Part of the value of stories is moral, in that understanding them, and the characters within them, is one way in which we seek to make moral sense of life. Arguably, it has become quite common to use stories in order to make moral sense of business life. Case method is the standard teaching method in top business schools, and so-called “war stories” are customary for on-the-job training. Shakespeare is a trendy purveyor of leadership education. Several books and articles have (...) been written on the intersection between literature and business and/or business ethics. Still, it is one thing to claim that literature can contribute to our understanding of business conduct, but yet another to claim that literature can contribute to␣the related goal of improving moral conduct in business. Supporters of the claims tend to presume they go together, while skeptics and detractors often discard them as a package. These claims warrant further investigation if they are to be perceived by business scholarship and practice as worthy of serious attention, not just a quaint search for lowbrow moral fables or a vain pursuit of highbrow poetry. One instrumental function of literature is to imitate life, thereby expanding our vision beyond our parochial interests; to see literature merely as a didactic instrument to serve business interests misses the point that literature should expand understanding, our sense of what in addition to business is interesting and valuable. (shrink)

The business ethics field contains a number of explanations for the imagination’s influence on decision-making. This has benefited moral theorizing because approaches that utilize the imagination tend to acknowledge important biological and psychological forces that influence the way we understand situations, develop strategies for problem-solving, and choose courses of action. But, I argue, the broad range of approaches has also served as an obstacle to theory development in the field. Given the variety of theoretical and disciplinary approaches, coupled with the (...) diversity of applications, it would be fair to judge the current state of theory as fractured. To bring focus to theory development, this conceptual study of the moral imagination is grounded in the work of one discipline, one theorist, one text: Plato’s Republic. The primary outcome of this study is the demonstration of the conditions under which the imagination serves to augment and support rationality rather than serving as an impediment. The systematic nature of Plato’s theory aids in the formation of more coherent conceptual grounding than currently available in the field. A final contribution of this study is the positioning of Plato as a proper beginning or foundation to any further theory development in the moral imagination. (shrink)

The study of ethical behavior in the field of leadership began in the 1990s when Murphy et al. (1992) responded to a call by Randall and Gibson (1990) to develop more rigorous methodologies in empi...

The paper takes a look at insurance customer dishonesty as a special case of consumer ethics, understood as a way of situation handling, as a moral choice between right and wrong, such as between self-interest vs. common-interest, in other words, a “moral temptation”. After briefly raising the question if different schools, of moral philosophy would conceptualize such moral temptations differently, the paper presents ‘moral psychology’ as a frame of reference, with a focus on cognitive moral development, moral attitude and moral (...) neutralization. Conceptualization questions can’t be answered finally without thinking at the same time of empirical research design and instrument design decisions, e.g. choosing between experiment vs. questionnaire studies, designing suitable moral temptation situations as an experiment vs. questionnaires with scenario vignettes. The paper discusses then experiences from a 2004 pilot survey, with a main focus on a few insurance dishonesty scenarios with follow-up questions. The paper has an open end, i.e. outlines desirable future theoretical, empirical and practical work with insurance customer dishonesty. (shrink)

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen's death, during 2006 quite a number of cultural events were launched (cf. http://www.ibsen.net/). The article suggests celebrating Ibsen as a potentially useful resource for business ethics teaching. Departing from a short presentation of Ibsen's plays An enemy of the people and A doll's house the main focus of this paper is on two selected scenes from the latter piece -both as raw material for developing scenarios for moral maturity assessment (one (...) of them is strikingly similar to and different from Heinz' dilemma), and for teaching business students moral reflection and imagination. As an open end of the article a few wider questions are asked about the use of literature in addition to or instead of ethics when it comes to triggering moral reflection and imagination. (shrink)

The relationship between individuals' creativity and their ethical ideologies appears to be complex. Applying Forsyth's (1980, 1992) personal moral philosophy model which consists of two independent ethical ideology dimensions, idealism and relativism, we hypothesized and found support for a positive relationship between creativity and relativism. It appears that creative people are less likely than non-creative people to follow universal rules in their moral decision making. However, contrary to our hypothesis and the general stereotype that creative people are less caring about (...) others, we found a positive relationship between creativity and idealism. These findings indicate that highly creative people are likely to be what Forsyth called "situationists," individuals with both an ethic of caring and a pragmatic moral decision-making style. The finding that creative individuals tend to be situationists, and particularly that they tend to be high in idealism, appears to refute the line of reasoning that argues for a "creative personality" characterized in part by social insensitivity. Understanding the relationship between creativity and ethical ideologies has important implications for researchers, managers and teachers. (shrink)