Making Room For Ethics In Business Schools.

Criticism and blame surrounding corporate scandals in recent years didn’t stop at the boardroom door. Business schools also have been faulted for not deterring and for possibly encouraging executive misconduct. Conventional business education needs to be transformed, argues a Rice expert in business ethics. Otherwise, ethics education may turn out to be “little more than Pavlov-like conditioning of students.”

Corporate scandals in recent years have triggered a renewed focus on ethics education in business schools. Several surveys, however, suggest that historically no more than roughly one-third of business schools made ethics or related subjects a course requirement. Duane Windsor, an expert in business ethics at Rice’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, argues that until ethics is accorded at least equal curriculum importance with other subjects like accounting, finance and economics, the current concern over business ethics won’t last — until the next major scandal.

In the Journal of Business Ethics Education, Windsor advocates that business schools require a foundation course addressing the moral, legal and political education of future business managers, taught by specialists and offered at the start of a school’s core curriculum — whether at the undergraduate or graduate degree level. He also proposes systematically integrating business ethics, business law and areas such as stakeholder management and corporate social responsibility throughout the remainder of a business or management student’s education.

“If we expect our future business leaders to be value-setters, our business schools should profess and promote moral leadership over and above legal compliance or minimum adherence to corporate codes of conduct,” Windsor says.

The author points to current standards by the AACSB, an international accrediting body for business degree programs, as merely “signaling” schools to incorporate aspects of ethics education within their curricula, instead of making them a requirement for accreditation. Without first providing students with foundation coursework, Windsor believes embedding ethics into the curriculum may amount to “little more than Pavlov-like conditioning…”

“Students should be provided the groundwork by ethic specialists to help them understand this increasingly complex subject area,” Windsor argues. “Otherwise, simply infusing ethics into other coursework becomes highly superficial.”

Among the two dozen topics Windsor suggests for the foundation course and later coursework are studies of anti-corruption efforts, business ethics and history, business law, the corporate social performance model and corporate social responsibilities, and social auditing and reporting. Throughout his suggested topics, the author points to various specialists who have researched those areas, as well as case studies and laws enacted in response to corporate scandals and controversies.

A member of the Jones School faculty since 1977, Windsor has conducted research on corporate environment and social performance, business ethics, corporate governance and socially responsible management.

Some of his work appears as book chapters, most recently in “Enron: Corporate Fiascos And Their Implications” and “International Corporate Responsibility: Exploring the Issues,” and in Business Ethics Quarterly, the Journal of Public Affairs, the Journal of Corporate Citizenship and the Cornell International Law Journal.

A past president and program chair of the International Association for Business and Society and the current program chair of the Social Issues in Management Division of the Academy of Management, Windsor received his undergraduate degree from Rice and his master’s and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard.

To learn more about this research, contact Windsor at od*@**ce.edu or Debra Thomas in the Jones School at dt*****@**ce.edu

For more information at http://www.rice.edu