sum 2010 and 2006

Business Ethics and Social Responsibility Education:

Shifting the Worldview ROBERT A. GIACALONE

Temple University

KENNETH R. THOMPSON DePaul University

While the topics of business ethics and social responsibility education have received much attention in scholarly and pedagogical literature (although less in the pedagogical literature), the authors argue that the core teaching problem has not been discussed, that is, the worldview underpinning all of management education. The authors discuss this worldview, propose a more ethics-friendly worldview, and provide some considerations of its implication.

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Business educators walk a road where ethical signposts are unclear, new scandals lead to new laws, and society’s increased expectations change the parameters for what we teach. In this environ- ment, how we sensitize our students (i.e., how we teach our students about business ethics and so- cial responsibility) becomes central to the influ- ence we might have in shaping their thinking. As the basic pedagogical approaches we use are re- tooled, the premises of our instruction are recon- sidered, and the sources of our assumptions are questioned (see, e.g., Koehn, 2005). Helping stu- dents become more socially responsible and ethi- cally sensitive is a substantive part of our respon- sibility as we prepare a new generation of business practitioners. We face a difficult struggle, for even as we offer new approaches for dealing with changing business environments, less re- sponsible individuals and businesses learn new ways to prosper through immoral means (Calla- han, 2004).

Clearly, the inoculations to immoral behavior that we provide students, often through the direc- tion of philosophical strategies and notions of so- cial responsibility, are inadequate. Supporting ev-

idence is found in a seemingly unending flurry of newspaper articles and video documentaries (e.g., Greenwald, 2006) that reveal new morally repre- hensible actions. Undoubtedly, it is this stream of bad news that leaves us asking how teaching eth- ics and social responsibility might mitigate the problem (see, e.g., Gentile, Parks, & Piper 1993).

While authors of the scholarly and practitioner ethics literature have focused on more traditional issues such as how students’ moral standards im- pact their ethical work decisions, how organiza- tional climates impact ethical decisions, and how organizations fail to create the appropriate struc- ture for ethical decisions, authors presented here direct their attention to the task of teaching ethics and social responsibility. For those who believe the task is difficult because students do not care about the topic or find it irrelevant or uninterest- ing, demonstrating relevance, changing pedagogy and resources, and motivating learning would be the focal points. While we see these as important, we believe another perspective is worth consider- ing, one which focuses not on the students but also on the educational weltanschauung or worldview (Payne, 2001) that defines our curriculum.

To this end, we argue here that we face a funda- mental problem in teaching business ethics and social responsibility unrelated to pedagogy or course content. Rather, the problem is with the basic worldview underlying our management ed- ucation—a worldview that undermines and coun-

The authors wish to thank Lynne Andersson, Lisa Calvano, Gordon Dehler, Jonathan Doh, David Hoch, Marc Lampe, and Diane Swanson for their helpful comments on previous drafts. This manuscript was reviewed through an independent review process.

� Academy of Management Learning & Education, 2006, Vol. 5, No. 3, 266–277.

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termands the most basic tenets of ethics and social responsibility, making us unwitting abettors of the problem who are unable to provide students with effective, fundamental solutions. We offer an alter- native worldview that can serve as the foundation of management education and we provide some direction in bringing this alternative worldview into our curriculum.

THE ORGANIZATION-CENTERED WORLDVIEW

Trank and Rynes (2003) correctly state that ideol- ogy is an important part of professional education. However, we disagree with the contention that business faculty lack consensus over the defining values of business as a profession. The business school curriculum is based clearly on a set of val- ues, beliefs, and assumptions that constitute a co- herent worldview (see Koltko-Rivera, 2004). A worldview refers to set of beliefs that that identi- fies “what objects or experiences are good or bad, and what objectives, behaviors, and relationships are desirable or undesirable” (Koltko-Rivera, 2004: 4). In the business school worldview we teach, which we label an “organization-centered world- view” (OWV), business (and more often corpora- tions, which are an artificial creation of the state) is at the core—the fundamental part of our modern world. We teach students to perpetuate business’ importance and its centrality in society, to do so by increasing wealth, and to assume that by advanc- ing organizational interests, they advance their own and society’s overall best interests. Our edu- cation is framed to teach them that virtually every facet of what they do is essentially economic (Ghoshal, 2005; Pfeffer, 2005); only in the back- ground are other stakeholders and positions dis- cussed, although generally within this economic context.

Teaching the centrality of the profession is pe- culiar to business education alone. Other profes- sional schools do not share this collective egocen- tricity; neither law schools nor medical schools teach that law or medicine is the core of our mod- ern society. And while it can be argued that other professions do not have as much influence, what we teach is not solely descriptive but prescriptive.

