This book explores the opportunities and problems that corporate business managers and leaders of what the authors call corporate "constituencies" will confront over the next ten years as they seek their respective overlapping and conflicting goals. The authors define constituencies as internal groups like employees and external groups like shareholders, suppliers, and customers. But they also include new constituencies like consumerists, conservationists, racial and ethnic groups, the handicapped, social activists, and others who are affected by, and in turn affect, the (...) corporation. The book begins by describing the origins of the new constituencies and their history to the present. It goes on to discuss how managers have responded to these new groups and explores managers' values, arguing that they profess a free market philosophy but lobby for governmental restraints to protect their markets. Finally, the authors detail the ways in which managers can come to a better understanding of their social responsibilities, and suggest a new style of responsiveness--of managers to constituencies and constituencies to managers--that should result in cooperative solutions to ethical problems. (shrink)

The paper notes the recent spread of business ethics courses in American higher education, observing that teachers trained in economics have not readily incorporated ethical notions or theory into regular courses, such as finance, management, accounting, and marketing. The presumed ethically neutral, value-free approach of economists, who dominate business courses, is increasingly inadequate to meet the needs of business managers – or of business students. Technological and political changes, creating an interdependent environment within which managers operate, have eroded older ethics (...) based on tradition and common backgrounds. They have also raised ethical issues of new orders of complexity. With corporate business managers finding ethical concerns more pressing matters than do many teachers, the paper offers some tentative answers to three questions about how to interest business students in ethical issues: What Approach to Business Ethics Gets student's Attention? What Is the Value of Simulations and Games? What Can Be Said About the Business System And Its Values?The answer to the first question is simulations and games. Case method analysis is serviceable, engaging students' intellect, but all too often without emotional involvement or self-revelation. Experiential learning through class-room games accomplish both engagement and involvement in ways that are exceedingly helpful to business students, who have had "less occasion for critical reflection on self and world than have others of their age.". (shrink)