How to foster students' ethical-moral capabilities
UTS Business School academics Marco Berti, Natalia Nikolova and Walter Jarvis have published an academic paper in the top journal for business education, the Academy of Management Learning and Education, outlining a pedagogical model to cultivate business students' ethical-moral capabilities. The paper development was assisted by funding through a Social Impact Grant from the Centre for Social Justice & Inclusion.
Business ethics is a growing discipline, and this research adds to a developing body of scholarship on how to improve business ethics education so that it has positive impacts on managerial practice.
Berti, Nikolova and Jarvis developed an innovative pedagogy which they call ‘embodied phronesis’.
Embodied phronesis is based on experiential learning and means wisdom acquired through experience and practically applied. The pedagogy combines reflection on ethical principles and behaviours, and considers how power relations affect ethical practice in organisations. It also acknowledges the role of emotions and bias in shaping ethical behaviour.
Using reflections from postgraduate students who had studied under these principles, the research team found that embodied phronesis helps students shift from a technical and values-free view of managerial action to seeing it as an ethical and moral practice.
‘Our pedagogy allows students to deal with the complexities inherent in business ethics while simultaneously illustrating that there are no simple answers to the problem of how to be ethical in a business context,’ says Natalia Nikolova.
The project received a Social Impact Grant three years ago in the grants’ inaugural year, enabling the researchers to convert their data and learnings into the published paper.
Social Impact Grants are designed to support UTS increase its contribution to public good:
‘This is a fantastic example of how these grants can support academics to share best practice and to deliver on our responsibility as a university committed to the public good and creating a social impact. This publication in the Academy of Management Learning and Education contributes to UTS's international reputation in this space,’ says Nikolova.
Read the full paper, Embodied Phronetic Pedagogy: Cultivating Ethical and Moral Capabilities in Postgraduate Business Students.
Read other stories of socially impactful research and practice, and find out more about UTS Social Impact Grants.