This socialization toward business’ centrality is metaphorically Ptolemaic. Much as Ptolemy’s geo- centric view of the universe placed the earth in the center, the worldview that business schools engen- der positions business at the core; it prescribes decision making that aligns with the “natural” gravitational pull of this immense central force. More important, the OWV not only conveys that business centrality is true, but that the concomi-

tant materialism and self-interest that character- izes business decision making is appropriate. At the top of our values hierarchy is money and all of its constituents: power, status, and the accumula- tion of wealth.

In teaching this, at best we propagate and vali- date the worldview with which students enter our institutions; at worst, by perpetuating a worldview prescriptively that may be damaging (as we shall show), we are responsible for the academic equiv- alent of iatrogenic (physician-induced) disease. Ei- ther way, as Koehn (2005) notes, it is likely we have failed our students, engendering what Mitchell and Scott (1990) label an ethic of personal advan- tage. In this ethic, the centrality of business leads to a short-term viewpoint focused on ends rather than means, ultimately deemphasizing the com- munity and societal perspectives. Our instruction creates and perpetuates a student myopia, leading them toward a denatured view of organizational environments, a bias toward production and con- sumption, and “toward risk to make more money” (Shrivastava, 1995), which is driven by personal and organizational materialism (see Inglehart, 1990) and principally manifested in our attempts to engender desire for money, power, and status.

Materialism is characterized by the principal no- tion that well-being is enhanced as a function of one’s positive relationships with objects (Bur- roughs & Rindfleisch, 2002). But data do not support the view that well-being is enhanced. As a whole, materialism driven by desires for power, control, and financial gain as primary objectives (which is essentially what we teach) results in deleterious outcomes. Reviewing the relevant literature in his book on the impact of materialistic ideology, Kasser (2002) showed that materialistic values are associated with lower personal well-being (e.g., less happiness, less satisfaction with life, less vi- tality, more anxiety, more depression and drug use, more physical problems), poorer interpersonal relationships (e.g., less empathy, less trust, more conflict) and diminished value to the community (e.g., contribute less to the community, less desire to help others, less cooperation, more antisocial behavior).

Business professors have asserted the benefits of economic and materialistic thinking in their classes for so long that few even question these assertions. This is not uncommon when beliefs are widely accepted. The incorrect Ptolemaic view dominated European astronomy for over 1000 years, buttressed by “some quite sophisticated ge- ometry . . . to preserve the basic fiction” (“Ptolemy” A Dictionary of Scientists. Oxford University Press, 1999). The dominant, widely accepted worldview

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we teach may be equally wrong and steeped in the fictions of the OWV (see, e.g., Korten, 2001; Hender- son, 1996), creating three significant consequences for teaching business ethics and social responsi- bility.

First, it leads us to teach ethics within a business model that uses “sophisticated geometry” support- ing the organization-centered fiction that material- ism is good and business should be central. Within that fundamental fiction, we can teach ethics with- out asking students to confront the factually im- possible notions of unlimited growth in a world of limited resources, the questionable consumerist ideology based in materialistic goals, and the eco- logically unsound tactics that may bring planetary suicide. We can do so because the fictions that underlie the worldview have replicated them- selves as memes (see the work on memetics, Lynch, 1996) and are taught by us as a fundamental truth. If we are to truly teach business ethics, we would need to teach students to critically evaluate what they hear and to question the moral accept- ability of basic business activity, or to question the credibility of sources that affirm the worldview (see Carlson, 1995).

Indeed, if the business ethics we teach should find its “ontological basis in the information we currently possess about man, society, history and the universe that surrounds us” (Aerts, Apostel, De Moor, Hellemans, Maex, Van Belle, & Van Der Veken, 1994: 1), a substantive amount of informa- tion indicates the worldview we teach is flawed and no longer functional, for it fails to serve hu- manity in ways that are sustainable and genera- tive (McAdams & de St. Aubin, 1992). The possibil- ities that this worldview holds for the future, when considered with diligence and forethought (see, e.g., the State of the World reports) are nightmar- ish. This problem is critical, for if we teach stu- dents the efficiency of markets, even within a stakeholder context (Jones, 1995), the consequences of that efficiency may still be destructive. Essen- tially, if the premises of the worldview are based on fundamentally flawed values, beliefs, and as- sumptions, then on what basis can we teach them to establish the parameters of an ethical analysis?

