Business school ethics confusion

Over the past few years, and in reaction to high-profile corporate scandals, many MBA programs have added additional courses on business ethics and corporate social responsibility (CSR). But for people outside of the universities, the content of these courses remains obscure. What are future corporate managers being taught under the heading of `business ethics'? In what context are students instructed on their "social responsibilities" as businessmen and women? Is a good dose of Milton Friedman all that is required or is there a need for something more?

Consider Harvard Business School. The main CSR course at HBS, "Business Leadership and Strategic Corporate Citizenship" is an optional course offered during the 2nd year of the MBA program. The syllabus for this year's version is instructive. The professor introduces CSR by explaining the three reasons why corporate leaders ought to act in a socially responsible manner: (i) it helps the world and is simply the right thing to do; (ii) corporations have an obligation to "give back" to society because it is society that has given business the license to operate and to make profits in the first place; and (iii) it increases profits in the long run. "We endorse all three reasons for corporate social responsibility," says the professor, "but we will largely ignore the first two" because, well, because this is a university, not a high school debating club.

Now consider London Business School. The United Kingdom is arguably "ahead" of the U.S. in terms of adopting CSR policies (they have their own government website and minister responsible for CSR). So how does the UK's pre-eminent business school compare to Harvard in this regard? First, the LBS course, "Business Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility", is a required course that one takes at the very beginning of the MBA program. Second, as the title indicates, this course combines CSR with business ethics. As outlined in a 2004 syllabus, `business ethics' focuses more on the decisions of an individual manager with respect to the corporation, whereas CSR focuses more on the relationship between the corporation as a whole and the rest of society.

Like the Harvard course, the London course asks students to examine cases in recent business history in which CSR has been front and center, such as Nike and the sweatshop debate, or Shell oil and human rights in Africa. And while the readings generally support the `doing good is good business' view of CSR, students, at both institutions, are also exposed to the Milton Friedman view, as well as the conflict between being responsible to shareholders vs. being responsible to all of "society". So what's missing?

One problem is that this type of MBA course - and there are many others out there - attempts to deal with a political subject in a non-political way. For instance, the corporate campaigns waged by non-government organizations are a key reason why corporations come to embrace CSR in the first place: think McDonald's or Wal-Mart. Yet the technocratic point of view favored by business schools does not equip students with the ideological perspective that is necessary to understanding either CSR's supporters or its opponents.

In the case of the Harvard course, the professor endorsed an ideological position - I believe CSR is good because it helps the world - but would not allow that position to be examined. Instead, a student is to assume its validity from the start, and focus on how a business leader can most effectively manage its various "stakeholders", that is, shareholders, employees, suppliers and NGOs. The usual response, then, is that the professor should offer the Friedman position - the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits - as an alternative and to stress the role of the manager as agent of the owners of the corporation (the shareholders). But this, too, is insufficient. Under the Friedman view, a corporation can use every means within the law to increase profits for its shareholders, such as lobbying the government for special favors or to support new industry regulations that will fall most heavily on the competition.

Perhaps what is needed is to rethink the way `business ethics' is taught; such that an ethical businessman is one who is responsible not to shareholders or stakeholders, but to the free market system and its components, including private property rights, voluntary exchange and competition. Generally, this is the Friedman view, but broader. It suggests that the role of business is not only to follow the rules of the game, but to not use the law to alter the rules of the game in ways that impede the functioning of the market. Isn't this the true social responsibility of business?

Source






Is diversity enough?

An interesting Marxist article below. The argument is that preoccupation with affirmative action distracts from pursuit of economic equality and that affirmative action for the poor, not blacks, is needed:

The University of Illinois at Chicago, a struggling but ambitious public university in the heart of the city, celebrates its ethnically diverse student body as a great achievement. But Walter Benn Michaels, chairman of the university's English department, is unimpressed. The commitment of universities, corporations and other institutions to such diversity is "at best a distraction and at worst an essentially reactionary position," he argues in his new book, The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality.

