Helet Botha, Ph.D.
Biography and Education
Education
Professor Botha received her Ph.D. from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia (2019). She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the George Washington Business School Award for Outstanding Teaching at the Undergraduate Level (2021), the Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation Research Grant (2019-2021), and the Society for Business Ethics Founders’ Award (2016).
Teaching and Research
Research
Professor Botha’s research lies at the intersections of Ethics, Strategy, and Entrepreneurship. As an existentialist philosopher and an experimentalist, she studies the phenomenology of managerial and entrepreneurial decision-making. Her work focuses on the impact and antecedents of a commitment to moral agency, as well as beliefs about others’ benevolence. So far, her work has been published in the Journal of Business Ethics, Business Ethics Quarterly, Negotiation Journal, the Cambridge Handbook of Research Approaches to Business Ethics and Corporate Responsibility (2017), and A Research Agenda for Organizational Ethics (2023). Her webinar on an existentialist ethics at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School can be viewed here (2023).
Professor Botha is currently (2024-2025) spear-heading a Special Issue of the Journal of Business Ethics on how workers - employees, managers, executives - confront and cope with the precarity of living amid polycrisis. The call for papers can be found here.
Teaching
She teaches Corporate Responsibility through case discussion. Her teaching philosophy and practice is grounded in Contemplative Pedagogy. With the support of the HUB for Teaching and Learning Resources at UM-Dearborn, she is doing research on classroom policies and practices around technology use that are supportive of contemplation (2024).
Selected Publications
Botha, Helet, and R. Edward Freeman. "Existentialist Perspectives on the Problem and Prevention of Moral Disengagement." Journal of Business Ethics (2022): 1-13.
Botha, Helet. 2023. "On bolstering the experience of moral agency: Simone de Beauvoir and ethical decision-making in organizations" in A Research Agenda for Organizational Ethics, edited by Jones, Jen. Edward Elgar Publishing.