Second, the organization-centered worldview (OWV) has allowed us to use a separate standard for the inclusion of course content. Material con- cerns and business centrality are moved by cen- tripetal force toward the core of the curriculum, imbedding financial concerns in everything we teach. For example, we do not simply teach stu- dents about job satisfaction, but about how satis- faction impacts performance, ultimately focused again on financial matters. Ethical content, which

does not support the OWV, is conversely moved centrifugally to the outskirts of the curriculum, seemingly leaving us with one of two choices: eth- ics modules or a single ethics course. This begs a simple question: “Why is it that while virtually everything in our course content is justified by, tied to, or infused with the financial bottom line, no other course content across the curriculum needs to be justified by, tied to, or infused with the ethical bottom line?” Why, for example, is the question of job satisfaction not tied primarily to an ethical responsibility to provide a decent work environ- ment simply because people are important in themselves? The answer appears simple: In an OWV, people matter only to the extent that they serve the financial needs of the organization.

Finally, and perhaps most critically, our OWV research on ethics and social responsibility has transmogrified ethical discourse, leading us to try to justify ethical actions principally in financial terms ethically. A research area has even emerged to justify ethical and socially responsible behavior as financially sound. In a meta-analysis of the literature on corporate social and financial perfor- mance, Orlitzky, Schmidt, and Rynes (2003) con- clude: “First and foremost, market forces generally do not penalize companies that are high in corpo- rate social performance; thus, managers can afford to be socially responsible” (p. 426). While the data undoubtedly justifies the conclusion (along with those of other excellent studies), when we teach that managers can afford to be ethical or socially responsible, the implication is that profitability is the decision criterion, leaving us to conclude that there may be times when we cannot afford to be ethical. When it is profitable, ethics can be a “sell- ing point” on which we can further the self-inter- ests of organizations.

Such an implication is unimaginable within other contexts. Would we talk about being able to afford to treat our children ethically? Even in our own profession, would we use affordability as openly (in terms of tenure, promotion, or salary increases) as the gauge against which we deter- mine whether to execute our professional duties? To grade students fairly? When it comes to busi- ness decisions, it seems we are asking our stu- dents to “quantify outcomes that should be justifi- able on moral grounds alone” (Beatty, 2004: 193), a tenet consistent with an OWV.

Clearly, there is no problem in identifying and advancing the financial benefits of ethical behav- ior per se. Such an approach can provide organi- zations with an incentive for engaging in and sup- porting ethical activity. But when this materialistic value has supremacy above all other values, when

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the choice to behave ethically is made primarily on its financial merits, the ethical discourse is cor- rupted by the problem of human greed and need for power (Mintzberg, 2005). Other motivations, based in moral standards and humanitarian con- cerns become subservient to the duty to use the bottom line as the overriding component in ethical decision making.1 In such a mind-set, moral con- cerns become synonymous with financial concerns and are indistinguishable in the decision-making context. Such a mind-set would be considered evil in other facets of our lives. Perhaps Weil (1947) is correct that when we are in the power of evil, the actions we take are seen as a necessity or even a duty; in the OWV, it is an evil born not of malicious intent, but of the system (the worldview), which we take up as our own (White, 2006).

STUDENT OPTIONS IN AN ORGANIZATION- CENTERED WORLDVIEW

“Galileo’s head was on the block, the crime was looking up the truth.”

—Indigo Girls

Gray (1993) notes that course content is both ex- plicit (informational readings, stated course goals, assignments) and implicit (attitudes about the sub- ject, expectations about what to do with the sub- ject). When these conflict, the implicit message always wins. Thus, even when we teach ethical content explicitly, the implicit worldview we prof- fer is that materialist, profit-driven values must always be first. This implicit message undermines our ethical instruction, for in an OWV, everything plays a secondary role to profitability.

Because we advance pecuniary concerns above all others, students find the theory of action we provide unsettling. Even ethically motivated stu- dents may become confused, particularly when they are told to reconcile all decisions against venerated materialistic values. The execution of sound ethical principles is perceived by our stu- dents as impractical or operationally incompre- hensible because the implicit materialistic world- view corrupts and even morally inverts (Adams & Balfour, 1998) the ethics we teach.

Students understand that decisions consistent

with the ethical theories we teach are costly be- cause, in the OWV, ethical outcomes are underval- ued in organizational life. They understand that even within the worldview we teach (and not with- standing what they learn at work), the easiest way to be fired or to have a stagnant career is not by making profit unethically but by failing to make quarterly projections and to maximize profit. When we teach them about the ethically bereft, fallen companies, students realize that with so many companies and so many decisions made, it is un- likely they or their companies will encounter an inquisitor for an ethical peccadillo that helped make or exceed projections. The curriculum is clear: There is no asterisk for those who failed to make the projections due to exemplary ethics or socially responsible behavior. Therefore, even our holistic instruction on the descriptive, instrumen- tal, and normative aspects of stakeholder theory (Donaldson & Preston, 1995; Kaler, 2003) matters little; the worldview we teach draws students to the instrumental component as the primary consid- eration.

