Sheldrake, Peter et James Hurley
(2000).
Business, Values and Spirituality: A Case Study of A Business School in
Australia, in T.C. Pauchant and Associates, Ethics and spirituality
at work. Under revision in the U.S.
In this chapter Peter Sheldrake, the director of an important Australian
business school, and James Hurley, the head of its new DBA program , describe
certain principles for the integration of ethics and spirituality in business
education as well as its inherent difficulties.
Like an echo of Ian Mitroff who seeks a radically different thinking and
structure in management education (see chapter 2), the principles proposed
by Sheldrake and Hurley include the necessity to conceive a program based
on the true integration of personal growth and professional practice;
the structure of the program must also be adapted to the values it professes
and not the other way around; it should enhance a "learning community"
which is developed by both participants and teachers alike as opposed
to just accommodating individual students; as well, the program must change
from one which is motivated by knowledge for the purpose of control to
knowledge derived from compassion.
After describing the problems which arose from both students and professors, the administration and the general culture, Peter Sheldrake and James Hurley propose different mechanisms and processes which they find essential to insure the sucess of such a programme: the use of experiential learning, continued cross-fertilisation between personal development, knowledge, and practice; the development of a secure learning space; the use of art and literature; the solid footing in the notion of "a calling", both personal and institutional; the on-going training and supervision of instructors; promotion of a fundamental change in the university system; and the support of the programmes legitimacy by businesses themselves. Finally by way of a Quaker story, the authors remind us that ethical decision making originates in the depths of the soul and from a meaningfull dialogue with ones-self and others; a dominant theme in this book that will be taken up again in its concluding chapter
