To commemorate 40 years since the founding of the Journal of Business Ethics, the editors in chief of the journal have invited the editors to provide commentaries on the future of business ethics. This essay comprises a selection of commentaries aimed at creating dialogue around the theme The Ethics and Politics of Academic Knowledge Production. Questions of who produces knowledge about what, and how that knowledge is produced, are inherent to editing and publishing academic journals. At the Journal of Business (...) Ethics, we understand the ethical responsibility of academic knowledge production as going far beyond conventions around the integrity of the research content and research processes. We are deeply aware that access to resources, knowledge of the rules of the game, and being able to set those rules, are systematically and unequally distributed. One could ask the question “for whom is knowledge now ethical’”? (See the Burrell commentary.) We have a responsibility to address these inequalities and open up our journal to lesser heard voices, ideas, and ways of being. Our six commentators pursue this through various aspects of the ethics and politics of academic knowledge production. Working with MacIntyre’s scheme of practices and institutions, Andrew West provides commentary on the internal good of business ethics learning and education. Inviting us to step out of the cave, Christopher Michaelson urges a clear-eyed, unblinking focus on the purposes and audiences of business ethics scholarship. As developmental editor, Scott Taylor uncovers some of the politics of peer review with the aim of nurturing of unconventional research. Mike Hyman presents his idiosyncratic view of marketing ethics. In the penultimate commentary, Julie Nelson attributes difficulties in the academic positioning of the Business Ethics field to the hegemony of a masculine-centric model of the firm. And finally, Gibson Burrell provides a powerful provocation to go undercover as researcher-investigators in a parallel ethics of the research process. (shrink)

Three decades ago, the term Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) entered educational discourse. However, it is important to note that the concept of ‘ESD’ did not emerge from scholarly debates on education, rather as a tool to carry forward the agenda of sustainable development. As a result, it has been conceptualized in many different ways. This article is an attempt to further the debate on ESD-conceptualization. The paper discusses connections between constructivism, transformative learning, and Erich Fromm’s idea of ‘to be’ (...) and argues that the focus of ESD needs to change from narrow behavioural outcomes to emancipating learners to ask critical questions, decide (without the influence of anonymous authority of capitalism) and engage in activities that allows them to develop an authentic relationship with their world. The article suggests that consistent opportunities (inside and outside the classroom) to reflect and question the ‘having’ mode and taking steps towards ‘being’ mode will address the problem of ‘otherness’ and contribute towards a more sustainable world. (shrink)

Senior leadership transitions present daunting challenges. To promote inclusive development and comply with equal opportunity legislation, South African companies often fast-track careers of high-potential previously disadvantaged individuals. Organisations typically do not sufficiently support transitioning leaders, possibly acting unethically. The rate of failure is high with devastating effects for the individual and their organisation. The novel, empirically researched Transformative Transition Coaching framework, helps facilitate deep and lasting changes in meaning perspectives of transitioning leaders through coaching. The ability of the TTC framework (...) to support transitioning leaders is presented in this article. (shrink)

Education theorists have emphasized that transformative learning is not simply a matter of students gaining access to new knowledge and information, but instead centers upon personal transformation: it alters students’ perspectives, interpretations, and responses. How should learning that brings about this sort of self-transformation be understood from the perspectives of philosophy of mind and cognitive science? Jack Mezirow has described transformative learning primarily in terms of critical reflection, meta-cognitive reasoning, and the questioning of assumptions and beliefs. And within mainstream philosophy (...) of mind, there has been a long-standing assumption that cognition and thought are brain-based, computational, disembodied processes that occur separately from emotion and affect. According to this view, selftransformation might be construed as the forging of new neural connections and the development of new cognitive “programs.” However, I will argue that the literature on embodiment and enactivism that has emerged in recent years offers us a different and more productive way to conceptualize the intended effects of transformative learning. From the standpoint of enactivism, the experience of transformative learning is thoroughly bound up with the cognitive shifts that it involves, and it also involves significant changes to the neurobiological dynamics of the living body. Moreover, personal transformation is not simply something that happens to subjects, but rather a process in which they are actively and dynamically engaged. In addition, this enactivist approach emphasizes that the learning process is fully embodied and fundamentally affective. From a phenomenological perspective, personal transformation can be understood as a pronounced alteration in cognitive-affective orientation; and from a neurobiological perspective, the development of new habits of mind can be understood as the formation of highly integrated patterns of bodily engagement and response. The upshot is that it is not just subjects’ brains that are altered over the course of transformative learning, but also their overall bodily and affective attunement to their surroundings. (shrink)

