Teaching Business Students Research Articles

Updating a Code for Teaching Ethical Visualizations

The prevalent paradigm for understanding what constitutes a ‘good’ data visualization, and what we are likely teaching business students, relates to a conventional wisdom of efficiency, clarity, transparency, and faithful representation of truth. Teaching about the ethics of visualizations seems to be largely absent from business school curricula. This paper suggests that business students who make and use visualizations should be taught to use a code of ethics for visualizations based not only on conventional wisdom, but also on ideas from the Machine Learning/AI and ‘ethical visualizations’ communities. Elaborating on Sheppard’s code, the code suggested here incorporates ideas about bias, transparency, user agency, and privacy. Ethical awareness and practice become even more important as more data collection, processing, and visualization is shifted to Machine Learning and Generative AI. A threshold model is adapted to understand when visualization decisions require more scrutiny. Ideas from the code and the threshold model are used to analyze choices made by the CDC’s COVID-19 Rapid Response Team for an early pandemic visualization that circulated widely beyond the initial report in which it appeared. This and other examples underscore the need for business professionals to consider their visualizations from the perspective of the code.

Teaching Business Students to Care: Perspective-Taking and the Narrative Enabling of Moral Imagination

Teaching Business Students to Care: Perspective-Taking and the Narrative Enabling of Moral Imagination

Teaching Case Teaching Business Students Logistic Regression in R With the Aid of ChatGPT

Teaching Case Teaching Business Students Logistic Regression in R With the Aid of ChatGPT

Systematic Review of Effective Library Instruction for Business Students

The most successful library teaching strategies for post-secondary business programs have yet to be determined. The aim of this systematic review is to investigate the effectiveness of library instruction (with a focus on pedagogy) in business undergraduate and graduate programs. The researchers searched seven databases, selected studies that met the inclusion criteria, and extracted data following PRISMA guidelines. To achieve the study’s primary objective, the researchers included any library educational intervention in a business program conducted by librarians or library staff. The quality of included studies was evaluated based on a modified instrument designed to critically appraise educational interventions. The instrument consists of nine questions that relate to content, context, outcomes, study design, and methods. Thirty-five studies met the inclusion criteria and data was extracted based on subject area, content coverage, mode of instruction (in-person vs virtual), faculty collaboration, assessment strategies, and library educational interventions used to teach business students. Common educational interventions included hands-on activities, live demonstrations, active learning, group work, and lectures. The most compelling strategies include active learning, providing engaging sessions (e.g., flipped classroom), and faculty collaboration. Since most of the studies did not state clear learning outcomes, it is difficult to ascertain what type of interventions were truly effective in improving library sessions.

One semester, two languages: How to teach R and Python to business school students?

It is crazy to teach business students both R and Python at the same time! It was my thought when asked to teach such a course in 2020. However, after one-semester’s heavy struggle together with my students, I found that such a course is not only possible, but also desirable. In this paper, my teaching experiences are summarized into several areas: 1) write my own lecture notes; 2) use concepts and formulae suitable for business students; 3) tons of in-class exercises; 4) use the same formulae, data sets or even the same exercises several times; 5) recording my own video for each chapter even for a face-to-face lecture; 6) over 1,000 small programs; 7) many useful utility functions, and 8) teach R first, then compare Python with R constantly.

Business Education: Filling the Gaps in the Leader’s Awareness Concerning Organizational Phronesis

Education is a method of sharing social consciousness and social reconstruction. There is an existential crisis in business education driven by the conflict between social and financial objectives. A paradigm shift in business education requires that leaders be taught how to incorporate new competencies. Phronesis (practical wisdom), individual and collective, is an essential competence to be addressed in business education. It leads companies to continuous innovation and highly sustainable performance. We conducted 23 interviews with leaders from organizations in 14 countries to discuss some transformations that business education needs through leaders’ awareness concerning organizational phronesis. We conducted a thematic analysis of the interviews with support from NVivo software. The results demonstrate gaps in leaders’ awareness concerning phronesis and its relationships with knowledge management and organizational spirituality. Business education still needs to be reviewed to enable leaders to learn and incorporate phronesis theory and practice. Building on the gaps found in the leaders’ awareness of phronesis, we propose interdisciplinary pedagogical methods to teach business students competencies that enable the embodiment of phronesis. These changes in business education are indispensable to reach sustainability.