By default, our students learn that the venerated profit-driven, materialistic values are hegemonic components in their decision making and they adapt. Their adaptation to ethics and social re- sponsibility is not molded into virtuous activity, but rather into a simultaneous concern for per- sonal impression management and external pub- lic relations. When we teach them ethics within the OWV, ethical instruction becomes about tolerance for ethical concerns, not an aspiration to achieve ethical ends; largely, they learn to avoid trouble. Their decisions are designed to ensure they are positively regarded and to provide the public with a well-told story that mitigates legal action or a public relations nightmare (see Paulhus, 1984, for both components of impression management). At best, this drives a preconventional morality (Kohl- berg, 1981), motivating actions predicated primar- ily on winning rewards and avoiding punishment for oneself or the organization.

At worst, these motivations establish the seeds of sham ethics, where there is no intent to do the right thing unless it helps the decision maker or advances the profit expectations scripted by Wall Street analysts. Armed with the proper set of ex- cuses, justifications, and strategies for social influ- ence (see Rosenfeld, Giacalone, & Riordan, 2002, for the many approaches used), students learn that if society wants them to act socially responsibly they can script performances that would make Hol- lywood proud. When profitability requires unethi- cal action, an ethical façade, couched in language either before the unethical act occurs or afterward

1This point has been made by a number of authors in regard to the business environment itself. While this article deals with teaching, other sources have questioned the moral bases of business decision making as well (see, as examples, Korten, 2001; Ray & Rinzler, 1994), sometimes without using ethical language in their critique.

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(see, e.g., Arkin, 1981), can be used to allay ques- tions raised by social constituencies.

Our teaching should not inadvertently lead stu- dents to a slipcover version of ethics, where they manage the impression of ethics by hiding in the complexities or ambiguities of laws, but should help them find an authentic sense of ethics and social responsibility in themselves. The problems in education are less pedagogical than they are political and ideological (see Freire, 1976). If we are going to teach our students ethics and social re- sponsibility, changing the techniques or increas- ing the sophistication of ethical discussions we use (Donaldson, 2005) will never be enough. We must embrace and provide them with a worldview where ethics and social responsibility are at the core and admit that living this worldview may be costly; ethics and social responsibility are not free. It would be deceptive to fail to mention these costs, for the world at large often advances the interests of money before people, and those who do not may pay a considerable price (e.g., whistleblowers).

FROM AN ORGANIZATION-CENTERED WORLDVIEW TO A HUMAN-CENTERED ONE

“What to Ptolemy and his immediate succes- sors was reasonable agreement between as-

tronomical theory and observation was to Copernicus incisive evidence that the Ptole-

maic system must be wrong.” —Kuhn, (1961: 36)

If a critical change in management education must occur, it must be framed in a worldview that is not metaphorically Ptolemaic—a worldview where neither profitability nor business are the center of the universe. An OWV curriculum cannot inspire a vision that motivates ethical behavior for its own sake; it cannot foster caring that goes beyond (or is inconsistent with) the ethics of personal and orga- nizational advantage. We are left to admonish stu- dents to do better. But as Quinn (1995) noted elo- quently, “[P]eople need more than to be scolded, more than to be made to feel stupid and guilty. They need more than a vision of doom. They need a vision of the world and of themselves that in- spires them” (pp. 243–244).

Inspiration for higher order goals will not be found in an OMV management education, for the goals we define as most important have been framed in materialist values. If we are to inspire our students toward higher order goals, ethical goals in which positive outcomes for human be- ings are deemed more important than profit, a

management education must become metaphori- cally Copernican. As compared to the OWV, this Copernican human-centered worldview (HWV) sees the business environment as one of many components in a system, and profitability as but one goal to achieve.

With this HWV worldview, students learn that the goal around which everything should revolve is not business or any other entity. Consistent with Diener and Seligman’s (2004) conceptualization of an economy beyond money, a HWV has physical as well as social well-being (Keyes, 1998) as its core educational goals. Even if the problems Ghoshal (2005) raises in regard to science can be addressed by reinstituting moral concerns in our theory, unless we can position the well-being of the broader society as our focus (Ray & Rinzler, 1993; Trank & Rynes, 2004), we will still be left with the priorities of an OWV. The normative aspects of stakeholder theory (Donaldson & Preston, 1995) are left tainted by a worldview whose underlying val- ues are destructive and overwhelm all other val- ues.

