Abstract
For several years, MBA students enrolled in a Business & Society/Business Ethics class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have been volunteering their services at homeless shelters and in low-income communities. Students also work with low-income residents and relevant stakeholders on evolutionary team projects aimed at improving living conditions in low-income communities. These projects include starting a grocery co-op, credit union, day-care center, job training center and a transportation business. In addition, student groups develop service networks that link low-income communities with student organizations, other university professors and United Way volunteers. This article provides an evolutionary summary of these projects with the hope that other professors will adopt them for their classes.
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References
Collins, Denis and Thomas O'Rourke: 1994, Ethical Dilemmas in Business (South-Western Publishing Company, Cincinnati).
Collins, Denis and Laura Page: 1995, ‘Shifting from the Immanuel Kant to the Ted Koppel Paradigm for Integrating Business Ethics in the Curriculum: A Case Study’, Working paper.
Collins, Denis and Steven L. Wartick: 1995, ‘Business and Society/Business Ethics Courses: Twenty Years at the Crossroads’, Business & Society 34(1), 51–89.
Freire, Paulo: 1971, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Herder and Herder, New York).
Galbraith, John Kenneth: 1992, The Culture of Contentment (Houghton Mifflin, New York).
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Schwarz, John E. and Thomas J. Volgy: 1992, The Forgotten Americans: Thirty Million Working Poor in the Land of Opportunity (W.W. Norton & Company, New York).
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Denis Collins is an Assistant Professor of Business Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published numerous articles in the areas of business ethics, business and society, social philosophy, participatory management and gainsharing. He is coauthor, with Thomas O'Rourke, of Ethical Dilemmas in Business (South-Western Publishing, 1994) and coeditor, with Mark Starik, of Sustaining the Natural Environment: Empirical Studies on the Interface Between Nature and Organizations (JAI Press, 1995).
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Collins, D. Serving the homeless and low-income communities through Business & Society/Business Ethics class projects: The University of Wisconsin-Madison plan. Journal of Business Ethics 15, 67–85 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00380263
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00380263