Right-wing academics and pundits have built careers taking potshots at affirmative action, multiculturalism and identity politics-pursuits that some postmodern leftists see as the heart of radical politics. Michaels criticizes diversity politics from the left. His argument represents a fundamental and constructive challenge to conventional thinking about the most important issues facing our society. But it is also easily misunderstood. "I've been called a liberal racist more often than anything else in my life," he says, sitting in his office at the university's one towering office building, stylishly dressed in black jeans and t-shirt under a black window-pane jacket. He argues that the pursuit of diversity is based on a flawed understanding of humanity and stands as a roadblock to confrontation with the most basic injustices in society: "The trouble with diversity . is not just that it won't solve the problem of economic inequality; it's that it makes it hard for us to even see the problem."

Race, as virtually all modern anthropologists and geneticists agree, is not a scientifically valid concept. Obvious physical differences exist among humans, but the genetic variation within conventionally defined races is often greater than the variation among those races. Still, "race" is a concept that people use all the time with profound consequences, even if they can't define it. Race gets defined in ways that vary by time, geography and situation. Why, except for the peculiar American notion of blackness as being determined by one drop of "blood" of African ancestry, would a person of half African and half European genetic heritage, like Sen. Barack Obama, be called "black" rather than "white"-the latter a supposedly racial category that has grown more inclusive over many years?

People may talk instead about belonging to different ethnic cultures, borrowing the notion that anthropologists developed to describe the shared symbols and understanding of a distinct group of people, like the Navajo or Mbuti. But as valuable, if elusive, as this idea may be in studying tribal societies, Michaels contends that in our society it is another way to create biological categories that don't exist and thereby perpetuate an inaccurate and racist view of the world. In his zeal, however, Michaels unnecessarily jettisons entirely, rather than reformulates, the notion of culture.

As Michaels sees it, the social focus on achieving diversity diverts attention from the most fundamental injustice in our society-economic inequality. Moreover, the pursuit of diversity, especially in universities, gives legitimacy to the growing economic inequality of American society, because it protects the inheritance of economic privilege and does little to create opportunity for the poor, whether black or white.

Michaels, author of Our America and a writer about both literary theory and American literature, became interested in contemporary ideas of race and identity when studying American novels of the '20s. During that era, many public figures argued for the supremacy of what was seen as America's Anglo-Saxon or Nordic character. But by the '80s, Michaels notes, it was no longer publicly acceptable to advocate racial supremacy. Today, at a time when liberals and conservatives alike profess to abhor racism and prejudice, a new free-market fundamentalism-dubbed neo-liberalism-also claims that racism inefficiently interferes with the workings of a free labor market.

"The question is," Michaels says, "once we've given up the racism, and once we've given up to some degree the idea that races are a biological reality, why are we so attached to races? The first answer is that American society as a whole loves race. What I mean by that is that generally both right and left are-in neo-liberal terms-conservatives. The fundamental precepts of neoliberalism-the sense that in American society, effort and hard work are rewarded, that there's a rough justice in the distribution of wealth, and that inherited inequality is not a fundamental problem-are widely held views in American society. The two sets of ideas go together because one supports the other. "The vision that the primary problems of America are intolerance-sexism, racism-is completely compatible with the view that if we could just get rid of that intolerance and hatred and fear of the other, we'd be living in a fundamentally just society."

That has not happened. Economic inequality, increasing for decades, has accelerated in recent years. As a new edition of the Economic Policy Institute's The State of Working America points out, productivity has grown for the past four years but the median American family income has fallen. According to recent Commerce Department figures, wages and salaries (which include soaring executive paychecks) took the smallest share of national income since records started in 1929, and corporate profits took the largest share since 1950.

Blacks still fare worse on average than whites, but Michaels argues that the central problem here is exploitation of workers, not discrimination against blacks. And diversity is not the solution. He writes, "If you're worried about the growing economic inequality in American life, if you suspect that there may be something unjust as well as unpleasant in the spectacle of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, no cause is less worth supporting, no battle is less worth fighting than the ones we fight for diversity."

The obligation of diversity is to be nice to each other, Michaels writes, but the obligation of equality is to give up some money. Given the choice, diversity has the advantage of appearing to be morally righteous while at the same time preserving economic self-interest.

