What is important to making ethics a permanent and meaningful part of business-school education?
The research element is extremely important. If you look at a business school’s stakeholders — students, recruiters, faculty — the hardest nut to crack has been the faculty. The most pressure to teach and study ethics has come from students and corporate executives. Q: Why is the faculty tough to crack? A: The reward system inside each discipline is tied in some way, at all schools, to publication of research. [Only a few journals are stronger in ethics than in other subjects, and ethics isn’t as tangible a subject as, say marketing or decision science, making it harder to assess the depth of research in ethics. Additionally, few professors actually concentrate on ethics as a discipline.] When tenure promotions are made, committees need to pay attention to efforts to create research in this area. And [schools must] support research in ethics financially. Q: What if that doesn’t happen? A: If not, ethics will hang along on the thread of scandals. Unless there’s additional rigor in the
