Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-2pzkn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-14T16:24:14.269Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Empty Ethics and Reasonable Responsibility: Vocabularies of Motive among Law and Business Students

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Debra Schleef
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Despite professional norms of being socially responsible and providing service to the underprivileged, the attitudes of law students toward ethical duties and public service bear similarities to those of business students. Using data from multiple interviews with law and business school students at one university, I find that these attitudes develop in response to the expectations of peers and professors during school experiences. Ethics courses are marginalized by the schools, and courses focus on such pragmatic issues as the professional code of conduct (law school) or how the appearance of social responsibility affects the bottom line (business school). Provided with little guidance on what they might do when they encounter real ethical dilemmas, students larn vocabularies of motive concerning how lawyers and managers should balance profits, carry out responsibilities to various stakeholders, and weigh ethical concerns, and they then moderate their own expressions of extreme self-interest or self-sacrifice. Both groups learn to maintain social responsibilities only within reason, emphasizing the separation of work from personal convictions. These elements have implications for the performance of public service in their future careers, as well as for a scholarly understanding of professionalism.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , Summer 1997 , pp. 619 - 650
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1997 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abel, Richard. 1989. American Lawyers. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Berle, Adolf A. Jr. 1954. The Twentieth-Century Capitalist Revolution. New York: Har-court, Brace.Google Scholar
Berle, Adolf A. Jr., and Means, Gardiner C. 1932. The Modem Corporation and Private Property New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Bryne, John A. 1992. The Best Business Schools. Business Week, 26 October 1992, 60–70.Google Scholar
Child, John. 1969. The Business Enterprise in Modem Industrial Society. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Earley, James. 1957. Comment. American Economic Review 37: 330–35.Google Scholar
Francis, Arthur. 1980. Company Objectives, Managerial Motivations, and the Behaviour of Large Firms: An Empirical Test of the Theory of “Managerial” Capitalism. Cambridge Journal of Economics 4: 349–61.Google Scholar
Freidson, Eliot. 1970. Professional Dominance: The Social Structure of Medical Care. Chicago: Aldine.Google Scholar
Freidson, Eliot. 1972. The Profession of Medicine. New York: Dodd, Mead.Google Scholar
Freidson, Eliot. 1986. Professional Powers: A Study of the Institutionalization of Formal Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Granfield, Robert. 1992. Making Elite Lawyers: Visions of Law at Harvard and Beyond. New York: Routledge Press.Google Scholar
Hugstad, Paul S. 1983. The Business School in the 1980's: Liberalism versus Vocationalism. New York: Praeger Press.Google Scholar
Jackall, Robert. 1988. Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kaysen, Carl. 1957. The Social Significance of the Modern Corporation. American Economic Review 47: 311–19.Google Scholar
Larson, Magali Safarti. 1977. The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Marris, Robin. 1964. The Economic Theory of “Managerial” Capitalism. New York: Free Press of Glencoe.Google Scholar
Mills, C. Wright. 1940. Situated Action and Vocabularies of Motive. American Sociological Review 5: 904–13.Google Scholar
Nichols, Theo. 1969. Ownership, Ideology, and Control. London: George Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Pahl, Raymond E., and Winkler, John. 1974. The Economic Elite: Theory and Practice. In Elites and Power in British Society, ed. Stanworth, Philip and Giddens, Anthony, 102–22. London: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Parsons, Talcott. 1954. Essays in Sociological Theory. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.Google Scholar
Pahl, Raymond E., and Winkler, John. 1962. Law and Social Control. In Law and Sociology, ed. Evan, William M., 56–72. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.Google Scholar
Poor, Daniel. 1994. Organizational Culture and Professional Selves: The Impact of Large Firm Practice upon Young Lawyers. Ph.D. diss., Department of Sociology, City University of New York.Google Scholar
Powell, Michael J. 1993. Professional Innovation: Corporate Lawyers and Private Lawmaking. Law and Social Inquiry 18: 423–52.Google Scholar
Sarat, Austin, and Felstiner, William. 1988. Law and Social Relations: Vocabularies of Motive in Lawyer/Client Interaction. Law and Society Review 22: 737–69.Google Scholar
Schwartz, Audrey J. 1980. Law, Lawyers, and Law School: Perspectives from the First-Year Class. Journal of Legal Education 30: 437–69.Google Scholar
Seider, Maynard S. 1977. Corporate Ownership, Control, and Ideology: Support for Behavioral Similarity. Social Science Research 62: 113–28.Google Scholar
Stover, Robert. 1989. Making It and Breaking It: The Fate of Public Interest Commitment during Law School. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Useem, Michael. 1980. Corporations and the Corporate Elite. Annual Review of Sociology 6: 41–77.Google Scholar
Useem, Michael. 1984. The Inner Circle: Large Corporations and the Rise of Business Political Activity in the U.S. and U.K. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Williamson, Oliver E. 1964. The Economics of Discretionary Behavior: Managerial Objectives in a Theory of the Firm. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar