This article echoes those voices that demand new approaches and ‹senses’ for management education and business programs. Much of the article is focused on showing that the polemic about the educative model of business schools has moral and epistemological foundations and opens up the debate over the type of knowledge that practitioners need to possess in order to manage organizations, and how this knowledge can be taught in management programs. The article attempts to highlight the moral dimension of management through (...) a reinterpretation of the Aristotelian concept of practical wisdom. I defend the ideas that management is never morally neutral and that Aristotelian practical wisdom allows the recovery of moral considerations in management practice. I analyze the impact and implications that the introduction of practical wisdom in business schools entails for the conception and objectives of management education. This view reconfigures management education in terms of attention to values, virtues and context. Therefore, management programmes should prepare students to critically evaluate what they hear and to make decisions coherent with their values and virtues. In the final section, I reflect on the pedagogical implications of this approach. I point out that an integrated model of ethics and practical wisdom promotes education of cognition and education of affect as well. I provide an example to illustrate my perspective and to support my conclusions. (shrink)

This paper aims to explore challenges of the Aristotelian friendship (philia) in multicultural society and in the specific industrial and organizational contexts. Data was collected from forty-eight participant interviews with managers and employees of four mining companies in Indonesia with twelve informants from each company, both management and employees. The paper found that the virtue of friendship within the mining companies has several drawbacks when an imbalance of power exists between managers and employees. This paper suggests that to understand virtue (...) of friendship in a multi-ethnic and multicultural context, it is essential to ground the conceptual framework in both Aristotle’s views and specific cultural sensitivities, as only then can the full story be grasped. Thus, this paper contributes to bring insights into an under-explored, complex and, at times, paradoxical context, explaining that Aristotelian virtue ethics encounters cultural aspects and a specific context of human relationships which make challenges for business organizations to be virtuous. More importantly, this paper also paves the path towards further discussions and studies on virtue ethics to set a conceptual framework in both virtue ethics and specific cultural sensitivities for business ethics. Practically, this paper provides a valuable insight for business organizations especially business leaders, human resources (HR) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) practitioners, as it offers practice on how to avoid moral lapses in their day-to-day working relationships inside the organization as well as their relationships with the community. (shrink)