{"id":75702,"date":"2021-12-14T16:00:14","date_gmt":"2021-12-14T21:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=75702"},"modified":"2024-08-29T16:42:21","modified_gmt":"2024-08-29T20:42:21","slug":"faculty-focus-paul-dunn-working-to-create-excitement-and-understanding-in-business-ethics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2021\/12\/faculty-focus-paul-dunn-working-to-create-excitement-and-understanding-in-business-ethics\/","title":{"rendered":"FACULTY FOCUS: Paul Dunn working to create excitement \u2014 and understanding \u2014 in business ethics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Note: Faculty Focus is a monthly series that highlights faculty whose compelling passions, innovative ideas and various areas of expertise help weave together the fabric of Brock University\u2019s vibrant community. For more from the series,\u00a0<\/em>click here<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Paul Dunn remembers what it was like as though it were yesterday.<\/p>\n

The Goodman School of Business Professor of Ethics still recalls dragging himself to evening classes in Toronto as an accounting student after a long day of work, trying to further his education and better his life.<\/p>\n

\u201cI took some really awful, boring business courses, and after working a full day you had to listen to a monotone accounting professor drone on for three hours,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was painful.\u201d<\/p>\n

The experience motivated Dunn to take a different approach to teaching his own students.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have a high level of energy, so I always volunteer to teach in the evenings because I can make my classes stimulating and interesting,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m very sympathetic to any student who has been working all day long and then has to show up for a night class.\u201d<\/p>\n

His career focuses on piquing the interest of students in the business world, but it\u2019s a far cry from where his path began.<\/p>\n

Growing up in Toronto, Dunn wasn\u2019t sure where life was going to take him when he graduated high school.<\/p>\n

He headed to the University of Toronto for general arts programming, hoping to find a passion he could turn into a career.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was taking courses in math, economics, philosophy, political science and English,\u201d he says. \u201cI had no idea whatsoever what I wanted to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

As it turned out, philosophy was where Dunn initially found his fit.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s one of those things where if you get interested in something, you tend to do well at it, because you like doing it,\u201d he says. \u201cSo, each year I just kept taking more and more philosophy courses.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dunn went on to earn both his bachelor\u2019s and master\u2019s degrees in philosophy, but his career trajectory remained unclear.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy oldest brother suggested that even though I didn\u2019t know anything about business, perhaps I should consider accounting,\u201d he recalls.<\/p>\n

With no experience under his belt, Dunn walked into Clarkson Gordon \u2014the premier accounting firm in Canada at the time \u2014 to speak with the hiring partner.<\/p>\n

\u201cI explained that I knew nothing about accounting, but was interested in business,\u201d Dunn says. \u201cHe thought that anybody who had a master\u2019s degree in philosophy was someone they wanted to work with. He said, \u2018We can train you in the nuts and bolts; we want people who know how to think.\u2019 And so, I was hired.\u201d<\/p>\n

Working for the firm during the day, Dunn immediately began taking night courses and working toward his chartered accountancy designation.<\/p>\n

After reaching that goal, he spent about a dozen years in the financial industry in downtown Toronto, looking for the job that made him excited to go to work.<\/p>\n

He found it when he began teaching financial accounting part time at York University.<\/p>\n

The experience was enough to encourage Dunn to quit his day job and head back to school to get his PhD in Accounting from Boston University in hopes of a career move into academia.<\/p>\n

In 1998, he joined Brock University\u2019s Goodman School of Business.<\/p>\n

Through his research, Dunn has been able to combine his philosophy training with his practical experience as a professional accountant, focusing on the area of business ethics.<\/p>\n

The field has grown considerably and gained significant traction over the years, which has been \u201cvery rewarding\u201d to see, he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow, at almost every respectable business school, including Goodman, business ethics is a mandatory course,\u201d Dunn says. \u201cIt\u2019s required for a good reason. The decisions that business leaders make have such a huge impact on society, and it\u2019s critical that they are aware of the social and ethical dimensions of their economic decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n

He hopes to instil in his students that every economic decision has a social consequence.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt may be large, or it may be small, but every economic decision is going to have an impact on another human being,\u201d Dunn says.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s absolutely essential that all of our students, our future business leaders, have a solid understanding of the importance of considering the ethical aspects of their business decisions. They still may opt to go for the economics when making a choice, but at least they\u2019re acknowledging the social consequences of those economic decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dunn believes there are many lessons to be learned from the mistakes and successes of business leaders and works to share them with both his students and the community.<\/p>\n

His business ethics textbook is filled with case studies based on true stories and he spends time each week discussing current business issues on the radio with the Tom McConnell Show on Newstalk 610 CKTB.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Dunn remembers what it was like as though it were yesterday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":75703,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[39,7,3319,1,4],"tags":[5576,8634,594,6417],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75702"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75702"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75702\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75704,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75702\/revisions\/75704"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/75703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}