The HWV is founded on premises, values, beliefs and assumptions that are well explicated in the work on positive psychology and positive organi- zational scholarship, as well as the values work done on postmaterialism (see Inglehart, 1997) and cultural creatives (Ray & Anderson, 2001). These areas focus on values and traits that are associ- ated with the best of the human condition—for- giveness, hope, altruism, gratitude, transcendence (see Cameron, Dutton, & Quinn, 2004), as well as concern for community, quality of life, and social problems (Inglehart, 1997; Ray & Anderson, 2001). These beliefs, values, and assumptions are simi- larly consistent with an ecocentric management paradigm that fosters ecologically sustainable or- ganization–environment relations (Shrivastava, 1995); an HWV curriculum teaches students to make financial decisions fostering both the better- ment of people and the ecological system. It recog- nizes that measuring success with economic data, for a host of reasons, is a poor proxy for personal well-being (see Frey & Stutzer, 2002; Helliwell, 2003) or for understanding environmental impact (see Dunlap & Van Liere, 1981, 1984). An HWV leads us to focus our teaching on engendering positive well-being within the context of business opera- tions and requires us to consider indices of success in addition to financial ones (see Parker & Chusmir, 1992, for the other indices of success).

A HWV curriculum is oriented toward broader community good (Bellah et al., 1985; Gozdz, 1995) and not limited solely by self-centered concerns for profit. Students in this curriculum are taught that

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business’ enormous power is best used (and tem- pered) with decisions that go beyond the parame- ters of their products and services and toward what Mary Parker Follett believed were grander purposes to fulfill and more essential values to achieve (Lane, 1986). Indeed, in an HWV, the rela- tive importance of people and profit motives is inverted, such that people’s well-being is the fun- damental goal against which all issues of profit- ability are gauged. This inversion of people and profits has already been forecasted at a social level by futurists (Maynard & Mehrtens, 1993).

The notion of a “good business decision” is transformed from an instrumentally designed de- cision that advances business’ profit to one in which financial success is consistent with human needs. A HWV curriculum teaches that business’ role in our system is and can be substantial and even fundamental (Kolb, LeClair, Pelton, Swanson, & Windsor, 2005) to the proper functioning of our world, but this role must be earned not as a func- tion of money, but rather as a function of how well it advances the interests of humankind; business’ raison d’etre is conceptualized more holistically as a means of serving humanity rather than being served by it. As a result, we should teach more about social audits and less about financial audits.

The values that scaffold this worldview have been articulated, and adhered to, by a substantial part of the population (see Ray & Anderson, 2000) who do not see money as a means to an end. Indeed, people rank happiness and satisfaction ahead of money as a life goal (Diener & Oishi, in press). Growing numbers reject the premises of the OWV (see Ray & Anderson, 2000) and are challeng- ing it both on a theoretical and empirical basis (Harman & Hormann, 1990; Hawken, 1994; Ingle- hart, 1997). Some research shows that over the past 30 years, the rejection of these premises has led to dramatic values shifts that have coalesced both nationally (Ray & Anderson, 2001) and internation- ally (Inglehart, 1971, 1997), leading some to con- clude we are witnessing a global change in world- view (see Ray, 1996; Ray & Rinzler, 1994), which is transforming American and European societies (Inglehart, 1990; Dalton 1996: 104). In the United States alone, more that 24% of the population op- erates within such a worldview (see Ray, 1996).

The values underlying this worldview focus on the importance of nonfinancial, humanistic out- comes both for oneself and society, and are con- cerned with human-centered matters. Among these are transcendent values, (Giacalone & Jurk- iewicz, 2003), self-actualization (e.g., Ray, 1996; Ray & Anderson, 2000), the desire for greater voice in personal and social decisions (Inglehart, 1977,

1997; Ray & Anderson, 2000), the need to live life with meaning (Inglehart, 1971), the balance of in- dividual and community needs (Gozdz, 1995) across generations (Fox, 1994), and a shift away from materialistic desires (Ray & Anderson, 2000). McLarney and Chung (1999) note this values shift has changed the context of accountability and will legitimate decisions and outcomes that are quite different from those made within an OWV. Perhaps more critically, were we to shift toward a curricu- lum focused on well-being, the application of its principles would provide a number of benefits, in- cluding more effective functioning, more success- ful relationships, higher productivity, higher in- comes, and higher physical and emotional health (Diener & Seligman, 2004).

In light of these values changes and the more positive outcomes associated with them, it is in- cumbent on us to provide students with a curricu- lum that uses benchmarks of right and wrong which are founded on an intent to advance the well-being of people. When this happens, good decisions become aspirational in nature—focused on how students and their organizations can ad- vance people’s best interests. This aspirational ap- proach makes ethical issues expansive, focusing on ethical concerns that go beyond the Sarbanes– Oxley model of financial wrong doing, and instead focus moral acceptability at a fundamental, hu- man level. Issues involving the abuse of power, be they in the form of abusive bosses (Zellars, Tepper, & Duffy, 2002) and petty tyrants (Ashforth, 1994), or in the form of family unfriendly practices (Presser, 2004) become salient moral issues apart from their financial implications.

