethics within corporate finance should be to assist learners and decision makers in the corporate finance domain develop strong ethical consciousness about their actions and its implications. This chapter discusses the use of the ARARD-V framework (Awareness, Recognition, Analysis, Reflection, Decision, and Values) as a tool to support and reinforce other pedagogical tools in teaching ethics in corporate finance.
The ARARD-V framework encourages learners to expand their problem analysis and decision criteria to include qualitative and quantitative ethical dimension, leading to “ethics-adjusted” quantification of financial decision variables.
Contextual differences in legal systems, sophistication and regulation of financial markets, and social expectations, between developing and developed countries do not diminish the universality of ethical principles.
Chapter 6: Lies, Damned Lies? Ethics in Business Statistics
Managers and employees need to understand and apply statistics in their daily work life. This chapter aims to provide practical recommendations on how statistics teachers can make their management students aware of ethical issues inherent in statistics. After a short description of statistics as the science of learning from data, we concentrate on discussing ethical challenges that may arise during the different steps of collecting, preparing, analyzing, and reporting data. We then turn to problem-based and reflection-oriented teaching approaches that help increase student’s attention to ethical issues. Teachers are advised to avoid using the “moral forefinger,” but to motivate students to deal with and reflect on ethical challenges. Instructors may want to think through their own pedagogical approach and way of acting to become an authentic role model for students. Furthermore, teachers should build relationships with educators from other disciplines to ensure that rigorous statistical standards are in place in each of the management curriculum’s fields. We end by pointing out that the “right way” of using statistics does not differ between developing and developed countries. However, statistics teachers in developing countries may want to particularly focus on ethically acceptable data collection.
Chapter 7: Teaching Ethics in Finance Curricula: Personal and Institutional Virtues in Financial Markets
This chapter is aimed at describing how ethics can be integrated in finance curricula. It offers essentially two contributions: an outline of the personal and social ethical issues in finance addressed from a virtue ethics perspective and a narrative on learning instruments to tackle ethical issues in finance. The theoretical frame on personal and social virtues permits the classification of the themes that emerge from cases and collocates these within the discipline of ethics: the study of prudence, temperance, courage, and justice according to their definition constitutes the guideline for the study of ethical dilemmas in the financial sector. We provide two cases, Margin Call (Chandor 2011) and the case titled Holders, for the study of individual ethics in financial decision making. We also suggest using the documentary Inside Job to analyze the effect—both benefits and possible damage—that the financial sector has on society. This theoretical approach along with the use of cases makes effective the teaching of ethics in a finance course, in such that the students are called to engage first-hand, identifying with and taking positions with respect to concrete situations.
Chapter 8: Embedding Ethics in Teaching Investment Management: Understanding Socially Responsible Investing
A prevailing theme that encompasses ethics as it relates to investments is what is referred to as socially responsible investing (SRI), an investment discipline that considers social, environmental, and corporate governance criteria to generate sustainable financial returns and positive social impact in the long run. We examine the SRI discipline from its beginnings hundreds of years ago and its origins, which were based in religious principles, through its growth and implementation worldwide in today’s investing environment. We compare the growth of SRI in developed and developing countries. We discuss typical SRI-related ethical issues such as poor corporate governance, fraud, insider trading, derivatives trading excesses, and a lack of transparency in financial reporting. Beyond the discussion of SRI principles as theoretical issues, we further introduce a number of teaching strategies for these investment principles in what can often be ambiguous circumstances. We advise that teachers need to discuss these “gray area” scenarios in the classroom to help students understand that investment professionals face unanticipated, yet complicated, ethical dilemmas almost every day in their work. SRI principles can be implemented in security selection, asset allocation, and risk management within the overall system from the individual company through the community, country, and global market. We suggest that Student Management Investment Fund should endeavor to promote SRI by encouraging students to put these principles into practice through real-world investments.
Chapter 9: Ethical Considerations in International Recruitment Using Branding Strategies
This chapter explores the ethical dimensions of international recruitment efforts utilizing employer and nation-branding efforts. Scholarship on labor migration has thus far sought to identify causes of migration, but little attention has been paid to the ethical questions surrounding the phenomenon. This chapter is a step toward filling this ethical lacuna, and is aimed at university-level instruction. It argues that the management curriculum must include evaluation of the impact that international recruitment has on developed and developing nations. Students of management should be equipped with the ethical awareness needed to meet the challenges of international labor markets. An ethical pedagogy should include ethical probing, which entails identifying potential problems, particularly for developing nations, that result from international recruitment efforts. This chapter serves as a springboard for such probing. It presents the major ethical issues and provides heuristic devices designed to aid student comprehension and instructor efficacy.
Chapter 10: Teaching Ethics in the International Business Discipline
The teaching of ethics across international business curricula is increasingly crucial given the backdrop of corporate collapses and scandals whose causes have been attributed to lack of ethics in management. With increased globalization facilitating the movement of labor, today’s typical workforce is so diverse that it is difficult to offer a universal ethical template especially when approaching ethical issues in different cultures. This background has further put into question the role of business schools and universities in equipping business graduates with skills to grapple with ethical dilemmas in the business world. Consequently, the importance of teaching ethics to students of international business has been heightened. Despite the clear evidence for the need for teaching ethics to students in the international business curriculum, there are questions around whether ethics should be embedded into different specialist courses or taught as a stand-alone module; whether to make ethics a core module or an optional module, and if it is core, what should be taken out of an already crowded curriculum. This chapter explores issues around the teaching of ethics in the international business discipline and considers some of the practical challenges around this. It concludes by offering the use of gamification as a way to engage students and embed business ethics in a more meaningful way for students to develop transferable skills. The author draws from the experience of teaching ethics to MBA students and offers a few examples of ethical dilemmas that can be faced in different cultural contexts.
Chapter 11: Teaching Ethics and Compliance in International Business Courses
International business people often fall prey to legal difficulties due to violations of the laws of countries where they have interests. In this chapter, we propose that compliance must be taught in international business along with ethics, to cover both the practical and conceptual approaches to doing business abroad ethically. This way, international business students are provided with a robust framework that guides their reasoning and decision making, thus minimizing their exposure to legal difficulties in various climes. We identify four of the typical areas where ethical issues arise in international business including employment law, human rights, environment, and corruption, and highlight sample cases of violations and the efforts some organizations make to mitigate problems arising from these areas. We go on to propose that teaching should involve preparatory work in online discussions of ethical and regulatory issues, and submission of reflection papers, written in response to assigned articles, chapters, and cases in order to give participants an immersive experience. Then classroom time can be used for discussion and exercises with lectures limited to introduction and summation after the debriefing. We conclude with suggested exercises that could facilitate and enhance learning.