Prison Field Trips: Can White-Collar Criminals Positively Affect the Ethical and Legal Behavior of Marketing and MBA Students?

Abstract

Marketing educators bear some responsibility for teaching ethics and legal issues to their students. Visits to white-collar criminals in a federal prison camp are one method of achieving this task. This article develops and empirically assesses ten objectives for such a visit by MBA and undergraduate marketing classes. Undergraduates rated the experience higher on "helped me see that I am vulnerable to temptation to do the wrong thing" and "encouraged me to avoid making poor ethical decisions" than graduate students, while graduate students rated "helped make the course more relevant" higher. Also, students with less work experience gained a greater appreciation for the importance of business ethics as a result of the visit. There were no differences in terms of age or gender. Implications of the findings, future research suggestions, and implementation guidelines for those interested in taking their students on a prison visit are provided.

Salesperson Ethics

“…Learner feedback by 102 students (68 males, 34 females) at a Midwestern U.S. university from surveys embedded in the simulation from the three most recent classes is shown in Table 2. Results indicate that the simulation successfully achieved all five core objectives, with no significant difference between male and female learners, confirming previous findings about gender (e.g., Castleberry, 2007;Nill & Schibrowsky, 2005).…”

Call for collaboration in researching the best practices in teaching ethical entrepreneurship: the conflict of money and ethics

“…This approach is based on the idea that ethical decision-making is mastered by experience, and experience is enhanced by the opportunity to practice new behaviors (Lattal, 2012). The decision-making process opportunities are stimulated by a variety of different methodologies, including interviews (Castleberry, 2007), games (Gibson, 2003), exercises (Schumann et al, 2006), and simulations (Wankel and Stachowicz-Stanusch, 2012). This approach and different techniques helps students to identify the ethical issues present in a given situation, and to apply decision-making criteria (moral, or ethical frameworks).…”

Effects of Cost on the Quality of MBA Programmes in Ugandan Universities

“…There is a preponderant number of publications about the MBA programme. The writings focus most on the MBA in the contexts of Europe, Australia, the USA and Asia (Arbaugh, 2000;Blair, 1998;Brown, 2000;Fox, 2008;Kaiza, 2001;Kleiman and Kass, 2007;Mattis , 2008;Harris et al;Cohen and Miaoulis, 1978;Sinclair, 1997;Golen, 1989;Deconink and Steiner, 1999;Castleberry, 2007;Thursfield, 2008;Maxwell, 1986;Miller et al, 2007;Thompson, 2002;Bowman, 2007;Duncan, 1986;Elkin, 1991;Viljoen et al, 1990;Sims, et al, 1994;Dacko, 2001;Tonn and Milledge 2002;Simpson et al, 2005;Gabriel, 2005;Naude et al, 1997;Hay and Hodgkinson, 2008;Polvnick, 1979). Although these studies are very good in articulating the theories that underpin the MBA, they do not address Ugandan setting, hence leaving a gap that the current study seeks to fill.…”