BEHAVIORAL ETHICS: EXPLORING THE GLOBAL
LANDSCAPE IN ETHICS EDUCATION
GUEST EDITORS
Priscilla Elsass, Clark University
pelsass@clarku.edu
Jacob Park, Green Mountain College
parkj@greenmtn.edu
Christopher Adkins, The College of Willliam and Mary
christopher.adkins@mason.wm.edu
Kurt April, University of Cape Town
kurt.april@gsb.uct.ac.za
The litany of ethics lapses in corporations continues to make headlines, showing no signs of slowing down – Volkswagen develops illegal software to manipulate emissions data (Economist 2015), “too big to fail banks,” plead guilty to manipulating foreign currencies (Corkery & Protess, 2015); officials of the Banco Espirito Santo (BES) in Portugal are accused of misleading investors (Kowsmann, 2015) – to name just a few.
In response to these and other worldwide business scandals, management scholars are reflecting upon, and seeking new avenues for, ethics research aimed at understanding why business leaders and employees continue to behave in unethical ways. Most critically, there is an urgent need to consider how ethics curricula and pedagogies may provide more effective approaches to intervention, before, during and after, ethical lapses in this era of cross-cultural and global business enterprises with varied forms of institutional governance and corporate values.
The rise of behavioral ethics is well poised to provide a new approach to teaching business ethics. Defined as “a field that seeks to understand how people actually behave when confronted with ethical dilemmas” (Bazerman and Tenbrunsel, 2011, p. 4), the behavioral ethics field includes a number of important concepts such as bounded ethicality (Chugh, Bazerman, & Banaji, 2005) and ethical blindness (Bazerman and Tenbrunsel, 2011). A special issue of Business Ethics Quarterly (De Cremer, Mayer & Schminke, 2010) focused on three themes in behavioral ethics research: moral awareness, ethical decision making, and reactions to unethical behavior. Research in behavioral ethics is beginning to suggest that people are prone to systematic and predictable ethical lapses due to psychosocial and organizational influences, power differentials and cultural practices (e.g., clan and in-group favoritism). Such research also suggests that the development of students’ moral awareness, and their ability to recognize and effectively respond to both personal and organizational ethical dilemmas, presents a special pedagogical challenge for those who teach business ethics.
Behavioral ethics has found recent programmatic life in several widely adopted curricular models, including Prentice’s “Ethics Unwrapped” series from the University of Texas-Austin (http://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/), Stanford’s “Leadership in Focus” series (https://www.leadershipinfocus.net/), and Gentile’s Giving Voice to Values curriculum (http://www.babson.edu/Academics/teaching-research/gvv/Pages/home.aspx). Since JME’s most recent ethics education Special Issue was in 2006, we seek an updated understanding of how ethics pedagogy choices, effectiveness, and experiences for students have changed with the advent of this exciting new paradigm.
Possible Topics for Submission
Below, we provide a list of possible questions, issues and topics consistent with these aims that submissions might address. These questions are suggestions only and we are open to submissions that address the special issue’s aims in ways other than those described below.
How are “traditional” or normative ethics partnered with a behavioral approach? What are the challenges or rewards contained therein?
What new behavioral approaches hold the most promise in helping students cope with some of the organizational structural norms that invite unethical behavior?
What are the best practices for teaching ethics within a diverse, global context in which individual value systems may be differently shaped by cultural phenomena?
How are various disciplines (such as social psychology, educational psychology, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral economics) shedding new light on our understanding of best practices for educating ethical leaders?
How do we encourage students’ orientation to social justice by deepening their understanding of behavioral ethics?
What pedagogical methods successfully integrate the study of business ethics with other classroom approaches (such as service learning or “flipped” classrooms)?
How do university ethics courses (either in the classroom or in corporate training programs) facilitate the development of moral awareness and moral action? Is there evidence of success?
Given the evidence that many otherwise ethical individuals may commit unethical acts without being aware of it, how can we best teach our students to recognize and respond to ethical dilemmas?
Are they bad apples or bad organizational systems? How can the teaching of behavioral ethics enhance our courses in organizational theory and organizational strategy?
How can we encourage the development of moral awareness and self-reflection in our students?
We seek submissions across JME’s four sections: research/conceptual articles, essays, instructional innovations, and instructional change in context. Submissions should be original, not submitted to or published in any other sources, and follow JME submission guidelines that are available online at http://jme.sagepub.com. Prospective authors and potential reviewers are invited to contact the co-editors of the special issue to discuss paper ideas and concepts before submission. All submissions are due to the JME submission portal (http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jome) no later than June 1, 2016.
References
Bazerman, M. H. and Tenbrunsel, A.E. (2011) Blind spots: Why we fail to do what’s right and what to do about it. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Chugh, D.,Bazerman, M., and Banaji, M. (2005). Bounded ethicality as a psychological barrier to recognizing conflicts of interest. In D. Moore, D. Cain, G. Loewenstein, & M. Bazerman (Eds.),Conflict of interest: Challenges and solutions in business, law, medicine, and public policy (pp. 74–95). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Corkery, M. and Protess, B. (2015) Rigging of foreign exchange market makes felons of top banks. The New York Times, May 20, 2015. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/21/business/dealbook/5-big-banks-to-pay-billions-and-plead-guilty-in-currency-and-interest-rate-cases.html.
De Crema, D., Mayer, D.M., and Schminke, M. (2010). On understanding ethical behavior and decision making: A behavioral ethics approach. Business Ethics Quarterly , 20 (1), 1-6.
Economist. 2015. Mucky Business. Economist. September 26.
Kowsmann, P. (2015) Bank of Portugal fines ex-Banco Espirito Santo officials. The Wall Street Journal. May 28, 2015. Retrieved from http://www.wsj.com/articles/bank-of-portugal-fines-ex-banco-espirito-santo-officials-1432833170