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Ethics and community in management education.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

There is a crisis of legitimacy in management education. Recent corporate scandals in the United States have raised issues concerning prevailing ethical standards as well as value conflicts in business. We argue that the management disciplines provide both foundations of social criticism and advocacy of value-congruent management behavior necessary to address these ethical issues. Because ethical behavior is grounded in community, we must deliberately build community in our classrooms and in academic institutions. Ethical communities of practice can revitalize management education.

Value Conflicts in Business Highlight the Need for Community

There is arguably a heightening crisis of legitimacy in management education. In two studies, Rynes, Trank, Lawson and Ilies (2003) demonstrate a disturbing discrepancy between the strongly positive statements of corporate leaders about the importance of leadership, ethics, and interpersonal skills that are fostered by behavioral coursework in management and actual hiring decisions in students' early careers. There is compelling evidence that corporate recruiters evaluate resumes and make initial hiring decisions based almost solely on functional and technical courses in students' resumes, despite their own and their company's statements to the contrary (Rynes, Trank, Lawson and Ilies, 2003.) In these and other instances where corporate practices fail to follow the public ideals of corporate leaders, our students question the legitimacy of management coursework.

Recent corporate scandals in the United States (e.g. Enron, Arthur Andersen, WorldCom, Tyco, and HealthSouth) have raised issues for scholars and managers alike concerning prevailing ethical standards and practices in fast-paced, competitive, business environments. Our undergraduate and executive students are socialized in many ways throughout their lives. They will not necessarily be influenced to engage in socially responsible business or effective management behavior as the result of a single course, or an entire MBA program. However, the management disciplines provide foundations for social criticism and advocacy of value-congruent management behavior that offer complex views of these challenges and suggest remedies. To the extent that what we research and teach is not valued or practiced in corporate life, we must scrutinize the validity of our knowledge base and the effectiveness of our pedagogical approaches. Further, and very importantly, we must deliberately rebuild "community" in our classrooms and in the academic workplace.

"Community" has multiple meanings. We are all embedded in multiple communities, some more central to us than others. While community can be defined by locality, it most often means a collection of persons with common interests, usually occupational, professional or societal. In this paper, we expand the view of common interests by defining "community" as heightened consciousness and behavior that connects us to each other and to our highest ideals. We argue that, as management educators, we must transcend our collective socialization and the individualized...

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