Alterity and sensitivity: contours of the tutor in marketing ethics education.

This paper attempts to (re)plot the contours of the Tutor by scrutinising the way in which ethics is taught in the modern marketing syllabus. We open up a debate on how the Tutor role as a conduit of apparent ethical knowledge to students has somehow failed to map with sufficient sensitivity the terrain of the moral impulse in business practice. In particular, we argue for a reappraisal of the Tutor/student relationship such that we may facilitate a greater understanding of how marketing students can make sense of themselves and of ‗the other‘.
Drawing on literature from educational philosophy and the work of Emmanuel Levinas, we suggest that the conceptualisation of ethics in marketing cannot be divorced from the question of pedagogy and the responsibilities of the tutor. Whilst the largely conventional model adopted for the teaching of marketing may provide students with a prescribed set of knowledge and skills, it may by the same token refuse us the moral education that seems to be necessary.
The paper concludes that that recent economic problems offer an opportunity for a reappraisal of the teaching of marketing ethics. It is an opportunity to re-imagine the relationship between the student and the tutor.