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Free Enterprise: Values in Action - a day of talks, break-out sessions and discussion, followed by a drinks reception.

Venue: Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge.

24 March 2006

To register for this event, which is co-sponsored by the Centre for Business Research, please contact: Rachel Simpson.

A uniquely wide-ranging conference at Cambridge University in March will bring together speakers from evolutionary behaviour, business studies, neuroscience, economics and law to explore the fundamental importance of values in a free-market economy.

Free Enterprise: Values in Action will be the forum for a broad debate on whether business ethics are merely nice - or completely necessary - for success in developed economies, and whether those involved in successful private enterprise are selfish and amoral, or co-operative and reliable.

The conference speakers are drawn from the UK and the US and from a wide range of disciplines. Amongst others they include.

  • best-selling management author Charles Handy, co-founder of the London Business School;
  • William Casebeer, a US Air Force Major and Harvard University Fellow who has research interests in political violence, military ethics, torture interrogation and the brain mechanisms that govern our moral judgement.
  • Sarah Brosnan, an anthropologist and primatologist from Emory University, Atlanta, who studies the way chimpanzees behave when they have to ‘barter’ tokens for food and the co-operation and reciprocation involved in such economic behaviour;
  • and Paul Zak, founding Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University, who has been studying the physiology of participants in ‘trust’ experiments, and discovering associations between the presence of certain neuroactive hormones and feelings of trust or distrust in partners conducting a transaction.

    • The conference is running for three days altogether. It includes an Open Day on Friday 24th March when researchers are inviting UK academics, members of the local business community, and those interested in values in business to come and take part, and contribute their ideas.

    The day is free to attend, and refreshments will be provided. But places are limited, so anyone wishing to participate should first register by contacting Rachel Simpson: r.simpson@cbr.cam.ac.uk

    Co-organiser Oliver Goodenough, from the Vermont Law School, says: "Although the exchange of goods and services in free markets such as the UK have brought remarkable increases in our prosperity and liberty, such free enterprise is still widely regarded with suspicion. There is a popular view that those who engage in it are guilty of unconstrained selfishness and amoral self-interest."

    Monika Gruter Cheney, Executive Director of the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioural Research in California, which is co-ordinating the research, says: "We believe the prevailing caricature of free enterprise as operating purely within the context of unbridled self-interest is not just off-putting or inadequate, but wrong. In our program of research on 'Free Enterprise: Values in Action' we bring together researchers from zoologists to Nobel Laureate economists, and draw on the latest developments in fields as diverse as management, economics, neuroscience and evolutionary behavioural science to prove that values are as fundamentally important to the success of private enterprise in a free-economic system as self-interest and free choice."

  • The conference is entitled “Free Enterprise: Values in Action”, and it is being organised as part of an American research initiative run by the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioural Research, with funding from the John Templeton Foundation and the UCLA-Sloan Research Program.
  • The conference is being co-sponsored by the Centre for Business Research at Cambridge University.
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