How Academics See The Benefits And Challenges Of Business Ethics Teaching: Some Views From A UK Business School

Tonthat, Ai-Quang (2017). How Academics See The Benefits And Challenges Of Business Ethics Teaching: Some Views From A UK Business School. MRes thesis The Open University.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.ro.0000c086

Abstract

The UN Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME) initiative was launched at the same time as the global financial crisis was unfolding. This has highlighted the pressing need to teach business ethics in business schools around the world and has intensified the effort to have teaching business ethics institutionalised, a strategy which many scholars have called for over the years (De George 1987, Etzioni 1991, Donaldson 2014). Despite the development of business ethics over four decades as an academic field, the benefits and challenges of teaching business ethics are still evolving unclear? This qualitative study, conducted on a small scale, has found that some of the issues such as the importance of teaching business ethics or its benefits are no longer on the front line of debates as they have been well accepted, but issues such as the conceptualisation of business ethics and how business ethics should be taught remain very topical. Blending with these are some new benefits and challenges presented by the multi-cultural environment of internationalisation, requiring a concerted effort from both institutional and faculty levels.