How a catchy bass line might someday resonate beyond my business ethics classroom: Rock music in management learning

Introduction: “Under pressure”

Several years ago, when my American students arrived in London, bleary-eyed, from what for many of them was their first flight overseas, their first assignment was to find their way by Tube to their home-stays. Talk about pressure. They had studied maps of the London Underground at orientation, but, as we sometimes admit in management classrooms, what makes sense in theory does not always resonate in practice. They were rolling large suitcases containing everything they had packed for an entire semester. They spoke American, not the Queen’s English. They shied away from busy elevators, a.k.a. “lifts,” and most had never seen a subway car. How would they fare in a crowded train during rush hour?

Their next assignment after acclimating for a weekend was to navigate their way back to our Central London classroom for Monday morning Business Ethics. There, they were greeted by the catchiest bass line in rock music, seven notes which repeat 14 times before David Bowie interrupts Freddie Mercury’s scat with these words: “Pressure! Pushing down on me/Pressing down on you/No man ask for.” On the video screen, they saw grainy images of their potential futures: commuters entering congested trains, unemployment lines, Wall Street, Nosferatu, explosions, and love. They will always associate that bass line with their inaugural study abroad, their first experience of self-reliance, their realization that they had it within themselves to survive under pressure, and – I hope, someday, when they need it most during the moral convulsions of their careers – daring to care enough about business ethics to summon their implicit memories of our class.

Problem: How to make business ethics resonate

Business ethicists are notoriously insecure about the resonance of our subject matter. Business ethics is one of the “unsettled humanities” (the subject of the Call for Papers to which this essay responds) in a management curriculum that tends to value instrumental and measurable goods. The content of business ethics is “ambiguous and amorphous” (Beggs et al., 2006: 5). Students (Giacalone and Promislo, 2013) and practitioners (Forbes, 1987) challenge the efficacy of ethics courses and pedagogy. We business ethicists even regularly raise doubts and ask questions of ourselves (Dean and Beggs, 2006; Furman, 1990; Martin, 1982; Pamental, 1989; Purcell, 1977; Wynd and Mager, 1989), scrutinizing the place of ethics in the management curriculum (Rutherford et al., 2012). Our legitimacy and job security depend upon the belief that ethics education in business schools can decrease the distance between “moral persons” and “moral managers” (Association for the Advancement of Collegiate Schools of Business [AACSB], 2004). Yet, ironically, we benefit from overreaction to moral failure, when, in the aftermath of every wave of business scandals, attention to ethics education rises (e.g. Alsop, 2006; Etzioni, 2002; Jones, 1989). Meanwhile, we are loath to assume responsibility for former students’ misbehavior. We acknowledge the gaps between classroom theory and management practice (e.g. Soltes, 2017), between deciding and doing what is right (e.g. Gentile, 2017), and between awareness and action (e.g. Baker, 2013), mindful of limitations upon our ability to reform students’ moral character (Hartman, 2006; McDonald and Donleavy, 1995). Yet, we take offense to skeptics’ claim that ethics cannot be taught (e.g. Dean and Beggs, 2006; Etzioni, 2002; Hooker, 2004).

Even as we struggle for political legitimacy in business and management learning, we are in battle with ourselves. Business schools originally assigned the teaching of business ethics to philosophers. Those philosophers would foist moral theory and logic upon sometimes skeptical managers-in-waiting (Bowie, 2004; DeGeorge, 2004; Ferris, 1996). Yet, psychology (Kohlberg, 1969) and neuroscience (Greene, 2015; Robertson et al., 2017) have cast doubt on whether students of traditional college age have the moral maturity and brain development to make complex cognitive moral judgments. With the dominance of social science among management scholars – and the concomitant rise and distrust in reason of behavioral ethics (e.g. Bazerman and Tenbrunsel, 2011; Haidt, 2012) – business ethics pedagogy has become an increasingly complex amalgam of behavioral and normative ethics (e.g. De Los Reyes et al., 2017; Schwartz, 2017). We have conceded that human beings are “predictably irrational” (Ariely, 2008) but have made limited progress toward solving the problem.

