How can business schools best prepare their students to deal with the ethical challenges they will face in the ‘real world’? For three or four decades members of business (and other professional) schools have debated the relative merits of teaching ethics in a stand-alone “foundational” course or teaching a little bit of ethics “across the curriculum” in every course. This paper explores a third option—having an ethicist as a member of a team that teaches an integrated approach to management—which combines (...) the advantages of the two traditional options while avoiding some of their shortcomings. The paper begins with a lengthy discussion about the interdisciplinary nature of the field of business ethics and about the pedagogical implications of this conception of the field. And it concludes with a case study of the team-teaching approach at the Sauder School of Business of University of British Columbia. (shrink)

Imagine first the case of J (who might be anybody, jemand). J used to inhabit a social order, or rather an area within a social order, where socially approved roles were unusually well-defined. Responsibilities were allocated to each such role and each sphere of role-structured activity was clearly demarcated. These allocations and demarcations were embodied in and partly constituted by the expectations that others had learned to have of those who occupied each such role. For those who occupied those roles (...) to disappoint those expectations by failing to discharge their assigned responsibilities was to invite severe disapproval and other sanctions. To refuse to find one's place within the hierarchies of approved roles, or to have been refused a place, because judged unfit for any such role, was to be classified as socially deviant and irresponsible. The key moral concepts that education had inculcated into J were concepts of duty and responsibility. His fundamental moral beliefs were that each of us owes it to others to perform her or his assigned duties and to discharge her or his assigned responsibilities. A good human being performs those duties, discharges those responsibilities, and does not trespass into areas that are not her or his concern. A philosopher who comes across the likes of J will understand his attitudes as cultural parodies, in part of Plato (conceiving of justice as requiring ‘that each do her or his own work and not meddle with many things’ Republic 433a) and in part of Kant (doing one's duty just because it is one's duty and not for the sake of any further end), authors who had influenced J's school teachers. A sociologist will entertain the suspicion that in certain types of social order it may be only in the form of parodies that some types of concept can continue to find expression. But for the moment let us put this thought on one side and return to J. (shrink)

This article is a transcript of an interview with David Shaw, the author of the book, “An Ancient Greek Philosophy of Management Consulting: Thinking Differently about its Assumptions, Principles and Practice”, published with Springer in 2022. It discusses his reasons for looking to the ancient Greek philosophers for new ideas about management consulting, and how his papers for this journal have contributed to the development of the book.

How can organisations ‘manage for integrity’?1 Two differing approaches have been called the compliance strategy and the integrity strategy. While the first seeks to instil compliance with externally imposed standards, the integrity strategy seeks to teach ethical decision-making and values as well, so that ‘ethical thinking and awareness…[are]…part of every manager’s mental equipment’. In this paper the Dutch consultant philosopher Hans Bolten reports on how Socratic dialogue has helped managers develop ethical capacities and responsibility. Drawing on research with dialogue members (...) he concludes that organisations that care about ethics cannot rely on abstract moral codes and rules. He argues that they need Socratic dialogue as an instrument if their managers are to shape moral guidelines they both agree upon and can apply in practice. And he shows how dialogue can foster in managers the readiness to give an account of their actions, a readiness implicit in the idea of moral action itself. Thus Socratic dialogue can help create a culture in which morally accountable action is the rule, not the exception, and in which the responsibility to give an account of one’s actions has its rightful place.2. (shrink)

Socrates op de markt, Filosofie in bedrijf was first published in the Netherlands in 1997 and reprinted in 1999.1 It was translated into German and published in Germany in late 2000. The book covers the need today for Socratic dialogue, its methods, its uses and related concepts. These include elenchus (the refutation of what one thought one knew); maieutics (Socratic midwifery making latent knowledge conscious); the relationship of knowledge to feeling, virtue and the formation of personality; and the distinction between (...) three types of knowledge: scientific (episteme), professional (techne) and practical wisdom (phronesis). Our extracts — the first in English — set out Kessels’ arguments for using Socratic dialogue today, his account of its unique role in organisational learning, and a case history: a dialogue with a top management team in which elenchus plays a signal part as they seek to define a policy for handling redundancies. (shrink)

We attempt in this paper to define a new field of study for philosophy: philosophy of management. We briefly speculate why the interest some managers and management writers take in philosophy has been so little reciprocated and why it needs to be. Then we suggest the scope of this new branch of philosophy and how it relates to and overlaps with other branches. We summarise some key matters philosophers of management should concern themselves with and pursue one in some detail. (...) We conclude with an invitation. (shrink)

This paper gives a concise overview of the history and meaning of Socratic Dialogue and how it has been developed and used in modern times. The process of Socratic dialogue is seen as an environment for enhancing learning and in enabling the emergence of new meaning to be articulated in language, thereby making the understanding more accessible to the group. The authors also share their perspective as participants in Socratic dialogues. It is suggested that Socratic dialogue enables open communication and (...) empathic listening, development of shared meaning, enhanced insight and increased moral accountability. (shrink)