Abstract
The contemporary teaching of business ethics necessarily involves the recognition that texts, materials and modes of assessment ought to be rendered appealing to students, while at the same time ensuring the quality of teaching. Prima facie the use of film can be seen as a way to address this dilemma: Students may be attracted to the ‘delivery’ of course content through the medium of film as opposed to, for example, standard lecture format, participation in online activities or, at a stretch, reading and writing. An alternative scenario can also be envisioned where the use of film in teaching business ethics is bad professional practice, pandering to both the requirement for positive assessments from students and for technological change. This paper discusses these issues by critically examining the films recommended by a contemporary business ethics text, Crane and Matten (2010). We identify significant problems with the use of two films, The Corporation (2005) and Michael Clayton (2007). Against our own criticisms of these two texts, the paper then focuses upon Ken Loach’s (2007) film It’s a Free World, arguing that it is a useful text for the illustration of what students, more often than not, regard as the cliched issue of unskilled foreign wage labourers being exploited in ‘advanced’ western economies. Despite the considerable virtues of Loach’s particular text, we argue that any recourse to film as an alternative method of examining a range of issues in business ethics has to be treated with caution.
Highlights
In its recent discussion paper ‘More than Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs): Opportunities arising from disruptive technologies in education’, the Australian Trade Commission (ATC) (2013) provided a broad analysis of the changing environment of higher education
The ATC (2013, p. 1) noted that in 2012 several prominent academics based in the United States had vacated tenured positions at Stanford University to found companies delivering Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
The first point to be made following our brief examination of the use of film as texts in teaching business ethics is that, yes, potential does exist for particular films to be of some use in solving the ‘teaching as entertainment’/quality curriculum dilemma
Summary
In its recent discussion paper ‘More than MOOCs: Opportunities arising from disruptive technologies in education’, the Australian Trade Commission (ATC) (2013) provided a broad analysis of the changing environment of higher education. This analysis can be distilled into three observations. The technology ‘tail’ is increasingly being positioned alongside the course-content ‘dog’, quickening the drive to change (though not necessarily reform) derived from student evaluations Caught as they are between the delivery of a quality education product on the one hand and providing subjectively assessed entertainment for their students on the other, lecturers are consistently searching for ‘innovative’ ways to satisfy these competing demands. Would the extensive use of film as text encourage indolence on the part of those of us whose responsibility it is to teach business ethics–to be ‘bad teachers’ in the way that Cameron Diaz’s character is in the film of the same name (Colombia Pictures 2011)–walking in to class, slapping on a DVD and falling asleep?
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