Shifting to a Human-Centered Curriculum

Shifting to a HWV curriculum will require at least two distinct foci: delineating the basis of the HWV curriculum and getting AACSB to support the change.

The Basis of a Human-Centered Curriculum: Intent and Content

The basis of an HWV curriculum begins with a business school’s recognition of its own social re- sponsibility in the educational process. The intent of the OWV management education we provide develops students who will be financially success- ful business people, and more recently, financially successful business people acting in socially re- sponsible manner. But recognizing our own social responsibility is a more formidable task, for it re- quires the courage to teach students how to ex-

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plore the negative repercussions of what we pro- fess and requires the vision to help them become agents for well-being.

More important, particularly for those who do not believe that well-being should be the core of our curriculum, teaching students to explore the mul- tifaceted (not simply economic) repercussions of their decisions respects their status as growing, cognizant adults who will make decisions on their own. It forces them to look at what is really hap- pening as a result of the decisions our education advocates (regardless even of the worldview that is being taught) and to spend a significant amount of time contemplating whether their intended de- cisions are good and what to do about them when they are not. We do not need to tell them that they must act ethically (something we cannot force them to do), but instead we need to teach them to recognize the wide-ranging implications of their decisions. The OWV rubrics of management edu- cation are so focused on the exclusive financial implications of decisions that they teach our stu- dents to be unknowing capitulators in the dam- ages caused by business centrality and material- ism. By providing them with an alternative worldview and tools to explore the systemic reper- cussions of their decisions, we free them to act morally, immorally, or amorally based on a clear understanding of decision-making consequences.

For example, if students understood that the real costs of what they produced, if they understood the long-term repercussions of “encouraging” their subordinates to work more hours, if they fully rec- ognized the connection between their company’s actions and the social issues that confront us, which ones would knowingly choose to act in so- cially irresponsible ways? Which company leaders would act in ways that would knowingly harm? No longer shadowed by the ignorance of real conse- quences that the OWV creates, more students and leaders might live out their integrity. And as more students left our institutions with a different per- spective, even those with an amoral desire to look good would be forced to speak the language of well-being. At best, the HMV would start a new conversation. At worst, we could be more certain that when our students were acting immorally, it was not because they failed to understand, but because they were choosing to do so.

The content of the curriculum should not simply shift into a HWV, but should provide a contrasting focus. On one hand, the curriculum should educate students in the problems with the OWV. Foremost in this goal would be to explicate the deleterious impact of materialism (Kasser, 2002) as well the work on environmentalism and the ecological im-

pact the OWV lifestyle engenders (e.g., De Graaf & Evans, 1996). In contrast, a focus of the curriculum would be on well-being and the relatively hidden problems that our OWV business ethics curriculum does not entertain (e.g., child labor, slave labor, family impact). Certainly, the literature in positive psychology (Snyder & Lopez, 2002) and positive or- ganizational scholarship (Cameron, Dutton, & Quinn, 2003) could serve as a foundational compo- nent, along with the work on integral culture (Ray, 1996) and postmaterialism (Inglehart, 1997).

While we have focused on the many problems of the OWV, it is important to stress that we do not believe that the HVW is without problems or ethi- cal concerns. Consequently, the content of a HWV curriculum must provide a balanced curriculum that addresses the problems and promise of both worldviews fairly. It cannot and should not be driven by a new ideological madness or self-righ- teousness, but by the simple goal of educating responsibly, affirming what we know about conse- quences of the current worldview and positioning an alternative—all based on the best interests of human well-being, not profit.

Changing the Tune at AACSB

AACSB has spent a great deal of time and energy determining, discussing, and trying to deal with the issues of relevance in the business curriculum and the incursion of competitors to our educational program (Management Education at Risk, 2002). This approach deals with our relevance to the mar- ket, the changing global environment, and the skills necessary for business success, although it fails to focus on issues of human well-being: what we teach our students about how people should be treated, their rights, and the immutable idea that concerns for well-being always precede profit.

Thus, even if the issue of relevance to constitu- encies were addressed, AACSB’s focus is myopic in that it deals only with how to address external, financially oriented problems and opportunities rather than the ethical problems and opportunities business schools create for the external environ- ment. The very basis of an OWV requires AACSB to define our existence as labor providers who will help increase business profitability; it does not fully understand that what we teach also has eth- ical implications for well-being.

