The Good Place in Your Classroom: Recommendations for Teaching Management Ethics

Abstract

The sitcom The Good Place can be used by management instructors to teach ethical frameworks and concepts. This series, familiar to many undergraduate students in the US, features a Professor of Ethics and Moral Philosophy who gives mini lectures applied to what the characters are experiencing. These mini lectures can be shown to undergraduates studying ethics in a full course or as a subsection of courses such as management, organizational behavior, or leadership. This article provides information on particular clips that management instructors can use, recommendations for discussion topics with prompts provided, and a comparative pedagogical analysis of using this resource.

(Re)thinking Ethics and Moral Behaviors as Complex Contagions: A Qualitative Content Analysis of Networks in The Good Place

“…Research studies have limited their scope to innovative exploration of ethics in media narratives (May, 2022;Pickens, 2022), especially for efficacious classroom teaching (Meyer, 2020;van Esch et al, 2021). Particularly, an educational study conducted by Meyer (2020) used episodes of The Good Place as a case study to teach students of a Masters' level ethics class in public administration.…”