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Business Ethics Education: Should We? Can We?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2015

Richard J McKenna
Richard J McKenna*
Affiliation:
Strategic Management, Edith Cowan University, Churchlands WA 6000, Australia Tel: 09 273 8628 Fax: 09 273 8754, Email r.mckenna@cowan.edu.au
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Abstract

Emanating from some of the major business failures of the 1980s has been a growing disquiet at the absence of a concern for ethics in the business community. A possible cause for the apparent immorality of actions taken by some businesses is the absence of ethics from the training programs provided to business managers and professionals. It may be that whilst some practices of the 1980s were those of immoral persons, the wider and underlying problem is one of amoral behaviour. That is, our business system operates without an ethical base, and this occurs, in part, because business ethics is excluded from the curricula of the institutions responsible for the training and further education of business managers and professionals.

The successful introduction of business ethics into the curricula requires a sufficient body of academics who believe that the learning of business ethics is both necessary and possible. Research data shows that few Australian universities have a formal program in business ethics. This paper reports an exploratory examination of the attitudes of business academics toward the need for inclusion of ethics in the business curriculum. The response to the survey suggests that while there is, as yet, no centre of concentrated will and ability to set the process of curricula change in motion, there is widespread interest and recognition of the need. Several constraints are identified, including the instrumentalist ethos of our institutions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Management & Organization , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , March 1995 , pp. 44 - 63
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management 1995

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