Chapter 11: A Decision Making Framework for Business Ethics Education

Advancing business ethics education is one of the greatest challenges facing business leaders today. While business programs in higher education have traditionally linked teaching of functional areas such as accounting, finance, marketing, and management to the activities of practitioners, this has not occurred in the teaching of business ethics. The 2005 National Business Ethics Survey, conducted by the Ethics Resource Center, found that 86% of employee’s organizations have a code of conduct, 69% have ethics training, and 26% of organizations have all the elements of a formal ethics program (Ethics Resource Center, n.d). There are many critics of business schools who suggest that we are not connected to what is happening in the development and implementation of business ethics in corporate America. This is because there have been dramatic changes in requirements in the last five years. Both mandatory and expected core practices of businesses have been driven by the institutionalization of business ethics through public policy.