Hand-picked for you from around the web + original content published just on the Moral Markets site
“Fighting anti-Black racism in the corporate world needs to be done in partnership with academia. After all, business schools in particular play a critical role in shaping the next generation of leaders, and Black representation (or lack thereof) in materials and faculty has an impact on not only who leads businesses but also how they lead. The authors lay out three areas.”
“Advocates for ethics testing argue that financial crises and corporate scandals, from the 2001 Enron scandal to the Great Recession of 2007 to 2010, can often be traced back to poor conduct training and a lack of social norms. Critics, such as the management guru Peter Drucker, question whether ethics can or even should be taught. In their view, business ethics courses were created ‘largely for the sake of appearances.’ […] So, can ethics be taught? According to our new research the evidence points to ‘yes’.”
“So far, most business schools (including Stanford where I teach) have responded to this trust challenge by offering more programs and courses on ethics, social entrepreneurship, impact investing, and philanthropy, with the message that we need better private-sector solutions to social problems. This approach won’t cut it.”
“Engineering and medicine have in many respects become separate from their respective underlying sciences of physics and biology. Public-policy schools, which typically have a strong economics focus, must now rethink the way they teach students – and medical schools could offer a model to follow.”
John Komlos, who calls himself “an ardent advocate of humanistic economics”, recently published a new edition of his introductory textbook in economics, Foundations of Real-World Economics: What Every Economics Student Needs to Know (2018, Routledge). The first chapter, titled “Welcome to Real-World Economics“, is now available to download from the Moral Markets site. In this post some quotes which give you a first impression of the perspective on economics that this book offers.
“Economic thinking governs much of our world. But the discipline’s teaching is stuck in the past. Centred around antiquated 19th-century models built on Newtonian physics, economics treats humans as atomic particles, rather than as social beings. While academic research often manages to transcend this simplicity, undergraduate education does not – and the influence of these simplified ideas is carried by graduates as they go on to work in politics, media, business and the civil service.”
“We both studied economics for many years, we love our profession, and we fervently hope more critical-thinking, passionate young people will take up this discipline – mostly to help us save the economy (and the planet) from conventional economics. But for economics to play a more helpful, critical role, it must thoroughly reinvent itself – and fast. It must abandon its ideological and self-serving faith in the efficacy of private markets. It must embrace the social, historical, and environmental context of work, production, and distribution. And it must commit to truly building a better world, rather than justifying the status quo.”
“The banking royal commission has seen spectacular resignations, calls for changes in the law, and calls for cultural change within banks. But what about changes in education, which is where much of what’s wrong begins? Business schools teach the people who will one day be the managers and leaders who run banks and other financial institutions. They have had a hand in driving much of what came before the commission – the prioritisation of profit (ends) over how people are treated (means).”
