Chapter 17: Critical Pedagogy and Ethics: An Epic Four-Quadrant Model

This chapter combines a narrative analysis with a critical perspective to offer a critical narrative analysis of ethical issues in business management pedagogy. Starting with a story of cheating in a business classroom, a critical deconstruction of the dominant or status-quo story explodes the neatly focused tragic story of crime and punishment. Eight deconstruction steps (Boje, 2001) shatter the unitary tragic story into the polyphonic epic narrative of multiple characters, settings, and plots.

Yes, some students cheated in a class. But what about the pressures to teach larger classes, which require objective multiple-choice testing rather than essays? What about those honest students who observed the cheating and did nothing? What about teachers who take graduate students’ work and publish it as their own? What about the obsessions with objective testing for “outcomes assessment” and funding decisions? Is it fair to fail a student for proven plagiarism or cheating when we know so many go unpunished? What about the growing gap between the rich and the poor? All these issues and more are relevant to developing a pedagogy for addressing ethics from a critical perspective in business schools.