Students at West Virginia University are engaged in developing a new approach to business ethics.

During the past 30 years, America’s economy has been in a state of transition from one based essentially on job creation through its profit-making sector to one based in large part on job creation through its nonprofit and governmental sectors.

Because the traditional approach to business ethics primarily focuses on ethical concerns surrounding the profit motive of larger corporations, it often loses relevance to students who plan to work outside the for-profit sector of the economy. Yet no workplace, whether large or small, for-profit or not, can escape having to deal with such ethical issues as safety, human dignity, environmental protection and the problem of fairness to all concerned.

Recognizing the need for greater attention to business ethics issues in today’s society, M. Duane Nellis, dean of the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, and Jay H. Coats, dean of the College of Business and Economics, challenged the Philosophy Department to develop a business ethics course that could offer real-life workplace relevance for all students interested in management.

“Given the range of national issues related to business ethics, this course is certainly very timely and valuable for our students,”Nellis said.

Philosophy Department Chair Richard Montgomery took the challenge one step further. He asked visiting professor David Cale, who has an M.B.A., a Ph.D. and nearly 40 years of experience as an employer in the for-profit and nonprofit sectors, to develop an advanced course integrating the insights of traditional business ethics with the pragmatic management problems and legalistic settings of the everyday work environment.

Cale’s approach to solving the problem of relevance began with the premise that ethics is not intangible but something real imposing itself on the work environment in four ways: through legal requirements upon employers where social expectations become written law, through employee willingness to accept and carry out an organization’s policies, through jury acceptance of unwritten entitlement claims and, finally, through public acceptance of the organization itself.

All employers, whether for-profit or governmental, deal with these four factors through policy manuals, a document or collection of documents that define a given workplace’s specific goals, needs, rules and procedures within the constraints imposed by society’s ethical expectations.

“Accordingly,”Cale said,”it is through the policy manuals that managers take ethics from the realm of theory to the realm of practice.”

Because WVU is perhaps the first higher education institution in the United States to explore this approach to business ethics, the 44 students enrolled in Philosophy 293 have themselves become involved in discovering how this blend of theory and practice can work best. Cale said student feedback is critical to the future direction of this course.

Students in the class have formed 11”consulting”companies with four members each. Each has taken up the task of finding a”client,”a small business or nonprofit organization in the Morgantown area in need of having its policy manual upgraded. Students choose one of the four areaspolicy structure, universal policies, human resources or job descriptionsand make this their contribution to the client’s new policy manual, which also serves as the”consulting”company’s term paper.