Ethics in Event Management Education – a conversation

In the context of Event Management Education, ethics can be conceptualised in many ways including research, operational and social implications as well the emergent issues surrounding Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). There is limited research on the positioning of ethics within the Event Management curriculum (Provencio, 2024) although there is a much broader exploration of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Health and Safety (see for example Werner et al., 2022; Zhang & Law, 2025). Within Business Education more broadly there is a debate between the merits of stand alone modules versus embedding ethics into general content (Jonson et al., 2015; Kim et al., 2023) with some evidence that stand alone modules are more effective. The method of delivery also needs to be considered with some evidence that cooperative or group learning is more effective particularly if the issues discussed are relevant to the students’ desired careers and existing experience (Martini et al., 2025). Likewise, the discipline the students are studying appears to have an impact on their perceptions of their level of responsibility and willingness to attempt to evade this (Blasco, 2022).
The relationship between teaching business ethics and of CSR and Sustainable Development Goals has ebbed and flowed over time. However Jaganjac et al. (2024) review of literature between 1982 and 2021 indicates that they are still somewhat separate. Similarly, while Health and Safety can be seen as a fundamental social responsibly (Montero et al., 2009) and ethics led business perform better there is still a preference from organisations to treat health and safety as an operational and compliance issue rather than being proactive (Mixafenti et al., 2025). However, the impact on Event Management education has not yet emerged in the academic literature. Likewise, the ethical and sustainability issues raised by AI (Vallor, 2024), are still in the early phases of integration within Event Management education.
Anecdotally, where different components of ethics are taught separately, students tend not to connect the pieces. As such, this workshop invites participants tor effect on how they conceptualise ethics as researchers and event management practioner and the impacts this has on their teaching.

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Jaganjac, B., Abrahamsen, L. M., Olsen, T. S., & Hunnes, J. A. (2024). Is It Time to Reclaim the ‘Ethics’ in Business Ethics Education? Journal of Business Ethics, 190, 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-023-05400-5
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