Business school conferences typically don’t include research from anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers and military scholars, but “Morality in the Marketplace” was no ordinary conference.
The event, which took place at the Freeman School in October 2014, marked the first in-person meeting of the Moral Research Lab, a virtual group of interdisciplinary scholars who study morality and moral decision-making. Nine researchers affiliated with the lab — including scholars from business, economics, psychology, philosophy and anthropology as well as representatives from the military, the National Institutes of Health and even a corporate fraud examiner — presented research aimed at better understanding why people behave badly in the market.
Janet Schwartz, left, and Peter McGraw were organizers of an interdisciplinary research conference on morality and moral decision-making.
“I think the thing that’s interesting is that it’s interdisciplinary,” says Janet Schwartz, assistant professor of marketing at the Freeman School and organizer of the conference. “The researchers came together from all over to present their ideas about how to make this research more relevant to the practice of ethics.”
Conference co-organizer Peter McGraw, associate professor of marketing at the University of Colorado Boulder, says the conference’s purpose wasn’t to tell people how to behave in the
marketplace, but it’s his hope that the research presented can be used by policymakers and executives to help create more ethical work environments.
“When people think about a business school, they often have a very narrow perception of what they do,” McGraw says. “Business schools can inform public policy, support entrepreneurs or help consumer advocates, so any time you can help understand the marketplace at some micro or macro level, the ability to prescribe expands greatly. Business schools have a much broader mission than most people assume, and I think a conference like this can help highlight that.”
“Morality in the Marketplace” was co-sponsored by the Freeman School, the Murphy Institute, Duke University’s Center for Advanced Hindsight, and the D. W. Mitchell Lecture Fund as part of the Provost’s Faculty Seminars in Interdisciplinary Research.
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