This essay will not finally resolve these tensions – between moral persons and moral managers, and between right knowledge and right action. However, I hope that the unsettling approach it introduces will support the goal of making business ethics education about these tensions resonate beyond the classroom in practice. Coming to academia from business, I had lived and worked in the world of big city, big firm consulting to which many of my students aspired. My doctorate in philosophical ethics helped me to teach my students about moral reason and to tell them about the difference between the illusory good life of material wealth and the enduring good life of philosophical wisdom. Yet, I often in my consulting career saw moral reason fall apart under the spell of material reward. I worried that my students would forget the decision methods we learned in the heat of some career- and character-defining moment 5 or 10 years hence. Amid growing unease about the practical value of a liberal arts education (e.g. Colby et al., 2011), it seemed to me that the humanities still had important work to do in a business school that might unsettle students’ stereotypes about the kinds of values and behaviors that must predominate in business. To that end, I sought out songs that I hoped would resonate with them into their uncertain futures, amid the pressures and promises of business.

Thesis: Rock songs and resonance

One of my familiar refrains to my business ethics students is that I wish for them to be essentially the same people they are at work as they are with their close relations, the people who know and love them for their basic goodness. My stating this early on in their encounters with me reassures them that I have not come into their lives to change who they are, which I probably could not do, even if change was needed. It also acknowledges that nearly all of us want to be good people but may be committed to the false belief that business success always requires us to betray our better angels. Further, it recognizes that the tension between their identities as moral persons and moral managers will persist long after they have left my classroom. Philosophically, we may share a common orientation toward some vague, universal conception of human well-being. Psychologically, our pursuit of well-being can be self-serving and self-deceiving. Convincing them that the common good and self-interest are not logically incompatible is less a matter of telling them than of showing them, of rhetorical persuasion through creative methods involving novels, stories, films, biographies, inspiring guests, and enervating music, among other tools.

This arts and humanities-inspired approach to teaching business ethics seeks (to paraphrase Maya Angelou, who might have been paraphrasing someone else (Seales, 2017)) to help students recall how they felt when they were in my class, not necessarily to memorize the exact details that they learned. In fact, I have come to disabuse myself of the notion that students need to remember every detail of the intellectual content on my syllabi. This is not to say that deep and detailed engagement with complex ideas is unnecessary. It is rather to suggest that it is more important for them to know how to engage with ideas in general than to memorize the particular ideas that I serve them. I seek to create an experience to go with a lesson, a palpable impression on my students that they can associate with what they think. Because an important part of the underlying assumptions we each bring to the classroom is that business competition creates pressure to compromise our moral ideals, I played Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” at the beginning of the first class of their London semester. My dabbling in song continued with Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” and The Clash’s “Rock the Casbah,” until an experiment became a commitment to playing a new song, every time we met.

The pedagogical thesis that I want to advance in this essay is that the arts and humanities – in particular, the blend of music and lyrics that constitute a rock song – can make business ethics learning resonate beyond the classroom. To be clear, I am advocating the intentional and targeted use of entertaining songs with lyrics or other features that are topically relevant and thus lead to intellectual inquiry – not just the chance connection of a pleasant tune to a claim that happened to made at a point in time. In the parlance of Ramsey and Fitzgibbons (2005), my use of songs is about learning by “being in [and out of] the classroom,” not teaching by “doing” (p. 333, emphasis added). My thesis may well apply to many fields of study, not just business or business ethics, but my experience and explanation of it pertains to business ethics and related fields. So, more precisely stated, my thesis is that the intentional and targeted use of songs related thematically to classroom content about business ethics will support student learning, in the classroom and beyond, also including long-term recollection of essential sentiments they experienced upon their early intellectual encounters with the prospect that they could be, simultaneously, moral persons and moral managers. In other words, business ethics can resonate in a catchy bass line.

My use of an auditory terminology is intentionally both figurative and literal. Figuratively, resonance includes engaging students’ reason in the classroom to impart knowledge about business ethics judgment. It also includes teaching them to recognize the cognitive biases that divide their “want” and “should” selves (Bazerman and Tenbrunsel, 2011). Furthermore, resonance includes instilling them with the memory of what we studied so that, long after they have left my classroom, when circumstances arise in which they most need to recall what they learned, they can be moved to act upon it. Literally, the role of music in my teaching is for it to “re-sound” with students – through intellectual examination and emotional reverberation and to echo over time. In other words, my conception of resonance follows an Aristotelian account of practical wisdom, which distinguishes between deciding what is right (knowing) for the right reasons (loving) that lead to right action (doing) (Aristotle, 1992). The potential for disconnect between knowing, loving, and doing is reflected in the depiction of modern behavioral ethics of the biohuman as a more intuitive than rational moral creature (e.g. Ariely, 2008; Bazerman and Tenbrunsel, 2011; Haidt, 2012) and in postmodern ethics that associates the very possibility of moral decision-making with uncertainty about knowledge (Jones, 2003). The problem of resonance also is implied in contemporary business ethics pedagogy that distinguishes knowing from doing and caring, placing special emphasis on giving voice through action to moral values that one holds dear (Gentile, 2017).

