Against the background of the recent UN Global Compact initiative for responsible management education and the UNESCO guidelines on education for sustainable development, the mission of the International Working Group on Business Ethics Education (IWBEE) is to foster business ethics education in business education. Our aim is to cooperatively expand our knowledge on the role of ethics in business practice and education against the background of different political, economic and cultural contexts. By this we want to contribute to fostering and enhancing the attentiveness regarding ethical issues in business as well as education practice and theory.

 

The group has two foci: (1) We want to explore/ exchange around/ understand better what business ethics is about and how it is related to society and environment. (2) Based on our understanding and research, we want to clarify what business ethics education is about. This exploration is done in a comparative or international perspective: we discuss these experiences in the light of our national contexts. In this regard, our focus is on the particular societal presuppositions in which business ethics education can take place, which are a result of the political and cultural differences in the respective countries. The tasks of the group are

 

• Bundling international activities in the field of business ethics education addressing the political, cultural and historical varieties of capitalism
• Initiating research on the cultural embeddedness of business practices and on the impact that this embeddedness actually has gained on business ethics education
• Development of curricula which fit the cultural and historical idiosyncrasies of business practices
• Identification of cultural “invariable” contents of business ethics education
• Exchange of scholars and students, initiating international research projects, initiating international co-teaching projects on concrete subjects of business education like management, marketing, or finance.