On Monday, February 6, at 2:00 p.m., the Bentley Verizon Visiting Professorship in Business Ethics will feature renowned business ethics scholar Patricia Werhane, who will explore ways businesses can respond to pressures to globalize without losing their integrity. The program, “Globalization and Its Challenges for Business Ethics in the 21st Century,” will be held in LaCava Center Room 395, 175 Forest Street, Waltham, Mass. It is free and open to the public.

Werhane will particularly explore whether international companies can operate ethically in countries with pervasive poverty and almost no rule of law. She will investigate the moral and economic feasibility of answering the call from Bill Gates to “meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits…” and lead to “profitable partnerships” for companies and the communities with which they do business.

Werhane will be based at Bentley’s Center for Business Ethics, and will facilitate a faculty and staff workshop on February 9, in addition to visiting classes.

Werhane holds the Wicklander Chair of Business Ethics at DePaul University, where she is also the managing director of the Institute for Business and Professional Ethics. She has published numerous articles and is the author or editor of over twenty books including Adam Smith and His Legacy for Modern Capitalism, and Profitable Partnerships for Poverty Alleviation. She has been a Rockefeller Fellow at Dartmouth College, a visiting professor at Cambridge University and is Professor Emerita at University of Virginia. She is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Business Ethics Quarterly, the journal of the Society for Business Ethics, and academic advisor to the Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics.

The Verizon Visiting Professorship in Business Ethics is presented by the Center for Business Ethics at Bentley University, through the generous support of Verizon Communications. The center is a partner in the Bentley Alliance for Ethics and Social Responsibility, and the event is co-sponsored by Bentley’s McCallum Connect. For further information, contact the Center for Business Ethics at 781.891.2981.