Ethical Dilemmas in the Creative, Cultural and Service Industries

Johan Bouwer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367210113
• eBook ISBN: 9780429559853
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Ethical Dilemmas in the Creative, Cultural and Service Industries enhances professional ethical awareness and supports students' development of skills for ethical decision-making in these growing sectors.

It focusses on the shaping of personal and professional values, and dealing with the moral and ethical issues that (future) professionals may encounter in practice. Including a multitude of varied and interdisciplinary case studies, this textbook adopts an applied ethical approach which enables the student to combine basic ethical theory with relevant and 'real-life' cases. Major ethical issues such as CSR, ethical leadership, human rights, fraud, employee rights and duties, new technology and (social) entrepreneurship are addressed.

This will be invaluable reading for students studying tourism, hospitality, leisure, events, marketing, healthcare, logistics, retail and game development. It will also be a suitable resource for in-company training of practitioners already working in this wide range of domains.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Johan Bouwer

1.1 Introduction

Educational institutions all around the globe are, against the background of the many scandals witnessed in the world of business in the last decades, still in search of adequate ways to educate responsible professionals who, on the one hand, will be able to serve their companies with integrity and display responsible behaviour in that context, whilst also living up to the needs and moral expectations of society and behaving like responsible global citizens, on the other. Those scandals and (financial) crises have prompted the educators of future business men and women to seriously study business ethics. This discipline fundamentally evaluates and judges economic practices on the basis of their ‘acceptability’, rightness or wrongness and on their ability to prevent harm to people, communities, society and the environment; but also, and especially, on their ability to foster benefit and value (well-being, quality of life) for all. In addition, the many challenges the world faces today – such as dealing with the impacts of climate change; pursuing sustainability; eradicating poverty and inequality; addressing the exclusion of groups of people (cultures and minorities), and the negative impacts of technological development; ensuring the availability and safety of food for all; addressing the unavailability of good healthcare globally; turning around the high rates of child mortality in the world, and ensuring good education for all – add to the necessity that educational institutes address these urgent issues in their curricula in order to contribute to ensuring a sustainable planet for both current and future generations. The world has become a global village and decisions taken in one part of the world (could) have an impact on the others. This applies to business as well: it has become globalised, and is faced by the challenged of (re-)evaluating the very foundations of its existence, (re-)defining its relationship with society and nature and becoming more and more involved in the contexts in which it operates, and (re-)considering the impacts of its operations, products and services on human beings and on the planet itself. Businesses are invited to join hands with those trying to find solutions to these challenges and to take care not to be a part of the problems that have given rise to them. This not only applies to large international companies, but also to smaller and medium-sized ones. More precisely, it applies to every leader, manager and employee. One cannot speak of (responsible and ethical) business without speaking of (responsible and ethical) people.

Therefore, in order to deliver well-equipped future professionals who will be able to resort to morally sound practices in business and management, scholars and practitioners have pursued their quest to find adequate and effective ways of teaching/training ethics in business and management education with quite some fervour. The debate and discussions amongst scholars on how ethics could/should be taught might be called lively and intense. An astonishing amount of work has been done in studying, amongst other things: (the content of) business ethics courses; teaching methods; the pedagogical presuppositions behind those methods; the perceptions of both lecturers and students with regard to the importance and purpose of ethics education; models for and principles of ethical decision-making; the effects of (business) ethics education on moral behaviour; moral development, and the determinants and moderators of moral behaviour. A Google search on ‘business ethics education’ delivered 338,000,000 hits, which testifies to the magnitude of this scholarly activity (the search was carried out on 6 March 2019). Apart from the many books that have been written on business ethics, and the stream of publications on ‘teaching (business) ethics’ that have been accepted in ‘regular’ journals for business ethics (such as the Business Ethics Quarterly, Business & Professional Ethics Journal, Journal of Business Ethics, International Journal of Business Governance and Ethics, and Business Ethics: A European Review), the field also comprises several scholarly journals which specialise in (business and management) ethics education. To mention a few: the Journal of Business Ethics Education, the Academy of Management Learning and Education, the Journal of Management Education, and, the latest addition, the International Journal for Ethics Education, which was launched at the end of 2016. Even so, the search for ways in which educational institutes could teach ethics effectively, or rather, educate responsible professionals for the world of business and management has not come to an end, yet.

This textbook contributes to this endeavour in a very specific way. It follows an approach to business ethics that sees it as ‘ethical decision-making’ and tries to pre-empt the critique made of many textbooks by Murphy, Sharma and Moon (2012). Quoting Adams, Murphy et al. observed that these textbooks, in representing ethical decision-making, fail to reflect on decision-making at the individual level (instead of at the corporate level); they convey material that mainly focusses on theory rather than practice, they rarely embed ethical dilemmas ‘in the context of other aspects of the workplace’ (2012: 324) by resorting to the integration of themes and practices in education and, most of all: they fail to devote attention to the shaping of personal and professional values. Therefore, the book is composed in such a way as to introduce basic knowledge of ethical theory and the factors that influence ethical decision-making, but concentrates especially on case studies. The discussion questions related to these cases arguably facilitate the enhancement of ethical awareness, critical personal and professional reflexivity, and the skills needed in order to make sound ethical judgements and decisions. The cases cover a vast range of broad ethical issues in the field of business ethics, but especially focus on experiences (or possible exposure to ethical problems and dilemmas) employees might encounter in professional practice within the domains of the creative, cultural and service industries. These focal points are related to the three broad domains that make up the educational scope of Breda University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands, an institution for higher, professional/vocational and academic education. This university offers educational programmes which cover the fields of tourism, leisure, hospitality, facilities, logistics, mobility, urban development, game development and media and entertainment – fields which are not widely addressed in books on business ethics, at least not cohesively. For example, publications like Issues in Recreation and Leisure: Ethical Decision-Making (McLean and Yoder, 2005); Ethics in the Hospitality and Tourism Industry (Liebermann and Nissen, 2008); Values in Tourism: An Itinerary to Tourism Ethics (Gras-Dijkstra, 2009); and The Ethics of Tourism: Critical and Applied Perspectives (Lovelock and Lovelock, 2013) certainly contribute to the theme, but they mainly aim to cover issues – to some extent exhaustively – that are at stake within a specific sector. This textbook provides for ethical reflection on different, (inter)related fields in one publication.