Critical Pedagogy and Eco-pedagogy: Discussing Ethics and Radical Environmentalism at Business School

This article discusses critical pedagogy and ecopedagogy, which stimulate active citizenship through the lessons of environmentalism, exposing students to the critique of the underlying power structures of society. This article discusses business ethics and sustainability undergraduate course, which served as a case study applying critical pedagogy and ecopedogogy. Critical pedagogy, developed by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire rejects the idea that education is ever politically neutral, arguing that teaching is an inherently political act. Ecopedagogy, taking critical pedagogy further to include current environmental challenges, has inspired this educational intervention described in this article. Asked to watch and reflect on a documentary about radical environmentalism, the students demonstrated a certain shift in their understanding of conventional ethics, enshrined in anthropocentrism. Their reflections showed that they were both surprised and to a degree shocked about not just the actions of the “radicals”, but also the role of the state, supported by corporate and political lobbies in suppressing protest and the framing of the term “radicalism”. The article concludes in the reflection on what radical environmentalism can teach business students in their role as active citizens.

Undershaft in B-School: Responses of Business Students to Major Barbara

ABSTRACT This article examines the responses of business students to the 1941 film version of Major Barbara. It argues that today's business students are quite receptive to the arguments of the play and eager to make comparisons with contemporary debates in business ethics. Due to the nature of drama, plays have a unique pedagogical potential to reach students and engage with them more fully. Shaw, in particular, provides especially helpful tools for teaching business students as well as students in other fields that typically do not have plays on their syllabi. The article suggests several ways Shaw's works can be incorporated into curricula outside of literary and theater studies to enrich the education of nontraditional future Shavians.

Teaching research methods: Introducing a psychogeographical approach

AbstractThis paper explores teaching business students research methods using a psychogeographical approach, specifically the technique of dérive. It responds to calls for new ways of teaching in higher education and addresses the dearth of literature on teaching undergraduate business students qualitative research methods. Psychogeography challenges the dominance of questionnaires and interviews, introduces students to data variety, problematizes notions of success and illuminates the importance of observation and location. Using two studies with undergraduate students, the authors emphasize place and setting, the perception of purpose, the choice of data, criteria of success and the value of guided reflection and self-reflection in students’ learning. Additionally the data reflect on the way students perceive research about management and the nature of management itself. The paper concludes that the deployment of psychogeography to teach business research methods although complex and fraught with difficulty is nevertheless viable, educationally productive and worthy of further research.

(Dys)functional Models of Managerial Thinking?

Managers deal with a bewildering variety of problem and decision situations. Yet texts that teach business students about problem solving and decision making invariably depict this process with mod...

Teaching Business Ethics during the Global Economic Crisis: A Post-Foundational Approach

Facing a near-death experience naturally pushes people to re-examine their basic moral values. During the recent global economic melt-down, calls to solve the concomitant ‘moral’ crisis come in from all fronts. The presumption is that we need business ethics courses to teach our business students to learn to take the moral high-road; we need ethics pledges and codes of ethics to teach business students to do the right thing. But in reality, what impact can a business ethics class have on business people in the real world of tough choices and intense competition? It is my contention that if we look at the teaching of business ethics from the traditional Foundational Platonic perspective, we over-promise and under-deliver. By contrast, a Post- Foundational perspective gives us a pragmatic and viable picture of business ethics pedagogy that can make a real difference.

A 'Novel' Approach to Education

Opinion columnist Roger C. Schank describes how he came to use a specially-written novel to teach business students. Becoming engrossed with fiction, characters, and story can be just as engaging as getting wrapped up in an interactive activity.

