WORKSHOP LEARNING FROM AN ETHICS WORKSHOP IN AN MBA PROGRAMME

The recent escalation of interest in moral aspects of business has prompted some management education providers to include this concern in their programmes. At present this usually takes the form of occasional seminars or workshops, rather than having a whole course component devoted to the subject. The resulting constraints on the time available for the adequate treatment of ethics in management provoke some interesting issues and challenges for those working in this area, some of which are discussed in this report In this article I describe and reflect upon a one-day postgraduate workshop on ethics in managerial decision-making at the Management Division, University of Newcastle-uponTyne, UK. The students comprised 16 full-time and 34 part-time MBAs, together with eight from a full-time MA in Human Resource Management. The great majority of the participants were British. There were two tutors present including myself. THE WORKSHOP The programme for the day began with an introductory talk on the role of ethics in management and was followed by a 50-minute presentation outlining key perspectives and theories in moral philosophy. As it was part of a degree programme it was felt appropriate to provide this theoretical foundation. The topics covered were: 0 The difference between personal and societal moralities and the question of ethical relativism. N A brief description of, and comment on, major perspectives in moral philosophy, viz. deontology (the view that some acts are morally obligatory regardless of consequences), consequentialism (the view that the moral rightness or wrongness of action depends solely on an assessment of the consequences of that action), and utilitarianism (as a specific form of consequentialism, but confining the measure of ’good ’ to the maximisation of happiness)