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“[E]thics education in business schools is not working. Years after business schools beefed up their ethics programs, half of employees still report seeing misconduct at work.”

From a review of a new book.

… Yeshiva University professor Moses Pava reports that his business students tell him that, “corporate social responsibility is merely rhetoric designed to fool environmentalists, consumer advocates and other do-gooders.”

The B-School Boys have responded to their graduates’ arrests for insider trading, etc., by adding yet more ethics courses. Rustle up some more rhetoric! At Yeshiva, no one talked a better ethics game than Ezra Merkin and his BFF, Bernard Madoff.

Margaret Soltan, February 22, 2011 6:16AM
Posted in: beware the b-school boys

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6 Responses to ““[E]thics education in business schools is not working. Years after business schools beefed up their ethics programs, half of employees still report seeing misconduct at work.””

  1. dmf Says:

    across the board, as long as higher-ed teaches “ethics” as something different than, in addition to, the means and ends of practices, then it will just be counterproductive.

  2. econprof Says:

    I would say that the ethics education worked perfectly…

  3. Margaret Soltan Says:

    I assume you mean that it’s not intended to work; that schools don’t want to impede the, er, economic success of their students…

  4. theprofessor Says:

    Ethics courses will not work for people who could care less about right or wrong, so expecting them to magically produce angels is unreasonable. The ones who benefit from ethics courses are good people who want to learn how to identify where ethical problems are likely to lurk and how to reason about ethical conflicts.

  5. dmf Says:

    what is the value of being able to “reason” about institutional/structural matters (the problems aren’t lurking they are/were screaming headline news) that one has no power to fix? Should we start offering seminars on whistle-blowing? As I said above if ethics classes are at odds with every other class in the program they cannot work, except to give cover to the powers that be and their funders.

  6. dmf Says:

    via Goldberg@theatlantic:
    One of the more unlikely image-mongers that has worked to burnish Qadhafi’s and Libya’s image never registered with the Justice Department. Prominent neoconservative Richard Perle, the former Reagan-era Defense Department official and George W. Bush-era chairman of the Defense Policy Board, traveled to Libya twice in 2006 to meet with Qadhafi, and afterward briefed Vice President Dick Cheney on his visits, according to documents released by a Libyan opposition group in 2009.

    Perle traveled to Libya as a paid adviser to the Monitor Group, a prestigious Boston-based consulting firm with close ties to leading professors at the Harvard Business School. The firm named Perle a senior adviser in 2006.

    The Monitor Group described Perle’s travel to Libya and the recruitment of several other prominent thinkers and former officials to burnish Libya’s and Qadhafi’s image in a series of documents obtained and released by a Libyan opposition group, the National Conference of the Libyan Opposition, in 2009.

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