Theories of value, narrative, and music

The original reason I began playing music for the Americans in my London classroom was to aid in their cultural literacy – and, frankly, to force myself to brush up on my own Brit rock. After all, I discovered such geniuses as the Rolling Stones and the Stone Roses, along with the Cure, the Clash, Queen, and the Kinks, long after they were first cool, missing out in my own college years on the idea that music could be at once popular and classic, and that classic did not have to mean classical. The recognition that my “experiment” might unwittingly have induced my students to salivate like Pavlovian dogs upon the ringing of a musical bell came suddenly when, one Monday morning midway through their British immersion, a few weeks after I had taught them in class how to slam dance to “Rock the Casbah,” I heard that they had actually done so in a nightclub over the weekend. They were not only reminiscing about dancing, either; they were wondering what the Arab youth in the club with them thought of The Clash’s cultural caricatures. Since then, I have learned that music has a thin tradition in management education (e.g. Lengnick-Hall and Lengnick-Hall, 1999; Rettig, 1979; Starkey and Tempest, 2009; Zimmerman, 1986), amid a more robust role for the arts and humanities in general (e.g. Colby et al., 2011; Michaelson, 2016; Nesteruk, 2014; Statler et al., 2015; Van Buskirk et al., 2017). I hope this essay can help to thicken that musical tradition in management by appealing to three theoretical foundations that reinforce unique and indispensable contributions that the humanities in general and music in particular can make to business ethics learning: how ethical theories of value contrast with economic theories; how humanities-based narratives add to economic conceptions of human beings; and, most particularly to song, the associative powers of music.

In many fields of management learning, the theory of value that prevails quantifies everything in economic terms. This conceptualization of value is defined in terms of instrumental usefulness, namely, production of goods and services (e.g. Mazzucato, 2018). Measurement using a common currency of money enables comparisons across categories, whether we are valuing the market price of an inanimate entity, such as a product for sale, or a human one, such as a worker. By assigning ethical value to that which has comparatively little or intangible economic value – the environment, and the human rights of manual laborers, for example – ethical inquiry challenges the worldview that value is purely instrumental and one-dimensional. Even non-financial reporting, however, acquiesces to an economic theory of value by monetizing society and the environment (e.g. Norman and McDonald, 2004). Value theory in philosophical ethics and aesthetics traditionally distinguishes between intrinsic value – the value of a thing as an end in itself – and instrumental value – its value as a means to other ends (e.g. Hume, 1983). Although intrinsic value does not equate to ethical value any more than instrumental value equates to economic value, the very possibility of intrinsic value suggests that the value of a thing or a person may be greater than its use or monetary equivalent. So, when educational value is instrumentalized, the intangible value of the arts and humanities has, ironically, an urgent use – namely, to demonstrate the inherent worth of that which may lack quantifiably instrumental value. Although the concept of intrinsic value is neither philosophically uncontroversial in ethics (e.g. Harman, 1967) nor in aesthetics (e.g. Beardsley, 1964), it is an important feature of Kant’s influential Critique of Judgment (1987) and other work of aesthetic theory. Perhaps music, at least as much as any art, manifests the Kantian concept of “purposiveness without purpose”: We are compelled to listen to pleasing songs for no reason other than the song itself. Whether or not this claim is immune to the challenge that aesthetic pleasure is the end to which the song is only a means is not the point. Even if one is skeptical of the concept of intrinsic value, the experience of seeming to love something for its own sake (or even, for that matter, experiencing displeasure with it) invoked by a song opens up the classroom to a discussion about the relationship between economic and non-economic value. This relationship is further complicated – and the discussion is made deeper and more digressive – by the fact that mainstream majority rock musicians often sing as if they do not care at all about money, even while it makes them and their promotional team fabulously rich. Still, the point remains that a song can present the possibility that the arts and humanities have a value that is not always captured by economic value alone.

