Abstract

Business schools have become implicated in the widespread demonisation of the financial classes. By educating those held most responsible for the crisis – financial traders and speculators – they are said to have produced ruthlessly talented graduates who have ambition in abundance but little sense for social responsibility or ethics. This ethical lack thrives upon the trading floor within a compelling critique of the complicity of the pedagogy of the business school with the financial crisis of the global economy. An ethical turn within the curriculum is now widely encouraged as a counteractive force. Within this paper, however, we argue that taking this ethical turn is not enough. For business ethicists to learn from the financial crisis, the crisis' legacy needs to be taken account of, and financialisation needs to be taken seriously. Pedagogical reform cannot bracket itself off from the crisis as if it were coincidental with or separate from it. Post‐crisis pedagogy must rather take the fact that it is requested now, in light of the crisis, as its very point of departure. The financial crisis must not be understood as something to be resisted in the name of Business Ethics. Instead, the financial crisis must be understood as the very foundation for contemporary Business Ethics in particular and for contemporary business and management education more generally.

Highlights

  • The once prominent reign of Dionysian self-abandonment has been thoroughly obliterated – the Gods of solidity and permanence have superseded to the throne

  • Given the conditioning of the university by finance, and the production of the student as an entrepreneur engaged in human capital investment, how can we conceive of finance itself as an object of study? We have already argued that the business school must take its ethical responsibility in the teaching of business in light of the excesses of financial capitalism

  • The proposal of ‘more business ethics’ in the classroom which has become predominant seems just as likely to waver, given as it is to leaving the specificity of financialisation to one side in its pursuit of a solution

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Summary

Introduction

The once prominent reign of Dionysian self-abandonment has been thoroughly obliterated – the Gods of solidity and permanence have superseded to the throne. We suggest that within the curricular, content-based argument, as well as within the pedagogical, process-based argument, the need for a consideration of financialisation is latent yet underdeveloped It is in this regard that we make the turn towards the second core section of our paper which opens with an introduction to the concept of financialisation and underlines its importance to the post-crisis predicament of Business Ethics. The discussion section of the paper suggests that one’s relationship to the process of education, just like one’s relationship to the content of the curriculum, is pre-constituted along a variety of financial nexuses which condition business ethics, in particular, and business and management education, more generally By acknowledging these nexuses as conditioning of both educational content and the educational process, we argue, can business and management studies hope to learn from, and respond to, the financial crisis. By arguing how it is only by taking our bearings from the ways in which finance conditions the contemporary university, and the study within it, that we may start to think about the possibilities for Business Ethics, or anything like it, in times of crisis

BUSINESS ETHICS AGAINST THE CRISIS
BUSINESS ETHICS STRUCTURED BY THE CRISIS
Findings
DISCUSSION
CONCLUSION
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