In fact, it appears that AACSB’s authentic com- mitment to ethics education, even in regard to its usual OWVs (particularly the stream of financial imbroglios we witnessed) has been questionable (Swanson, 2004; Swanson & Frederick, 2005). Swan- son (2004) noted that after an extensive campaign

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to get AACSB to implement ethics requirements, “it became clear that AACSB’s accountability for eth- ics education was weak to non-existent and would remain so, even in the aftermath of the worst cor- porate scandals on record” (p. 44). Beyond the power of the accrediting agency, even at the indi- vidual level, AACSB deans’ positive attitudes to- ward ethics education do not parallel curriculum requirements in their individual institutions (Evans & Marcal, 2005).

But if we move to a HWV, AACSB must recognize that ethics is essential, that management educa- tion is not primarily about financial issues, and that a focus on well-being is the only way to pull us out of our ethical morass. In doing so, it must focus on the well-being consequences our curricula cre- ate—for business, for society, for the environment, for families, and so forth. Others have already noted some impacts of omission: Management ed- ucation does not adequately prepare business leaders to deal with values conflicts (Beyond Grey Pinstripes, 2001). But what of our impacts of com- mission, of the problems our ideologies, our tech- niques, and our worldview cause? Kasser’s (2002) work alone warrants an inquiry into how teaching an OWV spills over into the lives of our students, employees, and their families.

AACSB’s focus can have a significant impact in advancing the agenda of a HWV. Consistent with its spotlight on relevance and competitiveness (Management Education at Risk, 2002), many op- tions are available. AACSB can change its rules for accreditation, create a blue ribbon committee to inquire into the implications of our teaching, and engineer the discussion with interested parties who can help to disseminate what they learn and argue for changes.

AACSB also can help steer change by focusing on recalibrating doctoral education. As Grey (2004) points out, if management education is to change, the conventional education that instructors receive is an impediment. Instructors schooled in an OWV are far less likely to teach the tenets of a HWV. While training, changes in curriculum require- ments, and AACSB mandates may help to motivate current faculty, these alone are not a solution to the problem. If we are to change the worldview driving our teaching and curriculum, we must begin to mandate changes in doctoral education so that a new generation of instructors will begin their ca- reers with worldview assumptions that advance ethical behavior. We believe that three specific steps must be taken in this regard.

First, business schools must commit to having a faculty that is diverse in its thinking as well as it racial, ethnic, and gender composition. How can

we hope to advance a new way of thinking unless we integrate some of its different intellectual con- stituencies into our faculties? There are currently a host of members of the Academy of Management whose worldview is more closely aligned with the HWV, including (but not restricted to) those in Crit- ical Management Studies and Social Issues in Management. Where integrating these faculty in significant numbers is logistically difficult, busi- ness schools can recruit from sociology, psychol- ogy, and other disciplines to round out the school’s worldview, not solely as a means of sourcing doc- toral faculty (Management Education at Risk, 2002: 16) and creating a more realistic means of learning problem solving (Nyquist & Woodford, 2000), but as way to include the HWV.

Second, in order to dispense with the organiza- tion-centered notions that business is central, it is critical that doctoral students get a substantive part of their education from outside the business school. This education should not include class- room instruction alone, but must incorporate con- siderable experience and exposure with nonbusi- ness school members (e.g., on doctoral dissertation committees, coursework). Much as the increasing global content of our management education has increased global thinking among students and challenged faculty to become more cosmopolitan (Management Education at Risk, 2004: 10), so can a substantive education outside the business curric- ulum (which is not tethered to the same notions of business centrality and materialism) increase our students’ focus on issues of well-being (perhaps through community and global service compo- nents) and the consequent ethical decisions that must be considered.

Third, we must train doctoral students to under- stand and incorporate values and ethics in their thinking, their research, and their practice. As things stand, they are exposed to ethics in a course or in modules in the curriculum. But when you teach students ethics as a part of the coursework, rather than infuse it into every aspect of the coursework, you reduce its importance. Thus, for example, when we teach students about various human resource management topics, we should infuse each topic with the ethical issues that en- velope that topic (see Deckop, 2006).

Finally, we must consider whether doctoral training itself is so infused with OWV values that it promotes more narrow, careerist thinking (Feld- man & Weitz, 1991), establishing or reinforcing the very destructive materialistic orientation that has been central to our curricula. It is this orientation that helps undermine the importance of teaching relative to research and that mentors students to

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do research that will pay off in the form of publi- cations in accepted lists. While this careerist ap- proach is undoubtedly efficacious in helping stu- dents secure higher paying jobs, its potentially negative impact on how doctoral students teach their students, on their interests in creative re- search, and on personal behaviors raises ques- tions about our own professional ethics.

