A Primer on Critical Thinking and Business Ethics: Critical Thinking Applied to Business Management (Volume 2) encapsulates new developments in Critical Thinking skills for MBA students, in the form of a broad-based cross disciplinary primer in business management, with a special focus on business ethics. Each volume encourages critical thinking as a higher order type of thinking that can be taught, leading to a life of rationality, ethics and empathy, which is urgently required of leaders in a global environment where fraud and corruption are rife.
Volume 2 explores: Critical Thinking as applied to free market enterprise capitalism; to profit maximization presumptive models of capitalist thinking; to challenges of student assurance of learning; for owning moral responsibility for turbulent markets; and to domesticate global social 'wicked' problems. It is essential reading for all MBA students, as well as for researchers and practitioners.
Table of Contents:
Chapter 1. Critical Thinking Applied to Free Enterprise Market Capitalism
Chapter 2. Critical Thinking Applied to Profit Maximization and Its Presumptive Capitalist Models
Chapter 3. Critical Thinking for Owning Moral Responsibility for Turbulent Markets
Chapter 4. Critical Thinking for Redesigning the MBA Program: A Paradigm Shift to Respond to Its Major Criticisms
Chapter 5. Critical Thinking to Harness Global Social “Wicked” Problems: New Curriculum, Content, and Challenges in the Redesigned MBA Program
About the Author :
Oswald A. J. Mascarenhas, SJ, JRD TATA Chair Professor of Business Ethics
Munish Thakur, Associate Professor, Strategic Management, XLRI, India Jamshedpur
Payal Kumar, Principal Academic Advisor, Indian School of Hospitality
Review :
The post-pandemic world presents leaders with unprecedented levels of dynamism and uncertainty, leaving top management teams no choice but to engage in critical thinking—higher order analyses in which assumptions are questioned and disconfirmation is no less important than confirmation. With critical thinking coming to the forefront of leadership development, we as educators need to reflect on our present MBA curriculum in terms of both content and delivery. These three monographs are a must-read for anyone interested in developing graduate-level critical thinking skills and teaching future corporate leaders how to take a more nuanced perspective on the paradigm-shifting challenges they are likely to face when transitioning into their managerial career.
Organizational leaders continually tell us that what they need most are employees that know how to think and learn. Such skills are necessary for identifying problems, collaborating on solutions, and driving organizational change. Including these monographs on critical thinking in the MBA curriculum will go a long way to providing this essential need for the market.
As someone who teaches business leadership and human values and courses introducing and providing frameworks for analyzing healthcare markets, critical thinking is essential for me and my students. These authors clearly motivate the importance of critical thinking and present techniques to encourage students’ development. I could envision these books enhancing my preparation of students, who will become business leaders so they sharpen interpretations and decisions regarding the production and delivery of healthcare services, to create value for those with a financial stake in their organizations’ successes and for stakeholders including suppliers, patients, employees, and the community in which healthcare organizations operate.
