Teaching Business Students to Care: Perspective-Taking and the Narrative Enabling of Moral Imagination

How can educators equip business students to adopt an ethics of care perspective? An ethics of care perspective requires moral imagination of the self, the other, the self-other relationship, and displacement of motivation towards others. It stands in contrast to the deeply embedded firm-centric managerial perspective in business schools. Without a structured approach, students may struggle to adopt a care perspective. I propose three specifically designed narrativizing exercises that can act as vehicles for moral imagination for care by increasing student awareness of tensions between the self and others and motivating a harmonizing of these tensions. Autobiographical narrativizing surfaces discordance between a student’s managerial and non-managerial selves and invites an imaginative recomposition of these selves. Vicarious narrativizing occurs through stories of others, creating pathways between students' self-perspectives and that of others. Embodied narrativizing is a whole body and mind exercise in narrativizing the mental, visceral, and behavioural experiences during preparation for an upcoming interaction with another, along with narrativizing the actual interaction embedded in the other’s context. These three forms of narrativizing present complementary risks and benefits and cumulatively enable moral imagination for a care perspective.