The (B) case summarizes GSK’s response to pressures to increase access to essential medicines in developing countries and subsequent developments.

In a study of the integration of ethics in an MBA program at an Atlantic Canadian University, we found evidence of discrepancies between students and professors with regards to their perception of the integration of ethics into coursework. In addition, discrepancies were found among the perceptions of some of the students taking the same course. Possible reasons for these discrepancies are explored, as well as some of the examples of marginalization of ethics and some of the barriers to teaching ethics that emerged in this study. Implications for business faculty and administration are discussed.

An approach to ethical inquiry that overcomes the profound limitation emotivism places on honest moral discourse is developed. The method is introduced by first of all identifying the place which ethics properly assumes in a hierarchy of academic disciplines. Next, venerable traditions in normative ethics are summarized and a necessary order among them is posited. After reviewing what does not constitute sufficient warrant for our moral positions, it is proposed that the ultimate justification for our normative determinations be found in our worldviews. A classroom model is presented and its use demonstrated. The paper concludes by calling for a greater willingness on the part of all management educators to engage in the needed dialogue.

Ethics education and training are especially important in post-socialist countries where an understanding of ethical and responsible leadership is not yet fully developed. In such countries planning for the short term still dominates, and organisations focus their attention mainly on earning profit. In this article we show why the need has emerged to improve the general awareness of ethical issues in Estonia and teach ethical reasoning skills to business and government leaders. We describe the activities we have pursued at our ethics centre, officially founded at Estonian Business School at the end of 2001, and the research we have conducted over the last seven years.

This paper presents an experiential exercise introducing the concept of the personal ethical threshold (PET) to help explain why moral behavior does not always follow moral intention. An individual’s PET represents the individual’s vulnerability to situational factors, i.e., how little or much it takes for members of organizations to cross their proverbial line to act in a way they deem unethical. The PET reflects the interplay among the situation, the particular ethical issue, and the individual. Exploring the PET can help account for why some people are sometimes able to withstand substantial organizational pressures to behave in congruence with their ethical intentions, whereas others crumble in the face of apparently minimal situational forces. We hope that students’ exposure to and subsequent reflection upon their PET, by means of the exercise we present, will foster the development of their moral courage.

“Hot seating” is a form of creative drama in which the participants play themselves but imagine themselves in someone else’s position, some taking the role of interrogators and others the role of persons in the “hot seat”. This paper documents the case of marketing students who dramatised an ethics enquiry supposedly held under the auspices of a professional marketing association to investigate breaches in its code of professional conduct. Interpretive research, in the form of a cartoon test, was employed to examine the contribution of the educational drama activity to student perceptions of learning within a role-playing experientially-based marketing unit at an Australian University. Findings reveal that students preferred the hot-seating exercise to conventional teaching methods in terms of enjoyment, “real-life” experience, new understandings of both marketing and ethics, and their motivation to learn more about marketing ethics implications for themselves, customers and the profession. Strategically, the convention was found to involve the students emotionally and intellectually with some intensity, while revealing that some students may be fearful of the drama or even over-stimulated by the sometimes tense and powerful environment.This pedagogical approach was also seen to be particularly suitable for instruction for the delicate, contentious and personal issues often raised by ethics.

There is much more written about how and why business schools could and should talk about business ethics than about how they could “walk the talk.” When ethics is discussed, it is usually in relation to the position of business ethics within the curriculum, rather than about what does and does not constitute ethical behaviour on the part of a business school and its members. This paper seeks to explore how ethics can develop beyond the curriculum, and some methods by which business schools might promote effective ethical self-development. Four basic ethical concepts are used as potential starting points for business school faculty to engage with business ethics beyond the curriculum: moral conflict, role morality, moral codes, and moral climate. Through a discussion of these, eight theses are developed for further discussion and are suggested as a framework for future comparative research about business school ethics.

The events of September 11, the recent collapse of Enron, the ethical violations of NASDAQ brokers and dealers, and numerous other recent examples emphasize the need to teach ethical decision making to our students. We have created an interactive, internationally focused discussion case designed to foster student involvement in a hypothetical situation. The vignette allows the participating students to see an ethical situation evolve according to their own decisions. Student involvement in the decision process builds emotional content designed to build student interest in the topic, thereby facilitating productive classroom discussions. The international focus of the case engenders discussions of multicultural issues and difficulties in managing a multinational entity. The vignette is suitable for an international course, a management course, or a course in business ethics.

