Imagining a different voice: A critical and caring approach to management education

Abstract

This article discusses the use of the moral philosophy known as the ethics of care to critically engage management students in ways that favour the development and enactment of a critical and responsible mentality towards business. We use this ethics to ground critical thinking in a moral framework in order to create a conversation in which new possibilities for sustainable and ethical practices might be discovered. Specifically, we identify four teaching practices that allow students to experience being both ‘cared for’ and ‘one-caring’ and explore how this creates a deeper and more critical moral engagement with those affected by businesses. We further propose a framework for applying a care-ethical approach for teaching and learning.

Understanding the human in stakeholder theory: a phenomenological approach to affect-based learning

“…Aguinis et al, 2019), or mention them as part of the tools already used in business ethics or sustainability courses (e.g. Giacalone and Promislo, 2013; Heath et al, 2019; Stead and Stead, 2010). Others argue for the need to further develop such tools (e.g.…”

“…In such cognitivist approaches, the preoccupation with ‘tangible resources’ undermines attention to the ‘intangible resources’, such as respect, identification and meaningfulness that stakeholders may value more (Henriques, 2019: 213). When privileging rational/cognitive aspects of performance and decision-making (Barsade and Gibson, 2007), what most of the literature actually does is simply overlook other important issues such as empathy and care (Heath et al, 2019). We believe that the use of the salience model may be characteristic of what Negri and Hardt (1999) describe as dealing with value ‘from above’, that is, assigning value in reference to the broader political economy.…”

“…Notable exceptions include Bevan and Werhane (2010: 137, 2011), who argue that stakeholders are particularised human beings implying unlimited responsibility: ‘They are “names and faces” rather than homogenized as “the others”’, relying on Levinasian philosophy to criticise this tendency. Others try to infuse SHT with a feminist-inspired ethics of care (Burton and Dunn, 1996; Engster, 2011; Heath et al, 2019; Wicks et al, 1994) which helps to foster relationships and empathy towards others. The instrumentality that lies at the heart of SHT is however not entirely avoided through these strategies.…”

“…First, since management learning’s ‘science-envy’ led to a massive disdain for the messiness of human realities (Schoemaker, 2008: 120), which has made the embodied affective self distinctly unwelcome in the classroom (Brewis and Williams, 2019; Giacalone and Promislo, 2013). Second, because the notion of stakeholders and the associated tools have insufficiently been discussed per se in MLE (Bonnafous-Boucher and Rendtorff, 2015; Henriques, 2019; for an exception see Ferguson et al, 2005 concerning accounting education only), nor have they generally sought to develop an affective dimension (Heath et al, 2019). Consequently, MLE ends up easily perpetuating a kind of superficial, and normatively empty conception of the human, reduced to a self-interested rational homo oeconomicus , not least of which through the widespread use of the stakeholder label.…”

Embedded ethics and reflexivity: narrating a charter of ethical experience

“…Poldner et al, 2019; Pullen and Rhodes, 2015); Gilligan’s (1982) ethics of care (e.g. Heath et al, 2019), which situates ethics as “grounded in the everyday lives and experiences and moral dilemmas of ordinary people in the context of a full range of responsibilities and relationships rather than rights and rules” (Hawk, 2011: 6); and critical approaches which draw on Foucault’s, Derrida’s and/or Levinas’s work to critique or deconstruct business ethics (e.g. Dey and Steyaert, 2016; Jones, 2003; Klikauer, 2010; Siltaoja et al, 2015).…”