Teaching Business Ethics, Moral dilemmas and Experiential learning: Less lecturing, More practice?

Business Ethics and Social Responsibility courses are nowadays a popular element of management studies, with a continuously growing number of theoretical approaches, articles, monographs and textbooks. The development of the theory is by all means necessary, as the ethical issues in contemporary business management develop over time (as do the law and regulations), requiring solutions to new problems, as well as models and approaches to handling ethical issues enriched by the continuous development of general ethics, sociology and psychology. It is, however, common to observe, that both the student responses and the general attitude of academics towards teaching business ethics is predominantly critical. Reasons for failures of business ethics programs in corporate environment have been already analysed2 in research. Among other things, the pedagogy of business ethics certainly has issues, which limit the influence of courses on participants: