“We’re Just Geeks”: Disciplinary Identifications Among Business Students and Their Implications for Personal Responsibility
Maribel Blasco ()
Additional contact information
Maribel Blasco: Copenhagen Business School
Journal of Business Ethics, 2022, vol. 178, issue 1, No 17, 279-302
Abstract:
Abstract 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.
Keywords: Moral disengagement; Moral reasoning; Personal responsibility; Disciplines; Business students; Management education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10551-021-04759-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:178:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1007_s10551-021-04759-7
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10551/PS2
DOI: 10.1007/s10551-021-04759-7
Access Statistics for this article
Journal of Business Ethics is currently edited by Michelle Greenwood and R. Edward Freeman
More articles in Journal of Business Ethics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().