MEMBERS WHO JOINTLY OVERSEE THE ACTIVIties OF SBE

Board of Directors

Each year members of the Society for Business Ethics elect a new member to the Board of Directors. The Board is the governing body of our Society and is responsible for all major policy decisions affecting the Society. Members of the Board of Directors serve a five year term. During the second year on the Board an individual serves as secretary, during the third year as program chair (for our annual conference), and during the fourth year as our Society’s president.

Miguel Alzola

Secretary

Miguel Alzola

Bio coming soon.

Andy Gustafson

Executive Director

Andy Gustafson

Andy is Professor of Business Ethics and Society at Creighton University, where he has taught business ethics since 2005. Andy first got involved in the SBE while in graduate school at Marquette University. At Creighton he teaches undergrad and graduate courses mostly in business ethics, along with a Business, Faith and Common Good course, and travel courses to Las Vegas and South China. His published articles can be found in a wide variety of business ethics, philosophy, and ethics journals and handbooks. He is also founder and director of Creighton’s Business, Faith and Common Good Institute which brings many speakers to campus and hosts on a fall symposium each year.

Andy has been working out a utilitarian approach to business ethics, as well as considering the overlap between greatest happiness (Utilitarianism) and common good (Catholic Social Thought) perspectives. Recently he has been writing about utilitarianism as a humanistic approach to business ethics, Frank Knight’s view of entrepreneurship, and on the historical impact of utilitarianism on law in the U.S., as well as championing and explicating how the Economy of Communion movement in particular provides a valuable humanistic approach to business values and practices. His wife Celeste Harvey is also a philosopher. He is very grateful for the opportunity to serve the SBE for the 2022-2027 term.

 

 

Kendy Hess

Treasurer

Kendy Hess

I am currently in my second career, serving as the Brake Smith Associate Professor of Social Philosophy and Ethics at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. In my first life I got a JD from Harvard Law School (1993) and practiced corporate environmental law for fifteen years, becoming a partner at Altheimer & Gray in Chicago and then moving to an Of Counsel position. My primary practice focused on brownfields redevelopment, mergers and acquisitions, and environmental compliance. During this time I also sang semi-professionally and got an MA in Liberal Studies from Northwestern University (don’t want to be one-dimensional!). I then abandoned Chicago and most of my law career in 2003 to study at the University of Colorado-Boulder, though I continued a small practice until 2008. I graduated with a PhD in philosophy in 2009.

My core scholarship project argues for a metaphysically robust conception of group agency that will support the imposition of traditional moral obligations on firms and other highly organized groups; I get far fewer incredulous stares these days, so I’m calling that a win. More recent scholarly projects include the possibilities of a more holistic conception of the professional, questions about the expanding political role of firms, and the role of work in a flourishing human life. My teaching centers on ethics and political philosophy with a special focus on the environment and contemporary business practice. My most exciting project in this area has been the development of a liberal arts program – an interdisciplinary minor in Ethics, Society, and the Institution of Business – which explores the role of business in a just, flourishing, and sustainable society.

In addition to traditional service for my College and my profession, I am a trustee for the Native Plant Trust – the nation’s first conservation organization devoted exclusively to plants – where I serve on the Governance Committee and the IDEA Taskforce (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access). I’ve been an active, enthusiastic member of the SBE ever since I first discovered it at the 2011 meeting of the American Philosophical Association (shout out to Nien-hê Hsieh and Waheed Hussain!), and am delighted to have this chance to give something back.

Frank den Hond

BEQ co-Editor in Chief

Frank den Hond

Frank den Hond is the Ehrnrooth Professor of Management and Organization at Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland, and affiliated with Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His academic trajectory started with a Master degree in chemistry and developed via junior research positions in science and society departments, a doctoral thesis on corporate environmental strategy and innovation, and a position as faculty member in strategic management in a social science department, to a full professorship at Hanken. In his current position, Frank teaches undergraduate and doctoral students in topics such as business ethics, research methods, and organization theory. His research interests have covered a range of topics in the fields of organization theory and business and society; the results have been published in several of the leading scholarly journals as well as in edited volumes (Scholar Google—SiR_gKsAAAAJ). Frank is currently a co-editor in chief of Business Ethics Quarterly. He is a past co-editor in chief of Organization Studies and a past member of the Board of the European Group for Organizational Studies (EGOS). He spends much of his leisure time cooking, gardening and enjoying various outdoor activities. 

