"We’re just geeks": disciplinary identifications among business students and their implications for personal responsibility
This research shows how business students’ disciplinary specializations can affect their sense of personal responsibility by providing rationalizations for moral disengagement. It thereby conceptualizes business students’ disciplinary specializations as a key dimension of the business school respons...
| Published in: | Journal of business ethics |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Springer Science + Business Media B. V
2022
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| In: |
Journal of business ethics
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| Further subjects: | B
Disciplines
B Management Education B Aufsatz in Zeitschrift B Business Students B Moral Reasoning B Moral Disengagement B Personal responsibility |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (kostenfrei) Volltext (kostenfrei) |
| Summary: | This research shows how business students’ disciplinary specializations can affect their sense of personal responsibility by providing rationalizations for moral disengagement. It thereby conceptualizes business students’ disciplinary specializations as a key dimension of the business school responsibility learning environment. Students use four main rationalizations to displace responsibility variously away from their own disciplinary specializations, to claim responsibility as the prerogative of their specialization, and to shift irresponsibility onto disciplinary out-groups. Yet despite their disciplinary identifications, students largely rationalized that their sense of responsibility was an individual matter that was unlikely to be affected by contextual influences, and they attributed irresponsible behavior to incorrigible ‘bad apples.’ A theoretical model is offered which illustrates these dynamics by combining Bandura’s social cognitive theory with social identity theory. The research is based on secondary data, specifically focus-group interviews conducted with undergraduate students at a major Scandinavian business school in connection with the implementation of the UN Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME) initiative. The implications for management education include the need to strengthen students’ ‘disciplinary reflexivity,’ and to explicitly address the tension between students’ disciplinary solidarities and their faith in their own individual moral infallibility. |
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| ISSN: | 1573-0697 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of business ethics
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1007/s10551-021-04759-7 |