Theories of value imply normative claims about moral preferences – namely, what we ought to love – but theories of behavioral economics (e.g. Kahneman, 2011) and ethics (e.g. Haidt, 2012) help to explain why our moral knowledge is often complicated by cognitive biases that pose tensions between our reason and intuition. The general idea that economic value does not constitute the entirety of value substantiates a more specific contention of the humanities, that a human being is more than a rational economic actor and that a human community is more than a sum of individuals’ economic preferences. A significant body of normative theory and empirical science on narrative fiction reinforces several related claims that support the value of literature to business ethics education. Recent work in the science of stories suggests that great literature can cultivate readers’ empathy and ability to relate to other people (summarized in Michaelson, 2016), consistent with Aristotle’s assertion that poetry, even more than history, cultivates the moral imagination (e.g. Werhane, 1999). Literature helps us to develop our rational decision-making capacity as a complement to abstract philosophy as a concrete manifestation of ethical theories (e.g. Nussbaum 1990). At the same time, “the whole heritage of Western literature has described people as irrational” (Morson and Schapiro, 2017: 5), reminding us that our biases and blind spots coexist with reason to complicate ethical decision-making (e.g. Bazerman and Tenbrunsel, 2011) and that “problems in ethics, culture, and social values” cannot be reduced to purely economic terms (Morson and Schapiro, 2017: 2). Already a liberal user of novels and stories in my business ethics classes, I thought that some of the principles that apply to narrative literature might apply to other kinds of artistic narratives, such as rock music. Songs often tell stories about love, intrinsic (a romantic ballad) and instrumental (an anthem about getting rich). A song is a narrative – a progression of symbols that, in the order and form of their arrangement, tell a story. The lyrics of a rock song are a poetic narrative within a musical narrative, and analyzing the meaning of the words of a song in detail cultivates the transferable skill of analyzing corporate discourse. A rock video imposes a narrative interpretation of a song. The music and its related narratives evoke emotions, the intelligence of which works alongside our rational cognition to produce empathy and other moral emotions (Nussbaum, 2001).

But, if humanities-based pedagogy helps students to cultivate ethical values about what they ought to prefer and their awareness of how cognitive biases can obfuscate their moral knowledge, it still has to overcome the pragmatic challenge of how to do in practice, potentially years down the line, what one knows and loves to be the right thing. When I began using rock songs to enhance the resonance of my teaching, I did so without having carefully thought through the theory behind the pedagogy, but rather with a vague sense that music might aid students’ long-term memory of their experience in my class. Just as the next note or chord in a progression of a song resonates when the sequence and timing is right (e.g. Albert and Bell, 2002), I hoped to seed the notes in my class that would resonate with the next notes in my students’ lives and careers later on, difficult to anticipate though they may be. I would eventually discover that the neuroscientific case, explaining a cause-and-effect between song and memory, is quite straightforward and strong. Music does, unsurprisingly, evoke emotional responses. Those emotions, in turn, evoke memories (Janata et al., 2007; Jancke, 2008). This can happen when we are alone, but when we are together, our brain waves entrain to an external, shared rhythm (Doelling and Poeppel, 2015). It turns out that the transformative environment in which my selections were heard might have been particularly well-suited to infuse my students’ memories with song. Of course, songs are routinely used in childhood education as mnemonic devices to trigger voluntary memorization of specific information. Voluntary and involuntary memory engage different parts of the brains and distinct neural processes, although there are some shared neural components (Hall et al., 2014). However, the indelible effect of music on our brains is even more pronounced with involuntary memory, which is triggered by music that arouses and excites our emotions. Unlike songs that are intentional tools of explicit memory, songs that are automatic triggers of implicit memory often work without our conscious awareness, as when they are playing in the background (Janata, 2009). Young people, especially those of traditional college age, are particularly prone to being imprinted by significant songs that will evoke involuntary memories later in life. The music to which we are exposed around the onset of adulthood – often a time of intense excitement, change, and new and meaningful experiences – has particular resonance in this context. The parties, clubs, pubs, and bars that we frequent at this age are social venues in which background music can be ubiquitous, and the opportunity is present to share musical experiences with peers (Jenkins, 2014). The music evokes vivid memories (Belfi et al., 2015) nostalgia (Janata et al., 2007), and other effects that may endure into old age. A significant stream of research about the relationship between music and memory concerns memory-impaired patients, and these effects – evocation of involuntary autobiographical memories that evoke general emotional responses and not necessarily particular memorizations – have been shown even to persist after the onset of impairment (Bradley et al., 2013; El Haj et al., 2012). To be sure, my application of the neuroscientific case remains speculative, and how it will play out is unpredictable in practice. Yet, that is part of the point. Introducing rock music in a conventional classroom environment introduces unsettling elements of surprise and uncertainty that wake us from the doldrums of predictable pedagogy, introducing new opportunities to learn and remember. In the language of Derridean hauntology (Fisher, 2014), I have come to realize that I am trying to haunt my students’ futures with musical ghosts to remind them of their pasts, when they examined their business ethics in my classroom. To the extent that my London classroom was intimately connected to a seminal experience in those students’ development, the songs I chose – as Fisher (2014, emphasis added) says of Joy Division’s music, “connected not just because of what they were, but when they were” and has the potential to resonate by connecting also to our times together.

