A sharpened focus on business ethics at the Haskayne School of Business

Given today’s ethical challenges, there has never been a more critical time to increase our attention towards ethics in leadership. This is true for not only businesses but also, perhaps even more, for educational institutions to increase the focus on ethical foundations as students enter their careers, preparing for the sophisticated and demanding ethical dilemmas they will face.

CCAL launched its Ethics Strategy in the 2019-2020 academic year to make business ethics an ongoing, sophisticated, and high profile discussion that will draw in participants from within the University of Calgary and around the world. With first year’s success (450 students + 50 industry professionals and collaboration with world-class business ethics experts), CCAL will continue to provide business ethics interventions that strive to inspire voluntary participation, involve active learning and include multiple perspectives.

This year, CCAL will welcome several high profile business ethicists. It will continue to integrate ethics education into curricular and extracurricular activities at the Haskayne School of Business. CCAL provides resources and content for formal courses such as Ethical Governance (MGST 451), Ethical Leadership (MGST 453), and the MMgmt Capstone (MGST 674). Beyond this formal curriculum, CCAL offers the Ethics Speaker Series that brings leading scholars to inspire students, faculty, and community members to think more deeply, critically, and creatively about core ethical principles in the business context. This year, in addition to offering these events, the speakers have been gathered together into an Ethics Working Group, aimed at fostering new research in business ethics.

Dr. David G. Dick is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Fellow of the Canadian Centre for Advanced Leadership in Business (CCAL) in the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary. His main areas of research and teaching are in ethics and political philosophy. In particular, metaethics, business ethics, and the philosophy of money. The former Chair in Business Ethics, Dr. Dick oversees the Integrity Network, a Calgary-based working group of professionals in business ethics.

Dr. R. Edward Freeman is University Professor, Olsson Professor, and Academic Director of the Institute for Business in Society at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. He is best known for his award winning book, Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach (Pitman, 1984; and reprinted by Cambridge University Press in 2010). His latest book is The Power of And: Responsible Business Without Trade-offs, with Bidhan Parmar and Kirsten Martin, forthcoming from Columbia University Press in 2020. He has received six honorary doctorates (Doctor Honoris Causa) from: Radboud University in the Netherlands; Universidad Pontificia Comillas in Spain; the Hanken School of Economics, and Tampere University in Finland; Sherbrooke University in Canada; and, Leuphana University in Germany, for his work on stakeholder theory and business ethics. He is the host of The Stakeholder Podcast, sponsored by Stakeholder Media, LLC.

Dr. Nien-hê Hsieh is Professor of Business Administration and Joseph L. Rice, III Faculty Fellow at Harvard Business School. His research and teaching aims at helping business leaders and organizations determine and deliver on their responsibilities. He has written on a variety of topics, including worker participation in the management and governance of firms, the responsibilities of companies for human rights, the ownership of productive property, and choices involving incommensurable values. His current work involves developing an ethic of care for business. He is past president of the Society for Business Ethics and taught previously at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania..

Dr. Tobey Scharding specializes in business ethics and using ethical theories to guide managerial decision-making, particularly as regards business innovations and new business trends such as cryptocurrencies and artificial intelligence. Her research applies ethical theories from philosophy to managerial decision-making with an aim of enhancing managers' abilities to evaluate the ethics of new workplace practices and new technologies that are not well addressed by existing theories of managerial decision-making. Her articles have been published in leading academic journals such as Business Ethics Quarterly, Journal of Business Ethics, and Business and Society Review. Her book, This Is Business Ethics, was published by Wiley-Blackwell in 2018.

Dr. Robert Hughes was appointed to the Wharton School as an assistant professor of business ethics in 2015. He received his Ph.D in philosophy from UCLA in 2010 and his A.B. in philosophy from Harvard University in 2001. He has completed post-doctoral fellowships in the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health and in the Law and Philosophy Program at UCLA. Robert’s areas of specialization include applied ethics, philosophy of law, and political philosophy.