This study investigates the effects of making academic space for service learning that emphasizes the importance of active participation in society. We describe several projects of professional practice performed by students at our university with the objective of satisfying the needs of NGOs. The practice will allow for a meeting between academic learning of CSR and the needs of the community, articulated through voluntary practice. The final goal is to guide students through the process of facing the needs of their social context. Through an analysis of these aspects, we will demonstrate how the university can contribute to the formation of future professionals with solid social responsibility awareness.

This paper introduces a four-stage ethical learning model that we posit will augment the evaluation of the effectiveness of business ethics education. Using the Ignatian (Jesuit, Catholic) methodologies of self-reflection and discernment, comments by 195 undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in an American university regarding the relationship between ethical attitudes and business conduct are examined before and after completing a business ethics course. Results suggest that ethics education can 1) raise students’ ethical awareness, and 2) shift ethical attitudes in either positive or negative directions, thus supporting the existence of levels of ethical understanding that our learning model proposes. Methodological challenges for current and future evaluation of the effectiveness of ethics education, including enhancement of the generalizability of findings across international borders, are considered. Several implications for linking business ethics education with the conduct and climate of business practice are also discussed.

Wal-Mart received widespread praise for its response to Hurricane Katrina when it hit the Louisiana coast in August 2005 and low prices at the world’s largest retailer are estimated to save consumers billions of dollars a year. Nonetheless, it was coming under increasing criticism for corebusiness practices, ranging from detrimental effects on communities when Wal-Mart stores are established, to abusive labour practices, to alleged sourcing from sweatshops. This case looks at the benefits and the potentially harmful consequences of the Wal-Mart business model. The focus is on supply chain issues and, more specifically, a lawsuit brought by the International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF) charging that Wal-Mart failed to meet contractual obligations specified in its Standards for Suppliers Agreement. However, the retailer must respond to a range of criticisms that chief executive Lee Scott recognizes are harming its reputation. Scott asks, in reference to Wal-Mart’s response to Katrina, “what would it take for Wal-Mart to be that company, at our best, all the time?” More fundamentally, the case asks, how sustainable is Wal-Mart’s business model?

Ethics has become increasingly prominent in business education and educational research. With a prolific research stream developing in the area of business ethics teaching, our understanding of related approaches and issues has deepened. While researchers focus on the holistic approach to teaching business ethics, specific knowledge about teaching methods in this area remains sparse. This paper discusses an innovative approach to the case method, called case development, and its preliminary assessment in a postgraduate marketing ethics course. Groups of students were asked to research a chosen marketing ethics topic, develop a case study as part of their assessment and to subsequently analyse and present it to the class. Based on an initial assessment by means of a student survey, case development emerged as beneficial in terms of student learning and experience. Following a discussion of the approach and related results, the paper concludes withrecommendations and directions for future research.

Ethical Competence Questionnaire-Working Life and Business (ECQ-WLB) is an effort to build an instrument that measures ethical competence in business as a psychological problem-solving and decision-making skill. The questionnaire is constructed in a way that aims to avoid connection to any particular moral philosophical theory. Its theoretical base is the autonomy hypothesis of Piaget. Autonomous reasoning as measured by the questionnaire correlated positively to the level of organizational hierarchy. ECQ-WLB demonstrated satisfying psychometricproperties and reasonable reliability properties. A confirmatory factor analysis showed that the measurement model is compatible with the data.

Catholic business schools may better fulfill their religious mission by integrating Catholic social ethics into the business curriculum. But doing so presents a challenge to many business instructors who are unfamiliar with the Catholic ethical tradition. The purpose of this paper is to helpovercome this difficulty by describing a pedagogy the author has used successfully to integrate Catholic social ethics into the business ethics course. The pedagogy utilizes the Model of Integrated Course Design, the Method of Shared Inquiry, and a model of moral behavior grounded in the student’s worldview. This framework makes plausible a learning goal of increasing not only students’ moral awareness and moral reasoning, but their moral motivation as well—a goal particularly appropriate to a Catholic management education. Attitudes of students toward the course are examined and implications drawn for implementing it in the curriculum.

In March 2004, Coca-Cola suspended production at its $12 million bottling plant in Kerala, southern India. The plant had become the focus of an around-the-clock protest by local citizens, who noticed that the water in their wells had either dried up or become polluted within months of the plant’s opening. They were joined first by local and eventually by global activists concerned about resource privatization on a larger scale. As the controversy snowballed, figuring persistently in print and online media, the local governing authority, which had initially welcomed the plant, refused to renew its license. Even state government, normally supportive of foreign investment, became part of the vortex of forces aligned against Coca-Cola, and the company finds itself caught in a web of legal, strategic and ethical challenges. Rather than presenting the deepening crisis primarily from the perspective of corporate management, this case study offers a wholistic narrative, with first-person accounts from a wide array of stakeholders.