N/A Ethics Training in Business Schools: A Stalled Debate
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5294/edu.2022.25.2.6Keywords:
Curriculum, responsible management education, college, teaching ethics, higher education, business schoolsAbstract
The great corporate scandals of the beginning of the 21st century (Enron, Worldcom, Subprime) gave rise to economic crises of global impact. When influential graduates of renowned business schools were held accountable by public opinion, questions arose about whether the ethics training they received from these institutions had been insufficient. We intend to analyze trends in recent academic literature (2012–2022) on proposals to improve ethical teaching in management and business schools. Based on a systematic literature review (Q1 and Q2 journals in Scopus and WOS), we classified the articles into five categories, depending on where authors emphasized their diagnosis and proposals: 1) External factors to educational institutions (regulators and accreditors, market pressures, public opinion, and rankings); 2) cross-cutting factors (basic fundamental values of the environment, mission and institutional identity, strategy, and value offer); 3) input factors (managers, faculty, and students); 4) process factors (curriculum and format, pedagogy, content, and teaching materials), and (5) output factors (graduates, academic publications, institutional recognitions). The results indicate that interest in this discussion waned. Proposals mainly aimed at curricular changes (redesign of courses and new pedagogical proposals) and certain cross-cutting factors (for example, adjusting the mission and institutional objectives) in response to the commitment that many institutions made when signing the United Nations PRME (Principles for Responsible Management Education). It is also discussed whether this change was “cosmetic” rather than a comprehensive transformation of the educational offering capable of overcoming the existing barriers to improve the ethical teaching of professionals.
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