Education
Our research fields are of key importance to current and future generations of students at Maastricht University's School of Business and Economics. “Millennials want to work for employers committed to values and ethics”, according to a headline in The Guardian (5 May 2015). This has significant ramifications for employers. Ethics can be seen as an outcome of social processes (culture) and leadership. Wherever people work together to achieve results, they create structures and processes to get the work done, and to assess the quality of its processes and outcomes.
One of the most profound problems in preparing young people for challenging new jobs in times of exponential change is that higher education barely questions the assumptions on which preparation for practice is based. The 2008 financial crisis provided a dramatic demonstration of how society has changed and the challenges we face when preparing young people for the global marketplace/workforce. It may not come as a surprise that professions put so much effort in the development of codes of conduct, ethics, and continuous training and assessment to ensure that clients can trust the services delivered by professionals. Preparation of young professionals is increasingly challenging, because they seem to have lost the trust of society, and must deal with competing ends of trust and autonomy, care and profit, authority and accountability.
Our research theme offers the potential to develop new courses in current MSc programmes (e.g. fraudulent financial reporting) or even a whole new postgraduate programme (e.g. forensic accounting and fraud auditing). Next, our research theme will contribute, within the setting of UMIO, to tailor-made consultancy and corporate training. Finally, we will offer opportunities for our BSc, MSc and PhD students to join our project and contribute to its development through thesis projects and internships.
Bachelor's students
Ethics, Organizations and Society course (EBC2081)
Course coordinator: Professor Harry Hummels
Researchers and master's students
The CEL research community represents a wide range of research disciplines interested in how culture and leadership relate to the ethical decisions people make at work, and how they attach meaning to errors, risk-taking and fraudulent actions. Contact our coordinators for more information, or visit our People page.
Practitioners and postgraduate students
Masterclass in Governance & Culture (UMIO)
Masterclass in Governance, Regulation and Overseers (UMIO)
Executive Master in Cultural Leadership (UMIO)