Two Business School Scholars Publish in Prestigious Journal of Business Ethics
Sep 2, 2008 - Dr. Walton Padelford and Dr. Darin White have spent the last three years studying how people form an ethical economic worldview. Their work was recently accepted for publication in the prestigious Journal of Business Ethics.
According to the authors, the discussion of ethics and economics has a very long history across multiple disciplines. The founder of modern economics, Adam Smith, likewise had a keen interest in this topic. However, with the development of economic science, scholarly assessment has shifted toward positive analysis while normative analysis has been left mainly to philosophers. Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen makes this point by stating; “If one examines the balance of emphases in the publications in modern economics, it is hard not to notice the eschewal of deep normative analysis, and the neglect of the influence of ethical considerations in the characterization of actual human behavior.”
One of the motivations for this study was that the business school needs to continually propound the proposition that there is a legitimate and virtuous sphere of profit-making. We have a feeling that the idea of virtuous profits is downplayed or ridiculed in the rest of the university. Indeed, Charles Breeden and Noreen Lephardt found their business students at Marquette University had a growing tendency to believe that “the market encouraged greed and materialism, a popular theme among Ethics and Theology instructors which are core curriculum requirements at this University.”
The business school has no interest in inculcating a mentality of greed. Greed may be a perversion of some of the virtues such as prudence or even love which may be a strong motivator in work life and pursuit of profits. In her book, The Bourgeois Virtues, Deirdre McCloskey comments; “…the economy cannot actually get along without a good deal of love. Over half of consumer purchases at point of sale, for example, are on behalf of children and husbands and mothers and friends. Love runs consumption. Feminist economists have been noting for some time that without such altruistic purchases, the human race would promptly die out. A theory based on selfishness alone therefore cannot work scientifically. And if it became the way the social world actually worked, the social world would collapse.”
The authors used student populations to try and get a feeling for how the public’s view of the morality of profit-making changed with changing economic conditions and news events. By utilizing the newly developed morality of profit-making scale (MPM), survey data was obtained. Specifically, we theorized that the news media’s copious negative coverage of the gasoline price crisis of 2006 would significantly impact individuals’ MPM worldview. The results show that respondents’ explicit attitudes toward MPM were significantly impacted. However, respondents’ more deeply-held, implicit economic ethical worldview was only slightly impacted. The authors argue that only patient, long-term explanation and argumentation can permanently affect a society’s economics ethos. Implications and future research directions for further business research were outlined.
MCAFEE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION
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