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Beyond Knowledge: A Study of Latin American Business Schools’ Efforts to Deliver a Value-Based Education

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Abstract

In our research, we examine the efforts made by Latin American business schools in the last decade to deliver a value-based education. We carry out a survey with a sample of faculty members and program directors from the whole region. We find that societal demands influenced the direction of managerial education toward values and social responsibility, changing contents and teaching methodologies in the process. Our research shows that the teaching of value-based contents—social responsibility, business ethics and environmental sustainability—has gained ground in the region in the last decade, and that the emphasis on value-based contents goes hand-in-hand with a more intensive use of active learning methodologies—the case method in particular. From the perspective of respondents, the emphasis on active learning seems to correlate positively with observed changes in students’ civility.

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Fig. 1

Source: Adapted from Reficco and Jaén 2015, p. 2541

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Notes

  1. The petrolão (“big oily”) scandal, around Petrobras diversion of payments to the Worker's Party and its allies, put various business tycoons in jail and ended up engulfing President Dilma Rousseff. It later came to light that Odebretch, the country's biggest construction company, had paid nothing less than $ 788 millions in bribes to officials in 11 countries—most of them Latin Americans. It became evident that this was far from an isolated bad judgment call by a few “bad apples”. On the contrary, corruption was embedded in company structure and regular operations: its “Division of Structured Operations”, according to the US Department of Justice, “effectively functioned as a stand-alone bribe department”.

  2. Director: Srikant Datar (Harvard Business School). Coordinators: Raquel Galindo-Dorado (IAP, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), Gustavo Herrero (HBS Latin America Research Center), María Helena Jaén (IESA), Francisco de Asís Martínez-Jerez (Harvard Business School).

  3. CENTRUM, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (Peru), ESPAE-ESPOL (Ecuador), Fundaçao Getùlio Vargas (Brazil), Fundaçao Dom Cabral (Brazil), Harvard Business School (USA), IAE Business School (Argentina), Instituto de Desarrollo Empresarial (Ecuador), IEEM, Universidad de Montevideo (Uruguay), IESA (Venezuela), INALDE, Universidad de la Sabana (Colombia), INCAE (Nicaragua-Costa Rica), Insper (Brazil), Instituto Panamericano de Alta Dirección de Empresa (Mexico), Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (Mexico), Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (Mexico),  Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Colombia), Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (Chile), Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez (Chile), Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain), Universidad de los Andes (Colombia), Universidad de Palermo (Argentina), Universidad de San Andrés (Argentina), Universidad del Desarrollo (Chile), Universidad del Externado de Colombia (Colombia), Universidad del Pacífico (Peru), Universidad del Rosario (Colombia), Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (Argentina), Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil).

  4. The research was funded by the 28 participating schools or partners´ schools. The Colloquium on Rethinking Graduate Management Education in Latin America was co-funded by HBS and participating schools.

  5. Multilatinas are Latin American-based multinational firms, or more precisely, “firms that leveraged domestic positions to expand their operations throughout Latin America” (Casanovas et al. 2009, p. 2).

  6. Per the Free Dictionary, the term “well-rounded” stands for something that is “developed and well-balanced in a range or variety of aspects.” In the context of managerial education, it has been used to describe programs that go beyond the transmission of knowledge “in traditional subjects, such as finance, strategy, operations and the like”. Matt Symonds, “Trying to Create a Well-Rounded M.B.A.” Forbes, April 12th, 2009.

  7. These three terms (sustainability, social responsibility, and business ethics) have been shaped in different fields by different scholarly traditions. While in their original formulations, they were defined narrowly, in the last years they have converged and overlapped. Thus, sustainability has ceased to be understood only in terms of the environment and is now understood by many to encompass the social and environmental domains. The same could be said of the CSR and business ethics literatures: they both have credible claims to include the other two domains. To prevent confusions, in this paper we shall only use those terms in their narrow meanings.

  8. Together they represent what is informally known as the “triple crown.” Wikipedia, “The triple accreditation.” Available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_accreditation, accessed on Nov 29, 2016.

  9. Headquartered in Santiago, Chile, it features a region-wide monthly edition and regularly updated articles online, as well as country-specific editions in Chile, Brazil, Ecuador and Mexico. Available at http://www.worldcrunch.com/source-partner/america-economia-2.html, accessed on Nov 10, 2016.

  10. We used non-parametric analysis instead of Anova due to variance heterogeneity and sample sizes.

Abbreviations

AACSB:

The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business

AMBA:

The Association of MBAs

CLADEA:

Latin American Council of Business Schools or Consejo Latinoamericano de Escuelas de Administración in Spanish

CR:

Corporate responsibility

CSR:

Corporate social responsibility

EFMD:

The European foundation for management development

EQUIS:

EFMD quality improvement system

PBL:

Problem-based learning

PRME:

Principles for responsible management education

SEE:

Social, environmental and ethical

SH:

Stakeholders

UNDP:

United Nations Development Programme

US:

United States

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management, Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia

    Ezequiel Reficco, María Helena Jaén & Carlos Trujillo

  2. IESA, Caracas, Venezuela

    María Helena Jaén

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  1. Ezequiel Reficco
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  2. María Helena Jaén
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  3. Carlos Trujillo
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Correspondence to Ezequiel Reficco.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.

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Appendix 1

Appendix 1

Table 3 Number of respondents by school type and country
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Reficco, E., Jaén, M.H. & Trujillo, C. Beyond Knowledge: A Study of Latin American Business Schools’ Efforts to Deliver a Value-Based Education. J Bus Ethics 156, 857–874 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3634-z

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