One of humans’ distinctive cognitive abilities is that they develop an array of capacities through an enculturation process. In “Cognition as a Social Skill,” Sally points to one of the dangers associated with enculturation: ideological oppression. To conceptualize how such oppression takes root, Haslanager appeals to notions of mindshaping and social coordination, whereby people participate in oppressive social practices unthinkingly or even willingly. Arguably, an appeal to mindshaping provides a new kind of argument, grounded in philosophy of mind, which supports (...) the claims that feminist and anti-racist want to defend. However, some theorists worry that Haslanger’s account does not shed much light on how individuals could exert their agency to resist oppression. I argue that enactivist conceptions of mindshaping and habit can help us to make sense of the power of social influences and how they have the potential to both enable and undermine cognition and agency. This moves us toward increased understanding of the workings of social oppression—distinguishing between constructive and enabling forms of heteronomy, and overdetermining and pernicious modes that lead to atrophied moral cognition and a narrowing of the field of affordances. (shrink)

A facilitator's guide to transformative teaching is a workshop designed for the Center for Collaborative Conflict to help teachers teach conflict in a way that is most likely to encourage student's positive transformation. The project includes a visual guide, lesson plans for the person facilitating the workshop and a document that overviews the project and explains the theoretical foundation behind the workshop.

The development of a re-understanding or re-investigation of body pedagogy is currently prominent in the field of physical education and sport pedagogy. This goes for the learning of movement capability and health but also in relation to outdoor education. The latter a criticized area for having a one-size-fits-all approach to curriculum, with less attention to what to learn in OE, including aspects of everyday practices of being outdoors. The aim of this study was to explore students aged 15 years, and (...) their meaning making of being outdoors expressed in written stories about a favorite place. Two school year eight classes in a Swedish compulsory school situated in an area with high diversity participated. Through this theory-generated empirical study, written stories were explored as one way of evaluating students' meaning making of outdoor places. By using practical epistemology analysis to examine experience operationalized through aesthetic judgements attention is paid to the relation between the student and the situation. The analysis make it possible to discern a sense and meaning making of “being” outdoors as an embodied experience, as a relational whole of the self, others and the environment. Descriptions of aesthetic experiences were analyzed leading to dimensions of environing described as “calm and privacy,” “community and togetherness” and “feelings and senses.” A favorite place was by all students described as a very local and nearby place accessible in everyday life. The analysis generated understandings of feelings of “fulfillment” and different embodied experiences of what an encounter with an outdoor place or being outdoors could mean. Furthermore, how personal and diverse the meaning making place tends to be and how experience and habits contribute to the students' creation of microenvironments. Dimensions of environing become part of an embodied process. The analysis of the written stories calls for an alternative understanding of what OE can or should consist of. The findings encourage teachers and researchers to consider alternative understandings and practices of OE that highlight and educate students' overall embodied experiences and learning in OE and PE. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that an inclusive and effective community resilience approach requires empathy as a missing component in the current engineering education and practice. An inclusive and effective community resilience approach needs to be human-centric, individual- and communal-sensitive, justice-oriented, and values-based consistent. In this paper, we argue that three kinds of empathy, namely cognitive, affective, and conative, play a central role in creating and sustaining an inclusive and effective approach to community resilience. Finally, we discuss empathetic education through (...) learning theories and analytics skills to cultivate empathy in engineering education. Cultivating empathy in engineering education could help advance the impact and contribution of engineering to well-being. (shrink)