ETHICS AND BUSINESS
This course introduces students to different ways of thinking about business practice, in which the enactment of ethical (and moral) codes of conduct by business agents integrates with day-to-day business decision-making and action-taking. The persistence of business practices that catastrophically undermine social and ecological integrity justify that we, as management students and practitioners, consider the ethical phenomena at play in business contexts.
Following the influential Business Ethics Textbook by Crane and Matten (2010), the lectures will be organized in two parts, with an additional consideration of how most recent theoretical resources advance our understanding of business ethics phenomena.
The first part of the course will be mainly devoted to an introduction of early and contemporary ethical theories and business ethics theories, which the students will apply to the analysis of a selection of cases.
The second part of the course will address ethical challenges in the context of businesses confronted with growing pressures to accelerate progress towards economic, social and environmental sustainability, especially by considering the role of a variety of stakeholders with which companies ought to engage. The students will apply relevant concepts and theories to critically examine examples of corporate sustainability practices and challenges.