Tae Wan Kim

Conference Chair

Tae Wan Kim

I am Associate Professor of Business Ethics and Xerox Junior Faculty Chair at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business. I have been a member of Society for Business Ethics since 2007, when I was a PHD student in Ethics & Legal Studies at Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. My current research topics are related to business uses of artificial intelligence. “What role and responsibilities should business take in the coming machine age?” “Can ethics be taught to AI?” “Should Google respect data subjects’ ‘right to explanation’?” “What would be a cross-cultural AI ethics like?” “Is Confucianism useful to ground AI ethics in China?” As the questions are inter-disciplinary, I have been engaged with cross-sectoral fields. I have served as a committee member of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)’s Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems, Halcyon House’s Principles for Connected Intelligent Technologies, and Program Committee of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Joint Conference on Artificial intelligence, Society and Ethics. In addition to my primary position at the business school, I am also a faculty member of the Block Center for Technology and Society at Heinz College and CyLab at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science. To answer various questions, I have published in Business Ethics Quarterly, Journal of Business Ethics, Artificial Intelligence Magazine, IEEE Computer, Frontiers in Blockchain, Berkeley Business Law Journal, Ethics and Information Technology, Academy of Management Learning & Education, Proceedings of ACM Computer Human Interaction (CHI), Proceedings of AAAI/ACM on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Society, Proceedings of IEEE Privacy-Aware Computing, and a book chapter of Robot Ethics 2.0 (Oxford University Press), Cambridge Handbook of Research Approaches to Business Ethics and Corporate Responsibility (Cambridge University Press), Humanizing Business (Springer), Alternative Theories of the Firm (Routledge), and Business & Society 360 (Emerald). I had honor to receive Business Ethics Quarterly’s Best Article Award (in 2015, 2017), Journal of Business Ethics’ Star Reviewer (2017), Carnegie Bosch Institute’s Research Award (principal Investigator, $240,513), was selected as one of the “11 Ground-breaking World-changing Wharton PhDs” by Wharton Magazine (2018). Finally, I am on the editorial boards of Business Ethics Quarterly, Journal of Business Ethics, and Business & Society Review.

Christopher Wong Michaelson

President

Christopher Wong Michaelson

Christopher Wong Michaelson is a philosopher with 25 years of experience advising business leaders pursuing meaning and providing work with a purpose and is the author (with Jen Tosti-Kharas) of Is Your Work Worth It? (forthcoming in 2024 from PublicAffairs).

After earning his Ph.D. in philosophical ethics and aesthetics from the University of Minnesota, Christopher joined the New York office of Price Waterhouse (now PwC) as one of the first five consultants in a business ethics practice in 1998. A few years into his business career, he accepted a full-time faculty position at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, teaching corporate ethics while keeping a foot in practice. For a while he was PwC’s only one-day-a-week employee, working on ten editions of its Global CEO Survey and as its first Strategy Officer to the World Economic Forum before leaving in 2016.

Christopher went from Wharton to NYU’s Stern School of Business in 2005, where he continues on the Business and Society faculty and has taught professional responsibility and corporate governance. After moving home to Minneapolis, he also joined one of the largest business ethics faculties in the world at the University of St. Thomas in 2008, where he is now the Opus Distinguished Professor of Principled Leadership and Academic Director of the Melrose and The Toro Company Center for Principled Leadership. He is currently President of the Society for Business Ethics, affiliate faculty with the University of Minnesota’s Center for Bioethics, an academic fellow of the Ethics and Compliance Initiative, on several editorial boards, and the host of Work in Progress with Christopher Michaelson.

He lives with his wife, three kids, and two dogs near an urban lake in Minneapolis.

Mollie Painter

BEQ co-Editor in Chief

Mollie Painter

Bio coming soon.

Alejo Sison

Immediate Past President

Alejo Sison

Dear Fellow SBE Members,
My name is Alejo José G. Sison and I would like to thank you for the opportunity to serve you as member of the SBE Board. First, let me tell you a bit about myself.
Originally from the Philippines, I left Manila to pursue Philosophy studies in Spain. I eventually earned a doctorate writing on Ancient Greek Ethics. Then I got my first job teaching… in a Business School! It was painful, but I learned a lot about ethics in the professions and the challenges of presenting it to an audience sometimes not only uninclined, but perhaps even hostile to such matters.
How? By relating ethics to flourishing! Who wouldn’t want that? And that’s how I got started on the virtue ethics approach, which connects business with the economy and politics, in a generally Aristotelian framework.
For family reasons I returned to Manila and taught at a small liberal arts college with a graduate school in economics and business. After a couple of years, I was fortunate to get a Fulbright Scholarship at Harvard. It was amazing to see how professors and students engaged with the different disciplines of law, psychology, sociology, technology, and so forth, looking for ways to advance their own research concerns. I also had the chance to meet Mike Hoffman, in the Managing Ethics in Organizations program at Bentley. He invited me to be a fellow at the Center for Business Ethics and encouraged me greatly in my career.
In due course I returned to the University of Navarra in Spain which has hosted me since. Thanks to its network of partner universities, I have taught in several programs in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Meanwhile, I served as member then president of the European Business Ethics Network (EBEN) from 2009-2012. I also carried out editorial tasks in the Journal of Business Ethics, Business Ethics – A European Review, and our own Business Ethics Quarterly, among others. For the academic year 2018-2019, I am Visiting Ordinary Professor at the Busch School of the Catholic University of America.
You can find out more about my work at my personal academic webpage and blog, Work, Virtues, and Flourishing.