Application: Stories and songs

My own intellectual narrative insinuating the connection between a song and its resonance originated when I was writing one of the qualifying papers to advance in my doctoral program on philosophical ethics and aesthetics, about Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. Those who know a little about Proust’s masterwork are familiar with its famous early scene in which an adult Marcel is transported back in time by the simple taste of a tea-soaked madeleine. He recalls his childhood experience with his aunt, dipping the small cakes into a cup of tea. This sensory spark in turn yields the avalanche of recollection that fills the novel’s remaining 3000 pages. Marcel’s instance of involuntary memory happens to connect the tactile senses of taste, touch, and smell to his past, but it is only one of many examples of the phenomenon in the story (Van Campen, 2014): the glimpse of a particular shade of yellow on a painting canvas, the feeling beneath one’s feet of uneven paving-stones, the genuflection of an actress, the way a novelist’s books are arranged on the shelf, and, apropos to my topic, the repetition of a phrase from a composer’s violin sonata that conjures the hope and pain of romantic love. Proust’s philosophical story about involuntary memory is an ode to the arts and humanities that would infiltrate my classroom whether or not the science and theory of song confirmed his and my suspicions about its potential for resonance.

Long before I filled the auditory space of my classrooms with throbbing bass lines and rebellious rockers, I assigned novels and other narratives to my students to perform as vivid demonstrations of theory. On the classroom stage, my students have feigned love, fist fights, explosions, and office harassment – including the most impressive soliloquy about workplace boredom I have ever seen, and perhaps one of the grisliest and moving deaths ever performed in any theater. As with song, I expect my students’ emotional responses to these stories and performances will endure more vividly in their memories than will the particular plot details or finer points of theory. They do not have to memorize the exact content of the soliloquy to recall that it was the stream of consciousness of a character driven crazy by the repetitive desperation of his awful job, and they do not need to remember the full circumstances to appreciate that another character’s suicide was his solution to being caught in a seemingly intractable dilemma between loyalty to his emperor and loyalty to his friends. They just have to recall the promise they made to themselves when they took my class: that they would not settle for a life ruined by meaningless work and so had a moral responsibility not to inflict it upon others. And, they must recognize our refrain in class that, when caught in a dilemma between two equally unsavory alternatives, one should seek out options for a more palatable third path.

When I turn the volume on loud, so that the music commands the foreground, it is the physical resonance of the beat and vibrations that seem first to capture our attention. But then we can hear the story being told by the lyrics – which I post on a screen – more clearly, too. Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” may have had its day in the 1980s, but it depicts a materialistic culture still prevalent now, in which the connection between the social and market value of one’s work is elusive. The singer makes fun of musicians, like himself, who become fabulously wealthy “bangin’ on a drum like a chimpanzee/That ain’t workin’/That’s the way you do it/Get your money for nothing and your chicks for free.” We used this song to discuss market imperfections and meaningful work.

Queen’s “We Are the Champions” – the catchiest pop song of all time, according to a team of music and memory researchers (Daily Mail Reporter, 2011) – is another song susceptible to ironic construal about a capitalist society that has “no time for losers.” Most of my students had heard it before, associating it with championship celebrations in high school sports, reveling in its strains during a celebration on the court of play, or taunting opponents’ fans with it in the stands. They had never listened to it with a critical sensibility before in such a way as to infer irony. With their novel interpretation of its message, they challenged zero-sum competition in which, for there to be a winner, there must be a loser. They considered how they should measure success in their future careers, as market leaders who vanquished the competition, or as social entrepreneurs who sought to enrich those around them, not just themselves.

