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We revisit the problem of redesigning the Master in Business Administration (MBA) program, curriculum, and pedagogy, focusing on understanding and seeking to tame its “wicked problems,” as an intrinsic part and challenge of the MBA program venture, and to render it more realistic and relevant to address major problems and their consequences. We briefly review the theory of wicked problems and methods of dealing with their consequences from multiple perspectives. Most characterization of problems classifies them as simple (problems that have known formulations and solutions), complex (where formulations are known but not their resolutions), unstructured problems (where formulations are unknown, but solutions are estimated), and “wicked” (where both problem formulations and their resolutions are unknown but eventually partially tamable). Uncertainty, unpredictability, randomness, and ambiguity increase from simple to complex to unstructured to wicked problems. A redesigned MBA program should therefore address them effectively through the four semesters in two years. Most of these problems are real and affect life and economies, and hence, business schools cannot but incorporate them into their critical, ethical, and moral thinking.

The 170-year-old Master in Business Administration (MBA) program is becoming obsolete and inefficient to address today's real-world problems, and is facing mounting criticism from business scholars, management deans, and academic scholars alike. Reviewing major criticisms, this chapter suggests a new design for the MBA program that will not only address the criticisms but also accept a paradigm shift that will spearhead it in coming decades. The redesigned MBA “structure” proposes a four-semester full-time program, during which each semester delves into deeper marketplace problems of increasing complexity (i.e., from simple to complex to unstructured to wicked problems) and deals with these problems with new levels of critical thinking skills and ethical reasoning processes tempered by corresponding entrepreneurial knowledge, skills, and values. The “content” of the redesigned program is anchored around five major themes of business learning: namely, intrinsic motivation management, creativity and innovation management, productivity management, revenue management, and eco-sustainability management, each geared to generate professional entrepreneurial knowledge, and skills and values urgently needed today. Numerous beneficial features of this newly redesigned integrated business management program (MBA) are also discussed.

This chapter focuses on critical thinking as a new, powerful, and specialized tool and technique for understanding and analyzing the subtle operations of the free enterprise capitalist market system and its ethics and morality. Everything in the world of consumers and market enterprise systems are determined by our supply–demand system that in turn are determined by our presumed limitless production–distribution and consumption (LDPC) systems. From a critical thinking viewpoint, we study the free enterprise capitalist system (FECS) as a dynamic, interconnected organic system and not as a discrete or compartmentalized body of disaggregate parts. Systems thinking with critical thinking calls for a shift of our mindset from seeing just parts to seeing the whole reality in its structured dynamic unity; both mandate that we see ourselves as active participators or partners of FECS and not as mere cogs in its wheels or as mere factors of its production processes. Critical thinking seeks to identify the “structures” that underlie complex situations in FECS with those that bring about high- versus low-leveraged changes in various versions of capitalism. Specifically, this chapter applies critical thinking to FECS as defined by its founder, Adam Smith, in 1776 to its fundamental and structural assumptions, and as supported or critiqued by serious scholars such as Karl Marx, Maynard Keynes, C. K. Prahalad and Allen Hammond (inclusive capitalism), John Mackey and Rajendra Sisodia (conscious capitalism), and others.

This chapter addresses one of the most crucial areas for critical thinking: the morality of turbulent markets around the world. All of us are overwhelmed by such turbulent markets. Following Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2004, 2010), we distinguish between nonscalable industries (ordinary professions where income grows linearly, piecemeal or by marginal jumps) and scalable industries (extraordinary risk-prone professions where income grows in a nonlinear fashion, and by exponential jumps and fractures). Nonscalable industries generate tame and predictable markets of goods and services, while scalable industries regularly explode into behemoth virulent markets where rewards are disproportionately large compared to effort, and they are the major causes of turbulent financial markets that rock our world causing ever-widening inequities and inequalities. Part I describes both scalable and nonscalable markets in sufficient detail, including propensity of scalable industries to randomness, and the turbulent markets they create. Part II seeks understanding of moral responsibility of turbulent markets and discusses who should appropriate moral responsibility for turbulent markets and under what conditions. Part III synthesizes various theories of necessary and sufficient conditions for accepting or assigning moral responsibility. We also analyze the necessary and sufficient conditions for attribution of moral responsibility such as rationality, intentionality, autonomy or freedom, causality, accountability, and avoidability of various actors as moral agents or as moral persons. By grouping these conditions, we then derive some useful models for assigning moral responsibility to various entities such as individual executives, corporations, or joint bodies. We discuss the challenges and limitations of such models.