An Experiential Learning Approach To Teaching Social Entrepreneurship, Triple Bottom Line, And Sustainability: Modifying And Extending Practical Organizational Behavior Education (PROBE)

When teaching social entrepreneurship and sustainability, using an experiential learning approach can be more effective than a traditional lecture approach. Social and environmental entrepreneurs often have a deep passion for their work that is important for students to develop early in their careers. Experiential learning enables students to create and experience this passion for themselves, thereby preparing them with the motivational and emotional resources they may need to be successful in the future. We introduce Practical Organizational Behavior Education (PROBE) as one way of helping students develop this passion. PROBE was originally developed as a service-learning project for an undergraduate course in organizational behavior at a very small, private university. However, in this manuscript, we show how PROBE can be modified and extended to effectively teach business students about triple bottom line concepts, sustainability, and social entrepreneurship at the undergraduate and MBA levels within a large, public university system. We provide practical suggestions for instructors interested in implementing this approach in a broad variety of settings.

Consulting On Negotiation: Teaching Business Students Basic Techniques

Consulting On Negotiation: Teaching Business Students Basic Techniques

Using Ibsen in Business Ethics

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.

Students’ Views of Ethical Behavior and the Impact of Association

This study provides support for the better-than-average effect with respect to ethical decision-making, and the influence of personal contact on these perceptions. Using data from marketing students at two major universities over two time periods, the findings indicate that students believe their own behavior to be more ethical than either their friends’ or advertising agency executives’ behavior. Gender influenced perceptions of ethical decision-making for some types of questionable behavior, with women reporting higher ethical standards in these cases. Few changes were observed over time. Implications of these findings for teaching business students are discussed.

Teaching Business Students About HIV and AIDS in the Workplace: Curriculum and Resources

The significant and increasing number of people in the U.S. and global work-forces who are infected with HIV or who have AIDS must be managed differently from those who are not infected and those who have other life-threatening diseases. Business schools can prepare their MBA students to effectively, legally, and compassionately manage people with HIV infection or AIDS and to deal with all other workers who are affected by these conditions by offering a short, noncredit or one-credit, required course about how to do so. This article describes one such course that teaches students how to develop a workplace HIV/AIDS program, including policy development, manager and labor leader training, and employee and family education. Presentation options other than a stand-alone course for MBA students are considered as well.

Can We Succeed in Teaching Business Students to Write Effectively?

This article presents the results of a study where business students’ writing skills were assessed using an external objective measure in a business communication course. The student performance was disappointing before instructor intervention. After the intervention, student performance improved noticeably. The implications of the study are discussed for those who teach writing skills.

The Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot and the Teaching of International Commercial Arbitration

HOW TO teach international commercial arbitration depends largely on who is to be taught and the purpose for which they are being taught. Teaching business students about arbitration because they should know something about the resolution of business disputes would normally call for a different educational technique than would teaching young lawyers who have entered a firm that engages in international commercial arbitration. A moot arbitration is one method of teaching about arbitration and the Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot has become the most important of them. The Willem C Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot has as its primary audience law students, who act as counsel for the parties in the moot arbitration. The student participants need not be working on a first degree in law. Many of them are working on an LL.M. or doctoral degree. What is important is that they are still students and not practitioners. A considerably smaller audience is composed of business students. Yet a third category who learn about arbitration from the Moot are young law graduates who participate as arbitrator, though not as counsel. The Moot involves a dispute arising out of an international contract of sale subject to the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG). The dispute is to be settled by arbitration in Danubia, which has adopted the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration. All relevant states are party to the Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards. The relevant arbitration rules rotate among the sponsoring arbitral organisations. The Moot that culminated with the oral arguments in March 2005 used the Swiss Rules of International Arbitration. The Moot in 2005–2006 will use the arbitration rules of the Chicago International Dispute Resolution Association. A full list of sponsoring organisations, along …

Learning through a Student Conference

Students entering the workforce are increasingly expected to possess an appreciation of contemporary issues and challenges facing industry. Over recent years the focus of teaching business students has incorporated different approaches designed to equip students with skills that industry expects them to have. One such approach has been through a student specific conference, the topic of this paper. The conference focus was to engage key industry and government entities in the international trade arena, as a way of enhancing students' knowledge and appreciation of current issues in this area and increase their job ready status. The conference was run as professional event for students, held away from their home study campus, outside normal semester teaching times and additional to their academic load, but linked to a specific compulsory subject in their undergraduate degree program. Additionally a small extra-curricular fee (to recover expenses) was levied to participants. This paper evaluates the learning experience of participating at this two-day student specific conference and concludes that such an event can provide students with a higher learning experience than in a similar period of classroom teaching.