Around Christmastime, the students organized an end-of-semester gathering on Hyde Park’s ice rink. Earlier that day, in the classroom, we had listened to Band-Aid’s “Feed the World,” a noteworthy instance of rock stars coming together to use their core competencies of songwriting and performance to raise money for social causes. We talked about the musicians’ business model, how their example has been replicated numerous times to raise money to combat poverty, support farmers, and help victims of tragedy. Yet, we also scrutinized the lyricists’ blind spots about their own display of privilege and position: their apparent ignorance of weather, national identity, and religious diversity (“There won’t be snow in Africa this Christmastime”) (emphasis added), and their “us” and “them” paternalism (“There’s a world outside your window, and it’s a world of dread and fear”) (emphasis added). Notwithstanding these failings, the song remains seasonally ubiquitous in England, adding to my street credibility when – through no doing of my own – it came on the speakers while my students and I were skating.

These narratives are among the simplest and most straightforward ways of learning through music, but we would sometimes digress into musical theory. We would, for example, count the octaves in Freddie Mercury’s register and distinguish the anxiety that he communicated from the top of his range and the relative calm coming from Bowie’s baritone accompaniment. In “Rock the Casbah,” we noticed, minor keys tended to associate with subversive warnings and war planes. As in organizational behavior, dominant narratives were often expressed through pleasing melodies but could be disrupted by percussive notes. The possibilities to use music as a tool for teaching or as its own object of study go significantly beyond these simple examples and my limited music theory vocabulary.

My hope is that the business ethics lesson accompanying each song will resonate through the melody itself, and to that end, I think the words help. They might not take a title like “Money for Nothing” for granted anymore, but rather ask whether earning something for nothing is truly a proper aim of a business. Their celebrations of success might come with a greater appreciation for the efforts of competitors, business partners, and customers, even for the competitive spirit of the market that in the best of circumstances improves quality and value. Future philanthropic efforts may be undertaken with more conscious consideration that those who purport to alleviate others’ misfortune may be no more deserving of their good fortune than the objects of their generosity are of their presumed misfortune. The sentiments that appeal to them as moral persons may infiltrate their practice as moral managers.

At first, the song was a means to the end of introducing a topic. I played “Under Pressure” on repeat beginning a half hour before the first class and let it continue to play past the start time until every student had heard it in its entirety at least once. “It’s the terror of knowing/What this world is about/Watching some good friends/Screaming ‘Let me out!’” These kinds of lyrics launched a conversation about human moral psychology. We discussed examples of behavioral ethics, when our choices are distorted by self-serving biases to which we are insensitive (e.g. Bazerman and Tenbrunsel, 2011) and which we subsequently rationalize (e.g. Haidt, 2012). We talked about the financial, advancement, temporal, and other social pressures present in the kinds of work to which they aspired and how those factors could lead us to betray some of the weaknesses of our younger moral selves (Bloom, 2013). When we encountered current events and case studies later on in the semester in which a moral agent was under pressure, someone would inevitably invoke the song’s memorable bass line.

Increasingly, the song became the end in itself, the object of study, not just a tool for studying. This was the case with “Feed the World” and also a lesson involving “Rock the Casbah,” during which we watched and analyzed the music video three times. First, we watched it as a full class in order to familiarize ourselves with the lyrics and recognize iconic images in the film: an Arab Sheik embracing American consumer brands, the Sheik and a Hasidic Jew skipping down the sidewalk together, jet fighters streaking through the sky ostensibly to enforce a ban on rock music, and the band’s performance in front of a working drilling rig. Second, they watched it in small teams as they sought to expand the list of significant symbols they observed. Third, after we had talked about those symbols and what they meant, we watched it once more to point out significant moments that some teams may not have observed. Then, we explored the history of Westerners’ involvement in the Middle East’s oil production and trade, the political agreements between the ruling class in some Middle Eastern countries and their Western partners, the influx of Middle Eastern immigrants at both ends of the economic spectrum in cosmopolitan cities like London, and the role of economic inequality in social upheaval and political instability.

Limitations: Which songs and memories?

In summary, the somewhat accidental success of my informal experiments leads me now to deploy music in my classrooms with at least three aims: One involves choosing “good” songs that will resonate aesthetically so as to cultivate disinterested appreciation in the music for its own sake and provoke a conversation about economic and non-economic value. One involves selecting songs with accompanying narrative elements – including but not limited to lyrics – fertile with possibilities for careful analysis and attention to discern meaning and messages. And, one involves finding signature bass lines and other unforgettable features that literally resonate in students’ minds and memories. A few songs, like “Under Pressure,” satisfy all of these aims – classic song that is still widely played decades after it was recorded; relevant lyrics, music video, and backstory (including business ethics questions associated with uncredited sampling of the bass line by a later artist (Runtagh, 2016)); and, that catchy bass line. Most important, the music has to fit the context in which I am teaching.