In Chapter 1, we critically reviewed the foundations of the free enterprise capital system (FECS), which has been successful primarily because of its wealth and asset accumulation potentiality and actuality. In this chapter, we critically argue that this capacity has been grounded upon the profit maximization (PM) theories, models, and paradigms of FECS. The intent of this chapter is not anti-PM. The PM models of FECS have worked and performed well for more than 200 years of the economic history of the United States and other developed countries, and this phenomenon is celebrated and featured as “market performativity.” However, market performativity has not truly benefitted the poor and the marginalized; on the contrary, market performativity has wittingly or unwittingly created gaping inequalities of wealth, income, opportunity, and prosperity. Critical thinking does not combat PM but challenges it with alternative models of profit sharing that promote social wealth, social welfare, social progress, and opportunity for all, which we explore here. Economic development without social progress breeds economic inequality and social injustice. Economic development alone is not enough; we should create a new paradigm in which economic development is the servant of social progress, not vice versa. Such a paradigm shift involves integrating the creativity and innovativity of market performativity and the goals and drives of social performativity together with PM, that is, from market performativity to social performativity.

This paper aims to analyze the relationships between human resource supply chain management (HRSCM), corporate culture (CC) and the code of business ethics (CBE) in the MENA region.

In this study, the author adopted a quantitative approach through an online Google Form survey for the data-gathering process. All questionnaires were distributed to the manufacturing and service firms that are listed in the Chambers of the Industries of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Egypt in the MENA region using a simple random sampling method. About 567 usable and valid responses were retrieved out of 2,077 for analysis, representing a 27.3% response rate. The sample unit for analysis included all middle- and senior-level managers and employees within manufacturing and service firms. The conceptual model was tested using a hypothesis-testing deductive approach. The findings are based on covariance-based analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM) using PLS-SEM software. The author performed convergent validity and discriminant validity tests, and bootstrapping was also applied.

The empirical results display a significant and positive association between HRSCM and the CBE. The CC and the CBE tend to be positively and significantly related. Therefore, HRSCM can play a key role in boosting and applying the CBE in firms. For achieving the firm purposes, more attention to the HR personnel should be paid to implement the CBE. The high importance of the CBE becomes necessary for both the department and the firm.

Such results can provide insightful information for HR personnel, managers and leaders to encourage them to develop and maintain an effective corporate code of conduct within their organizations.

This paper tries to explore the linkages between HRSCM, CC and CBE in the Middle East region due to the lack of research available that analyzes the relationship between them. Not only that, but it also offers great implications for Middle Eastern businesses.

The citizen-shareholder approach in the capital market is considered a knowledge-enhancing and emerging concept in financial and accounting offerings. Its reliable background in management and human sciences makes it an essential basis for protecting the interests of shareholders and investors. Shareholders are considered a necessary part of the social platforms that are companies and regulatory institutions in the capital market; beyond being obligated to protect their material and intellectual rights, they are responsible for developing norms and facilitating investment values and gaining trust through mutual interactions based on respect for their interests. The purpose of this paper is to perform interactive qualitative analysis of the requirements for protecting the rights of citizens of capital market shareholders.

The methodology of the research is mixed, so that in the qualitative part, through content screening, the dimensions related to the protection of the citizen rights of the capital market shareholders were identified through a systematic review of 10 research in the period of 2017–2022. Then, the reliability of the specified dimensions was examined through Delphi analysis; in the quantitative part of the research, the criteria identified through the pairwise comparison matrix were first determined by the level of their relationships to determine based on the pattern of systemic representation of drivers and the consequences of requirements to protect the rights of citizens of capital market shareholders.

The research results in the qualitative part indicated the existence of 12 primary themes; during the two stages of Delphi analysis, three themes were removed, and a total of nine themes entered the quantitative phase. The results in a quantitative part indicate the creation of specialized and active committees of the board of directors as the primary driver and the reliability and timely disclosure of information in the long term as a systemic consequence.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first research that presents the new concept of citizen shareholders to strengthen the requirements of protecting the rights of shareholders in the capital market while developing new theoretical literature.