Archive for the ‘education’ Category
MBA Ethics Education: Designing the Designers
As a Visiting Scholar at the Rotman School of Management (more specifically at the Clarkson Centre for Business Ethics and Board Effectiveness), I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we educate tomorrow’s business leaders. This is the first of a series of blog entries on that topic.
Clearly, what we need to teach future managers (especially MBA students) about ethics depends crucially on what we understand the role of managers to be. And with regard to management ethics, we should carefully distinguish two very different educational needs, rooted in managers’ two very different roles.
One role managers play is that of decision-maker, and so the first issue to consider with regard to managerial ethics concerns the ethical behaviour of managers themselves. In this regard, business schools are in the business of educating decision-makers. Such being the case, it makes sense to teach MBA students about various ethical theories, about what can be learned from various scandals, about social expectations with regard to business, and so on. We want to instill in MBA students that doing the right thing matters, and give them the skills to figure out what that requires of them. (Relatedly: I blogged recently about the MBA Oath and the question of professionalizing management.)
The other role played by managers is that of a designer: managers essentially are tasked with designing organizations (or parts of organizations — teams, branches, functional units, and so on). And so the other key ethical issue with regard to managers is whether they will have the skills to design business units that make it easier, rather than harder, for subordinates to act ethically. MBA students, then, need to be taught about the ethically-salient elements of organizational design. They need to be taught, for example, about the kinds of incentive structures and the kinds of organizational cultures that foster rather than frustrate, good ethical decision-making, so that they can try to design such structures and cultures in the workplace.
But it’s worth noting that even individual ethical decision-making (and not just the design of decision-making contexts) itself involves design. As Caroline Whitbeck points out (in an excellent article* that I recently taught to my Business Ethics class), there is a very strong analogy to be made between ethical decision-making and the kind of design thinking that engineers engage in. Ethical decision-making, like engineering design, involves an attempt to solve a problem, in order to achieve certain objectives, taking into consideration a set of constraints. And it involves attempting to find a good solution, in a situation in which there may be multiple adequate solutions, no clear best solution, but many clearly unacceptable ones. Ethical decision-making, in other words, is precisely not like a multiple-choice exam question. Real ethical questions are very seldom of the form “Should we choose option A or option B?” More often, the question is “what options are feasible?” And, “what would those options look like, in practice?” And, “what series of steps will that option include, and what will happen if we do X and so-and-so does Y in response?” Ethical decision-making is a design process.
So, whether we are thinking about training MBAs to make particular decisions, or training them to build the contexts in which particular decisions are to be made, business schools are in the business of designing designers. The question, then, is not just which ethical principles ought to be used as the building materials of good decisions, but what ethical principles ought to govern the design process itself.
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*Caroline Whitbeck “Ethics as Design: Doing Justice to Moral Problems” (from Hastings Centre Report, Vol. 26, No. 3, 1996).
Ethical to Teach a Bogus Therapy?
Filed under: critical thinking, education, energy, fraud, health |
Comments (21) 
Needless to say, the industry I myself work in — higher education — is in no way immune from sub-par business ethics. (Those of us involved in the teaching end of higher education don’t like to think of it as a business, but at some level that’s what it is, as long as a fee is being charged.) And what else can I call it but bad ethics, when a university offers courses teaching students to manipulate forces that don’t exist in order to generate effects that don’t happen?
Check out this article, from Common Ground magazine: Integrative energy healing
The Integrative Energy Healing (IEH) Certificate Program at Langara College in Vancouver is actively involved in weaving together the science and research of energy-based healing with its practice. For eight years, this program has worked to offer a three-year certificate program in IEH, which offers an in-depth study of the various Eastern and Western scientific theories underlying energy-based healing. It is also an exploration of the human condition and the practice of different types of energy-based treatments….
Here’s Langara’s page about its Integrative Energy Healing. (And for good measure, here’s the page about its Holistic Healing & Skills program.)
Sounds groovy. The problem: they’re teaching something that doesn’t work. “Energy Healing” is part of a cluster of practices that claims to diagnose and treat illness by examining and modifying energy fields that flow around and through the human body. These practices have been pretty well investigated, and they’re simply baseless. The physical starting points of these practices conflict with fundamental physics, and experiments have proven that they just don’t work. One of the main sources supposedly supporting the value of energy medicine, cited in the article above, is Energy Medicine (Oschman, 2000).
Here’s an article reviewing Oschman’s book: Energy Medicine, reprinted from Skeptic Magazine. The review is pretty devastating.
Of course, it’s not hard to find others who have found Energy “Medicine” at least worth looking at. The Common Ground article cites the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) “formally recognizes and encourages the study of energy therapies.” What the article leaves out is that funding has so far turned up zero in the way of useful therapies, and there have recently been significant calls by scientists for the NIH to stop funding this pseudoscience.
So, what is there to say about a university teaching this stuff? Well, to the extent that students believe they’re learning real health science, they’re being ripped off. And since the practices being taught are part of the enormous alternative medicine industry, students are being taught a set of practices intended to be sold to customers: they’re being taught to sell a bogus product. Oh, and in the process, Langara is cheapening the entire notion of higher education.
A final thought, for those of you not yet convinced that it’s problematic for an institution of higher learning to be teaching a highly-questionable practice like “Energy Healing.” What would our reaction be if a parallel university-based programme were started up with the intention not of teaching students to “heal” patients, but to build bridges? What if, instead of using math and physics to build bridges safely, we taught engineers to simply lay their hands on iron beams to “feel” whether they were strong enough?
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Addendum:
Just a bit of clarification: the story above is about Langara College. But I refer to it throughout as “a university.” Technically, colleges & universities are different kinds of institutions in Canada (they’re provincially regulated & mostly provincially funded, so the details vary). But everything I say above applies to higher education institutions of all kinds.