The notion of diversity took off after 1978 when the Supreme Court ruled in Bakke v. Board of Regents that the University of California could, as part of its legitimate interest in maintaining a diverse student body, take race into account when admitting students. According to Michaels, the response to the decision fostered the idea that universities should encourage students to appreciate the differences among races (or other identities more or less modeled on race). But it did not address the issue of economic inequality, which retards achievement for blacks proportionally more than for whites. Economic inequality makes it harder for poor (including poor black) students to be able to afford to go to college. What's more, inequality-in education or family social capital-also makes it harder for poor students, once they reach college age, to compete academically with students from affluent families.

Michaels asserts that diversity gives legitimacy to higher education as a supposed meritocracy, which is important in an era when everyone is told that a college education is the key to success. Admitting a diverse student body, especially for the most elite schools, helps to create the impression that upper middle-class and rich students have won this educational ticket to higher incomes fairly, not because they come from families that are well off.

"The problem with affirmative action is not (as is often said) that it violates the principles of meritocracy," he writes; "the problem is that it produces the illusion that we actually have a meritocracy. . Race-based affirmative action . is a kind of collective bribe rich people pay themselves for ignoring economic inequality." If class-based affirmative action replaced racial affirmative action at Harvard, and its student body reflected the country's income distribution, he calculates that more than half the students would be gone, most of them rich and white.

More here




More politicized "history" teaching

A group that believes the Howard Government could have prevented the deaths of 353 asylum-seekers in the sinking of the Siev X in 2001 is on the verge of selling a case study to schools for use in modern history classes. Year 11 students would be asked to answer whether the drownings were the result of the federal Government's policies as part of the case study, prompting allegations that students were being steered towards a "politically correct" conclusion.

Modern History students would study a number of disputed claims, including whether or not the Australian navy sabotaged the boat before it left Indonesia, if the Siev X Secondary School's Case Study Committee does sell the case study to schools.

The principal of St Aloysius College in Sydney, Father Chris Middleton, told The Australian yesterday the school was considering using the program, to be launched in federal parliament today by child psychologist Steve Biddulph.

Students at schools that decide to use the case study will view primary source documents and be asked: "Was the sinking of the Siev X and subsequent loss of life preventable?" Students would also be asked to describe how statements by a former immigration officer and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer about whether the government officials sabotaged boats "contradict each other". The case study relies heavily on the documentary film Punished not Protected and two books - A Certain Maritime Incident and Dark Victory - which are highly critical of the Government, prompting criticism that the proposal is biased.

Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop said the material was "an outrageous attempt to disguise a political agenda as school curriculum". "It is a bizarre mix of unfounded allegations and rumour presented as fact, and is clearly intended to influence the opinions of school children rather than educate them with a factual version of events," Ms Bishop said. Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone said students should be "presented with the facts as we know them rather than any biased presentation".

Siev X Case Study spokesman Don Maclurcan, who is studying for his PhD in nanotechnology, said the case had polarised people and so would sharpen students' analytical skills. "I hope that students would come out of this with a greater knowledge of how government works, what our policies are in terms of immigration and refugees, and a knowledge of things that have happened in relation to our borders in the last five years," Mr Maclurcan said. He said the organising committee had "made every effort to set aside our own conclusions in order to assemble a balanced set of reading materials that present the many viewpoints offered". He said the material was developed "in consultation with the NSW Boards of Studies" but the board denied this yesterday.

The director of the National Centre for History Education at Monash University, associate professor Tony Taylor, said recent events were difficult to tackle in the classroom. "These debates can become more emotional than rational. Skilled teachers can deal with this successfully but it does take a lot of experience," he said. "As for conspiracy theories, it's always difficult to prove a negative; that is, to prove that there isn't a conspiracy."

Education critic Kevin Donnelly slammed the case study, saying it implied a "predetermined answer" about the tragedy. "Students are being directed towards a politically correct response that it could have been prevented and that the Government is responsible," he said. "This is just another attempt at an issues or theme approach to history which quite rightly has been condemned as failing to give students a comprehensive understanding of the background and overall narrative."

But Nick Ewbank, president of the History Teachers Association, backed the case study. [He would] "All history is about the weighing of evidence and the interpretation that can be placed on the given facts. Obviously, this particular case is fairly controversial but we shouldn't be shying away from controversial issues," he said.

Source

***************************

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here. My home page is here

***************************