Lecture examines business ethics
The role of ethics in business judgments and how business schools can help re-define decision-making in business will be the focus of the upcoming instalment of the David O’Brien Centre for Sustainable Enterprise’s (DOCSE) Distinguished Speaker Series.
“Business schools are training managers without deep appreciation for or commitment to ethical behavior,” says Paul Shrivastava, director of DOCSE. “Business education needs to address business ethics as a core and not peripheral issue.”
The event will take place on November 9 and will feature R. Edward Freeman, who believes that the frequent exclusion of ethics in business judgments is due to a duality that exists in the corporate mind between “management and humanity.”
“Business schools are broken,” says Freeman. “Surely the global financial crisis is evidence that we need a new story about business. This new story has to put ethics and values into the center stage, so that ‘business ethics’ is no longer an oxymoron.”
Freeman is a philosopher and professor of business administration at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business Administration. He is the academic director of Darden’s Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics, and is probably best known for his 1984 award-winning book Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach, in which he suggests that businesses should build their strategies around their relationships with key stakeholders. His most recent book, Stakeholder Theory: The State of the Art, was published in 2010.
“Ed's work on stakeholder theory of the firm remains seminal in our field,” says Shrivastava. “If corporations took care of all stakeholders, business, society and ecosystems would all be much better off.”
When: Friday, November 9 from 11 a.m. to noon
Where: Room MB-6.240, John Molson School of Business Building (1450 Guy St.), Sir George Williams Campus
Related links:
• Distinguished Speaker Series
• John Molson School of Business
• More on R. Edward Freeman