Dear Fellow SBE Members,
My name is Alejo José G. Sison and I would like to thank you for the opportunity to serve you as member of the SBE Board. First, let me tell you a bit about myself.
Originally from the Philippines, I left Manila to pursue Philosophy studies in Spain. I eventually earned a doctorate writing on Ancient Greek Ethics. Then I got my first job teaching… in a Business School! It was painful, but I learned a lot about ethics in the professions and the challenges of presenting it to an audience sometimes not only uninclined, but perhaps even hostile to such matters.
How? By relating ethics to flourishing! Who wouldn’t want that? And that’s how I got started on the virtue ethics approach, which connects business with the economy and politics, in a generally Aristotelian framework.
For family reasons I returned to Manila and taught at a small liberal arts college with a graduate school in economics and business. After a couple of years, I was fortunate to get a Fulbright Scholarship at Harvard. It was amazing to see how professors and students engaged with the different disciplines of law, psychology, sociology, technology, and so forth, looking for ways to advance their own research concerns. I also had the chance to meet Mike Hoffman, in the Managing Ethics in Organizations program at Bentley. He invited me to be a fellow at the Center for Business Ethics and encouraged me greatly in my career.
In due course I returned to the University of Navarra in Spain which has hosted me since. Thanks to its network of partner universities, I have taught in several programs in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Meanwhile, I served as member then president of the European Business Ethics Network (EBEN) from 2009-2012. I also carried out editorial tasks in the Journal of Business Ethics, Business Ethics – A European Review, and our own Business Ethics Quarterly, among others. For the academic year 2018-2019, I am Visiting Ordinary Professor at the Busch School of the Catholic University of America.
You can find out more about my work at my personal academic webpage and blog, Work, Virtues, and Flourishing.