Sometimes, what was happening in my students’ worlds outside my classroom determined the songs I chose for the classroom. As part of their cultural immersion in London, my students volunteered at grade schools, and by the second week, I already was hearing stories of contrast between my classroom and their volunteer classrooms: About the teachers’ raised voices and sharp discipline that literally was foreign to the coddled Americans. And, about how the little boys kicked the football with colorful sneakers that clashed with the jackets and ties they were not allowed to remove, even for physical education. About the coaches’ epithets, calling the players “headless chickens” and “stupid sausages.” We debated cultural relativism, whether schoolhouse norms in England were better than in America, worse, or just different.

The next class, they entered my classroom to the sounds of Pink Floyd. “We don’t need no education.” Video imagery of children being dropped into a sausage-maker. “We don’t need no thought control.” Most of them recognized the melody. “No dark sarcasm in the classroom.” But they had never thought about the meaning of the words. “Teacher leave those kids alone.” Rebellion and conflagration. Most of them were already familiar with “Another Brick in the Wall.” However, the song’s very challenge to the education establishment I represented might give us pause to consider some of the limits of my thesis.

Unverifiability of thesis: A few years on from my first experiments with song, I still hear occasionally from past students, from London and elsewhere, who have recently heard a song that reminded them of our time together some time ago. Some of these notes and calls are just reminiscences, but others are accompanied by a specific description of an experience when my prediction, that business ethics would prove useful someday in their professional careers, came true. However, I have not designed this classroom experience intentionally to gather data to prove my thesis empirically, and there is no longitudinal research of which I am aware that tests the efficacy of song on professional behavior. My thesis may be empirically unverifiable, mainly because there are too many variables that might influence its outcomes: the natural disposition of the students, their affinity for the songs I have chosen, what happens to them in the intervening years, their familiarity with the songs, and so on. Research on song and memory has shown that music can bring us back to these heady moments of our lives, but we may not be able to choose which heady moments they invoke.

Arbitrariness of involuntary memory: Research on music and moral judgment suggests that music has as much power to associate with negative or neutral impulses as with positive ones (e.g. Ziv et al., 2011). When they hear the piano track from “Rock the Casbah” many years hence, will my students remember our discussions about the influence of cultural bias on global ethics, or will they remember slam-dancing? When they hear “Feed the World,” will they recall our conversation about philanthropic paternalism, or will they recall skating in Hyde Park’s Winter Wonderland? What is to say they will not be induced to become the very materialists that “Money for Nothing” mocks? Involuntary memory can be arbitrary and unpredictable, and any effort to program it might have unintended and even counterproductive consequences. The more they are forced to learn the songs, the more, I suspect, they might rebel against rebellion – against the “thought control” of “Another Brick in the Wall.”

Interference from other musical sources: The songs I played in London were far from the only songs my students heard on repeat as the background soundtrack to their new life experience. Lorde, One Direction, and Pharrell Williams all had UK chart megahits during our time together, and my students were more likely to consider those songs to be their “own” music than the classics to which I introduced them. Not incidentally, if I could do it all over again, I would have added Lorde’s “Royals” to my playlist, with its lyrics mocking monarchical and material hierarchy: “My friends and I we’ve cracked the code/We count our dollars on the train to the party/And everyone who knows us knows that we’re fine with this/We didn’t come from money.” I was just not cool enough to discover it until well after its peak, as with all of the other songs on my list.

Differences in personal taste: I can control my choice of songs that have proven popular resonance and of lyrics that have topical relevance. However, I cannot control whether my students have encountered the songs in an alternative context, the depth of their understanding of the literal and critical meanings of the songs in our social context, and whether or not they happen to like the music. If we cannot, as teachers, exert “thought control,” then, as we often say, we can teach our students how to select a song, how to analyze it, how to make it a part of their learning experience that may revisit them involuntarily at a moment in the future when it might matter the most.