The authors are predominantly senior scholars who are affiliated with Breda University of Applied Sciences and use different perspectives to explicate their themes. They represent quite a range of cultural backgrounds, such as Dutch, British, Irish, Portuguese, Brazilian, Palestinian, Afghan, Albanese and South African. Three of the contributors have appointments at other universities as well.

In conclusion: this textbook does not claim to be comprehensive, nor does it aim at educating business ethicists, or even building character; rather, as indicated earlier, it wants to be of service to lecturers and undergraduate students in higher and vocational education in the three domains mentioned. Based on an integrated and a multidisciplinary approach, it aims at raising moral sensitivity and ethical awareness, and supporting the development of the skills required for ethical decision-making. There is no overkill of (theoretical) information and the book could therefore also be of service to professionals who currently work in these industries, encounter similar dilemmas in their professional practice and are in need of training that could support moral development and ethical decision-making within their organisations.

In the following sections, the focus, pedagogical presuppositions, structure and content of the book, including an overview of the cases and ethical dilemmas explicated within it, will be discussed more broadly.

1.2 The creative, cultural and service industries

As indicated above, the focus of this book will be on recognising and addressing the ethical dilemmas that (future) professionals within the domains of the creative, cultural and service sectors might encounter in their work. Within Breda University of Applied Sciences, these domains include industries like tourism, leisure and hospitality, which focus not only on economic, but also on cultural and social value; industries that employ creative skills and talent in order to generate economic value, and also those industries that create such value through the provision of intangible products and services such as transport, retail, marketing and healthcare. There are no watershed divisions between those domains. On the contrary, leisure sectors such as tourism, sports, culture, events and media are becoming increasingly interlinked and require an integrated and multidisciplinary approach. Moreover, some sectors, such as leisure and tourism for example, have become interlinked with other (public) sectors in society, such as healthcare (as seen in the influence of leisure on health and the phenomenon of medical tourism), which adds to the relevance of bringing those fields together in one book. To illustrate the overlap between these industries, the scope of their domains will be briefly addressed next.

The creative industries are generally conceived as an increasingly important economic sector that rests on knowledge and information (intellectual property) that has been generated through creative action and innovation. This field is also referred to as the creative economy or the cultural sector, which apparently makes ‘creative industries’ a fuzzy term. It comprises forms such as video games, art, advertising, fashion, TV and radio, (online) publishing, film, music, crafts, design, museums and galleries (see Creative Industries, n.d.). Some scholars go to such lengths as to consider the educational industries, and the (public and private) services they provide, to be part of the creative industries (Hesmondhalgh, 2002: 12).

The cultural industries is generally understood to cover the production of, for example music, television, film, publishing, crafts, design, architecture, the visual and performing arts and advertising; but also, tourism, sports, events, entertainment, food, pastimes and festivals. Cultural activities are conceived as embracing those activities people, groups and communities value and enjoy. There is clearly an overlap with the themes mentioned under the umbrella of the creative industries. In fact, the cultural industries are considered by UNESCO, for example, to be identical with the creative industries and to comprise the creation, production and distribution of cultural goods, which are usually subjected to intellectual property rights (see Cultural industry, n.d.).

The service industries, also called the tertiary sector, comprises ‘intangible products’ such as services delivered to customers. Usually activities such as marketing and offering guidance and advice are central to these services. Here again, some overlap with themes from the other two domains mentioned is visible. Services could be delivered in fields such as accounting, banking, insurance and computer services, but also in those of hospitality, tourism, transport, entertainment, distribution and food services (see Service industries, n.d.).

Without going into it too deeply, it should be noted that a critique of strict distinctions between these three domains has, apart from any alleged conceptual confusion due to overlap in the fields they cover, also been made on a more fundamental level. Miller argues that the term ‘cultural’ has to a large extent been overtaken by ‘creative’, which has been adopted by economists to indicate activities which produce profit. Creativity is seen as input and not output. Since all economic sectors have cultural elements and since culture relates to ‘all the questions of managing populations and coping with a life after manufacturing’, the cultural industries deserve a ‘new’ conceptualisation and therefore should take their rightful place amongst these three (2009: 95–97). This endeavour will not be explored here, but the conceptual distinction between the three domains will be maintained (at least in the title of this book).

It would be impractical and unsatisfactory to attempt to address all the possible ethical dilemmas that could emerge within all these fields in one book. Therefore, a selection of cases has been made that covers fields from all three of those domains, which enables students to, by making cross-references, get an overview of (possible) dilemmas and problems that could be at stake in their own (future) professional practice.

1.3 Using cases: Pedagogical support

Education should arguably ideally contribute to students’ attainment of critical personal and professional reflexivity, moral maturity and the status of responsible global citizens. Taking responsibility for one’s own personal and professional ac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Ethics, culture, moral development and decision-making in business contexts
• Part II Ethical dilemmas in the creative, cultural and service industries
• Index