I'm sorry to have missed yesterday's Paduano seminar by Linda Trevino, but happy to have read her in- press AMJ paper with Joel Gehman and Raghu Garud, "Values Work: A Process Study of The Emergence and Performance of Organizational Values Practices" while riding up to see my parents for the holiday weekend. In addition to liking the paper's performative ethnographic approach--and being highly positive about its appearing in AMJ, which I've always thought of as a bastion of more traditional empiricism--I was highly interested in the discussion of the introduction of an academic integrity honor code at a public business school. That's partly because I have an RBS colleague, Don McCabe, who for years has been among the leading figures in the honor code field, both as an empirical researcher and as a nuanced but committed advocate of honor codes.
Personally, I've always been ambivalent about honor codes in the context of a large public university like the one I teach in as opposed to an old, rooted private institution like Princeton, Don's alma mater. I'm attracted to the ideas of student solidarity and commitment to honesty, but I'm doubtful about the practicability and desirability of turning over responsibility for ethics monitoring to students and of having a strong focus on the negative or "stick" aspects of reporting and punishing honor code violations.
Reading Gehman, Trevino & Garud triggered a new thought/reaction on the honor code issue: I like the idea of incoming full-time MBA classes choosing on a class by class basis to commit to an honor code culture or to an alternative ethical culture involving individual and team commitment to ethical projects in various domains, or to both the honor code and ethical projects cultures. Perhaps there would also be a way to make this work for undergraduates as well--there I think it could happen best not so much across the board for RBS in general but in particular settings such as the undergraduate SCM major I help administer.
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