The downsides of song: There is, of course, a substantial chorus of parental folk wisdom suggesting that music, especially rock music, is bad for our academic learning. There is some truth to this suggestion that music can be a distraction from study, but it applies more to the kind of learning that benefits from intense concentration and repetition, such as serial recall (e.g. Perham and Vizard, 2011). The sort of learning that benefits from the stimulation of creative processes, reduction of stress, and evocation of emotions is arguably especially supported by the very features we would expect to find in classic British rock – such as a catchy bass line, rhyming chorus, and dramatic arc. This learning aligns with my objectives for business ethics, for students to recall the feeling of encountering an ethical issue that matters enough to slow down and examine it broadly for its implications for their own character and their sense of caring for others.

The limits of song. Although I suspect that my students’ strongest memory from my business ethics class might be those seven bass notes from “Under Pressure,” I do not mean to denigrate the importance of the technical content that I and others teach. The power of music to resonate is a means to the end of reinforcing content including and beyond the content of the song and the class – not a replacement for the content itself.

Time may or may not tell if my pedagogical hypothesis has resonated in the way that I have envisioned it to work well beyond the immediate presence of my teaching and musical accompaniment in my classroom. I imagine my students at work, feeling economic pressure to compromise their ethical values, unconsciously tapping their feet to the catchy bass line of “Under Pressure” and being induced at least reconsider the competing values at issue. Or, hearing the bass line over the din of bar chatter just when they are considering whether to act upon the insider tip they receive. More realistically, it will take more than the coincidental appearance of a song to sway their movements this way rather than that, but I hope, too, to have unsettled my students’ conceptions of value as it relates to business and to have resettled their appreciation for the value of the arts and humanities – to introduce them to a humanities-based conception of intrinsic value to challenge an economics-driven conception of the instrumental value of everything. I remain committed to the use of a song as a series of intersecting narratives within the narrative arc of my class that provoke topical exploration and critical analysis. And, I recognize that most of the Brit rock classics that I tried in my first effort reflect another narrative that ought to be unsettled, of an apparently homogeneous ensemble of musicians who held sway in the latter half of the prior century. One unintended lesson of my experience has been that rock music, like most of our business establishments, has a long way to go toward inclusion. Still, old songs can be repurposed to study new topics, such as Freddy Mercury’s complex ethnicity and sexuality and David Bowie’s androgyny, and new songs are being made constantly that continue the history of popular music as a tool of counter-cultural, social and economic activism.

Conclusion: “Blackstar”

A few years on from my time in London, in 2016, David Bowie lived and died a short walk from another one of my classrooms in New York City. The impression made by his passing was likelier greater on me than on my students. I grew up aware of his music, whereas to them, he was just another aging rock star. My generation’s sense of sexuality and haircuts was literally shaped by his self-experimentation, a progressive social value that many of them came to assume, thanks to Bowie. I was far from his most devoted fan while he lived, but I became a devotee of his influence after he died.

By that time, “Under Pressure” was canonical to my teaching, and I would have played it on day one of my three-day intensive whether or not he had passed away. It captures one of the central messages that I hope my students take away from the first day of my New York class, that pressure in business contributes to our vulnerability to biases that can lead us into moral error. However, the fact of his passing the week before my class began led me to play “Under Pressure” in his honor, a part of a story that I hope made a lasting impression on them.

The second day of the class, we focused on ethics in organizational behavior: what leaders can do to promote or demote ethical behavior, what resources (code of conduct, training and communication) are available to employees who need guidance, what lifelines they can access (mentors, hotline) when their bosses ask them to do things which contravene the code of conduct. Some of my students literally gasped in recognition when they heard Bowie sing in one of his most introspective ballads, “Life on Mars,” that “her friend is nowhere to be seen/Now she walks through her sunken dream.” Trying to live and thrive in New York City, they knew far too well what it was like to feel like an alien in a crowd, struggling with whether to betray the moral person within them at the behest of an immoral manager above.

On the final day of class, we talked about meaningful work and how students’ ideals of meaningful work differ from their everyday reality. We listened to the title track of Bowie’s final album, “Blackstar” which he released on his 69th birthday, three days before he died. He continued recording the music and filming the videos, knowing he had a terminal diagnosis. Meaningful work, indeed. Contrary to the cliché that nobody ever on their deathbed wishes to have worked more, there was Bowie, in the video, lying on what looked like a deathbed, head bandaged, performing his last, and possibly most innovative, set of songs. Who among my students ever imagined work that they cared about so much as to do it for a large portion of their dying days? “Something happened on the day he died/Spirit rose a metre and stepped aside/Somebody else took his place, and bravely cried/(‘I’m a blackstar, I’m a blackstar.’).”