ESTABLISHING NEW EXEMPLARS

Unquestionably, a shift to a HWV will alter the meaning of success in our classrooms at all edu- cational levels, making ethical standards based on well-being the pivotal criterion and ultimately, shifting the focus away from biases that may un- dermine student understanding of ethical con- cerns. Our bottom-line instructional focus will need to give way to a more holistic view of busi- ness leadership. While we need to teach students about the leader’s role in financial success, if we are to produce ethically centered students, we much teach them that the successful leader first must actively and passionately advance the inter- ests of people. In establishing for students how this new success is defined, it will be essential to introduce new role models whose ethical and fi- nancial success makes them exemplary.

These new role models may be both in and out- side of the mainstream, historical, and contempo- rary figures, business people and politicians, en- tertainers and scientists alike. The notion that our students should be exposed only to the thinking of various CEOs, CFOs, and COOs must be replaced with exemplars who are not seen in large corpo- rate boardrooms. These exemplars may be found in the actions of historical figures, literary charac- ters, and film characters. But they may also be found in people who use HWV approaches in all walks of life, gleaned from press reports on good Samaritans and activists. While these activities are little known to most, their exemplary actions can be made salient and taught in our classes. We can also find exemplars among famous people. Oprah Winfrey, admittedly one of the most suc- cessful businesswomen and entertainers, provides an index of such success. In an OWV curriculum, Oprah’s brand of success might be taught as a model to business students because her financial performance is noteworthy. In a HWV curriculum, it would be taught because she has found a way to balance her financial success and power with an active agenda for well-being. Her legacy is not solely her ability to create wealth, but her ability to leave a positive human legacy as well.

There are other role models as well, so called

merchants of vision (Liebig, 1994), whose human- centered practices can serve as exemplars of a worldview where the concerns of people are not secondary to profit. Judy Wicks, who Inc. magazine (McCuan, 2004) says has “put in place more pro- gressive business practices per square foot than any other entrepreneur,” (p. 142) provides another. Her White Dog Café and adjoining Black Cat retail store run solely on wind power; the White Dog Café uses organic produce and meats. She uses 20% of the White Dog’s profits for a foundation she set up to support local nonprofits and social justice groups, and she tells people that businesses should not grow bigger. While this refrain may be denigrated by OWV adherents, Wicks’ commit- ment to “leave things better than we found them,” (McCuan, 2004: 142) has created a company em- ploying 100 people and grossing $4–8 million an- nually. Students must be shown that business has many models of the HWV now actively engaged in the business world.

In the end, the content of how we teach business ethics, the pedagogy we use, and how it appears in our curriculum must be informed by the worldview we wish to set forth and the type of leadership role (e.g., providers of labor versus agents of socially responsible change) business schools wish to take in the world at large. If we really wish to advance ethics in management education, we must not ground our curriculum in financial values, but in a worldview that advances well-being as a priority, making ethics the main concern rather than the backfill of the curriculum. Regardless of the con- tent or the method, unless the ideals of ethics and social responsibility we teach are consistent with the worldview our curriculum posits, our students will relegate them to the scrap-heap of useless, inert knowledge (see Paul, 1993). Instilling the primacy of a financially driven, materialistic su- perordinate set of goals ahead of integrity leaves ethics and social responsibility subordinate. Ex- pecting our students to understand that logic or retain the rationale we provide is akin to providing an ongoing indoctrination into the singular impor- tance of a hedonistic lifestyle and then being told for a few minutes that moderation is important.

Our students are smart enough to read between the lines.

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Robert A. Giacalone, (PhD, State University of New York–Albany) is professor of human resource management at the Fox School of Business and Management, Temple University, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Previously, Giacalone was Surtman Distinguished Professor of Business Ethics at the University of North Carolina–Charlotte. His current research interests focus on the impact of workplace spirituality and changing values on business ethics.

Dr. Giacalone has served as consultant and trainer to a number of organizations including the FBI, Federal Reserve Bank, Wheat First Butcher Singer Securities, and Carter-Wallace. He has also authored over 100 articles, is co-editor of five books and co-author of two others: Impression Management in Organizations: Theory, Measurement, Practice (Routledge, 1995)

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and Impression Management: Building and Enhancing Reputations at Work (Thompson, 2002). He was the series editor for the Sage Series in Business Ethics and is currently co-editor of the Ethics in Practice book series. He also serves on several journal editorial boards and as editor of several special issues on business ethics.

Kenneth R. Thompson, (PhD, University of Nebraska), is professor of management at the Kellstadt Graduate School of Business at DePaul University. Ken’s research interests include goal setting, a behavioral approach to motivation, and application of Baldrige criteria to business. Ken has co-authored 5 books, including Social Issues in Business with Fred Luthans and Richard Hodgetts, and over 50 articles. Recently he completed a monograph on the application of the balanced scorecard in the Department of Defense and United States Postal Service under a grant from IBM. Ken is an examiner for Baldrige National Quality Award and Illinois quality award programs.

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