Virtue-Based Management

Drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre's book, After Virtue, we criticize current approaches to business ethics and corporate social responsibility. Both Kantian approaches that stress the importance of good intentions, and utilitarian approaches that stress the importance of good results come under MacIntyre's critique, as do Moore's ethical intuitionism and Stevenson's emotivism. In their place, a return to Aristotle shows us the importance of good habits, good practices, and the unity of the several virtues. The example of Winston Churchill is used to illustrate virtue-based leadership.     

PROBLEM‐SOLVING SCHEMATA FOR TEXT TYPES: A COMPARISON OF NARRATIVE AND EXPOSITORY TEXT STRUCTURES

In this paper we argue that comprehension is a problem solving activity and that different problem solving schemata exist for different types of texts, both narrative and expository. When processing the text, the reader uses these problem solving schemata to construct meaning of the context and to satisfy personal reading goals. For instance, comprehension of a text, such as a short story, a folk tale, or even a passage from a science book, can be viewed as a problem solving activity. Bransford and Stein's (1984) IDEAL model identifies the problem solver as one who (I) identifies problems, (D) defines and represents problems, (E) explores possible strategies for solving the problem, (A) acts on those strategies, and (L) looks back and evaluates the effects of those strategies. This problem solving model aptly describes what readers as problem solvers do when comprehending a text. The reader as a problem solver identifies and defines specific reading goals. To understand the content of the passage, the reader as a problem solver uses domain‐specific knowledge about the topic, prior experience in reading that type of text to explore a multitude of strategies. While reading the text, the reader uses those strategies to construct meaning about the text. After reading a passage, the proficient reader as a problem solver evaluates what has been read and checks to see if one's reading goals have been met.     

Scenario Planning: The Basics

This article covers the basics of scenario planning: Why scenarios? What are scenarios? How do you develop scenarios? After covering the preliminaries—the constitution of the scenario team; interviews; research; the identification of a focal issue; set and setting for a scenario workshop; staffing; the trajectory of a scenario planning project—the article moves on to describe several methods for identifying a finite set of diverse scenario logics. After a set of scenarios has been developed, there are several different routes from scenarios to strategy. Early indicators can help identify which of several scenarios is in fact unfolding.     

MORAL THEME COMPREHENSION IN THIRD GRADERS,FIFTH GRADERS,AND COLLEGE STUDENTS

Abstract

Proponents of character education (e.g., Bennett, author of The Book of Virtues) argue that children should hear moral stories in order to develop moral character. But do children necessarily understand the moral message of a narrative? Third and fifth grade students and adults were tested for their ability to apprehend the moral messages in three stories selected from The Book of Virtues and other sources. After listening and reading along with three moral stories, participants were asked to generate the message, select the message from a list of possible messages and select a vignette with the same message from three possible vignettes. Subjects also heard and read a non‐moral story and answered comprehension questions about it. Results indicate a developmental difference in moral theme understanding unexplained by reading comprehension scores alone.