Published 10-27-04
Submitted by Institute of Business Ethics
Essay Competition
The prize for an essay by a postgraduate student of £500 was awarded to Ming Lim from the Judge Institute of Management at the University of Cambridge for her essay "When Two Worlds Collide: The Ethics of Enabling Better Home-Work Balance".
The undergraduate prize of £500 was awarded to Catherine Barlow from Nottingham University Business School for her entry entitled "Ethical infractions - ethical issues in the cinematic screenplay of the feature films The Insider and Roger & Me".
Baroness Howe, who is a Governor of the London School of Economics and Vice-Chairman of the Open University said:
"It is essential that tomorrow's managers know how to recognise and cope with the ethical dilemmas they will all face in the course of their careers. Business ethics teaching on management courses is vitally important."
Notes for editors:
About the IBE
The Institute of Business Ethics was established in 1986 to encourage high standards of corporate and business behaviour and the sharing of best practice.
We enable companies to:
Details of publications are available from www.ibe.org.uk. 020 7798 6040
The IBE, together with EBEN-UK, launched a teaching business ethics website last year. Teaching Business Ethics introduces readers to the subject of business ethics and how it is taught. It contains details about teaching techniques, methods and issues. The web site also includes sections on teaching materials and bibliographies, as well as links to other relevant web sites. www.ibe.org.uk/teaching/home.html
About EBEN-UK
EBEN-UK is the leading academic body in the UK, affiliated to the European Business Ethics Network and with a wide membership from across the Universities in the UK. Its members teach business ethics within Business Schools and publish text books and scholarly articles on the subject. www.ebenuk.org
About the winning entries
Post graduate winner: Ming Lim, Judge Institute of Management, University of Cambridge When Two Worlds Collide: The Ethics of Enabling Better Home-Work Balance For some time now, work-home balance strategies were premised on the assumption that individuals had conflicting roles to play in his or her life and that if the 'right' policies were put into place, they would help the employee to 'balance' work and non-work responsibilities. Rational views, however, do not fully acknowledge individuals as complex and multi-faceted participants of society. This paper attempts to redress this kind of thinking by exploring two (related) approaches to the question of how organizations can better enable work-home balance.
Undergraduate winner: Catherine Barlow, Nottingham University Business School
Ethical infractions - ethical issues in the cinematic screenplay of the feature films The Insider and Roger & Me
The essay takes the stance that not every unethical decision in business is made because people are inherently bad, and rather the ongoing frequency of unethical behaviour can be explained as an interplay of individual, organisational, cultural and situational factors. In the process, the essay uses descriptive theory to explain individual and situational factors influencing ethical decision-making with particular attention paid to the influence of bureaucracy, ethical education, and moral framing. It is argued that the dominant bureaucratic form of modern corporations and its techniques act to subjugate individual morality, distance individuals from the consequences of their actions, and dehumanise the organisational constituents affected by decisions.