Exploring Business Ethics Through Pop Culture
From Succession to Severance, business ethics is everywhere in modern entertainment. But it’s more than just entertainment. Popular TV shows and movies can reflect and even influence the ethical decisions real people face in the workplace.
Below, we’ll discuss the way pop culture influences business ethics today and how you can harness its power to discuss ethical dilemmas in your organization.
Stranger Than Fiction: How Pop Culture Influences Business Ethics Today
The most common source of ethical influence is a person’s social environment. In the past, people were most heavily influenced by the people they spent their day with – family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, and bosses. They might have also drawn a bit from the wider professional network they built with colleagues from conferences, and there were probably a few business-based TV shows or movies thrown in.
But in the age of global media, multiple streaming services, and social media, we’re exposed to a lot more “outside influences” than we used to. The people closest to us no longer have the deepest impact on our sense of right and wrong; they’re sometimes drowned out by strangers, influencers, entertainment personalities, and various media sources.
The stories we tell as a culture have always been a critical part of communicating our morals and ethics. But as the entertainment industry has become more diffused over a greater number of channels, there are more and more sources of stories about business, professional ethics, and corporate culture that weigh in on the conversation.
Some break into the zeitgeist while others stay under the radar, but all of them help shape the ethics and standards of the people that consume them.
The Impact of Business Ethics in Media
The relationship between pop culture and business ethics is complicated, and there are many ways that ethical dilemmas in TV and movies can alter people’s perceptions of real-life situations.
Some of them are positive. Fiction can bring attention to shades of gray that are sometimes overlooked. It can set an aspirational example of how to handle a problem the right way. It can be a cautionary tale about straying from ethical guidelines.
Some of them can be negative. How TV shows reflect real-world business scandals can distort the truth of real events and give the public a false perception of events. Alternately, movies that highlight corporate ethical dilemmas might simplify an issue to make the conclusion seem forgone, obscuring its moral complexity. Reality television often encourages the worst attitudes and ideals in individuals in the name of entertainment, which can set a bad example and normalize poor business practices.
What does all this mean? In part, it means that businesses have less direct influence on the professional ethics of their workforce than ever before. You’re competing with narratives about business ethics and corporate responsibility in entertainment that truly engage people far better than any dry compliance course. Your employees are more likely to remember business ethics lessons from famous characters than the ones they get from you.
The good news? You can hijack these familiar stories for your own purposes.
How to Leverage Business Ethics in Pop Culture
Humans are hard-wired to understand the world through stories, so if you can tap into stories that have already captured your employees’ imaginations, you can use them to drive home the lessons that you want them to remember.
Here are a few ways you can use examples of business ethics in media to your advantage.
Call On Evocative Examples
Sometimes, the scenarios depicted in a movie or TV show are so memorable that they become the new paradigm for thinking about a problem.
One of the fun things about fiction is that TV can take things to the extreme to make a point. Exhibit A, Severance’s exploration of HR ethics, employee well-being, and work-life balance. Humor can be used to encapsulate an issue, a la Office Space. Soap opera levels of drama can get us invested in otherwise dry topics, the way Suits made corporate law look glamorous.
No matter how a show captures the imagination on a subject, you can piggyback on its effects to hold your audience’s attention.
Debunk Bad Narratives
A lot of movies and shows get business ethics wrong, but there’s an upside to be had – it provides something to teach against. People are inherently interested in seeing something popular picked apart.
Show What Not to Do
Anyone remember Highlights Magazine? Goofus and Gallant taught us manners through example, and Goofus was an overtime example of What Not to Do.
Any popular character that behaves badly can become your Goofus. From Don Draper to Gordon Gekko, there’s no shortage of bad guys you can use as an example, even when the original material itself fails to question the ethics of a character’s decision.
Draw Attention to Nuance
Sometimes, a show or movie doesn’t get it wrong so much as they leave things out. You can use simplified ethical dilemmas in film or TV to explore how much more complicated things are in real life. Take a serious look at things played for a laugh or flattened into a caricature.
Create Your Own Hypotheticals
Are you trying to teach about an ethical situation that you haven’t seen portrayed in entertainment? No problem! People enjoy thinking about familiar and beloved characters, so use them to engage your audience in a hypothetical that suits your needs. Choosing characters with well-known traits can spawn more creativity and critical thinking than asking people to consider the situation from their own point of view.
Start With the Basics Through Online Training
Compliance training is one of those things you don’t want to confuse or do halfway, so before you have fun in ways that help the lessons stick, your audience needs a good foundation in the basics.
Our self-paced online Code of Conduct courses use a tried and true curriculum to introduce concepts in business ethics and compliance, hammer home the important points of relevant regulations, and confirm each student’s comprehension. They can be a great primer to organizational discussions and workshops leveraging pop culture and business ethics.
