Nurturing integrity in management education with the development of an alternative web of metaphors

Abstract

Management education has set the goal to improve the content of undergraduate and graduate courses so that they broadly integrate concerns for ethics and integrity. In order to reach that goal, management educators must consider how an overreliance on mainstream metaphors (e.g., business-as-war) perpetuates uneasy incorporation of ethics and integrity. They need to be mindful of how metaphors are used and the images that they evoke. Part of the challenge in fostering ethics and integrity is to deal with student preconceptions about the nature of business activities, which is generally in line with these mainstream metaphors. With this paper, our goal is not to find the best metaphor to incorporatepraxis of integrity within management education, but to suggest the need for a web of metaphors to grow and develop into an appealing alternative. Exposure to different metaphors can lead to different lines of reasoning and decision-making. By using different metaphors to understand the complex and paradoxical character of management, students could see things in ways that they may not have thought possible before. In short, management education needs some sort of metaphorical pluralism in order to embrace concerns for ethics and integrity.