Journal of Social Science Education Volume 14, Number 1, Spring 2015 DOI 10.2390/jsse-v14-i1-1271 56 Dr. Christoph Schank Dr. Alexander Lorch Institute for Business Ethics University of St.Gallen Tannenstrasse 19 9000 St. Gallen Switzerland Emails: christoph.schank@unisg.ch alexander.lorch@unisg.ch Christoph Schank, Alexander Lorch Economic Citizenship and Socio-Economic Rationality as Foundations of an Appropriate Economic Education In this article we argue that social science education needs to convey more than operational mechanisms of society. Especially in socio-economic education, questions of business ethics, i.e. phenomena of economics and society need to be integrated and reflected, decidedly focusing on the moral content of economics. With the introduction of economic citizenship as the ideal economic actor to be the purpose of economic education, this paper proposes that economic education needs to connect economic expertise and moral judgment and should also allude to the necessity of every market action’s conditional legitimization by society. We propose to discuss different ‘sites’ of morality as a heuristic approach to the different areas of economic responsibility. The individual, organizational and political level of responsibility helps to categorize the different moral issues of economic activity and serves as a great pattern to explain economic relations to scholars and students. Keywords: Business ethics, economic-ethical education, integrated economic ethics, economic citizen, sites of morality, civic spirit, ethical expertise 1 Introduction: Socio-economic education from a business ethics perspective Economic and employment systems play an increasingly important role in modern societies; as (re)producers of social disparity, they take accountability for the distribution of economic goods and determine the amount of individual societal participation. Thus, eco- nomic operational competence constitutes an invaluable basis for any self-determined lifestyle concerning changes of status as well as everyday life. It is therefore crucial not to reduce these systems to abstracts beyond social reality, but to conceive them as culturally embedded societal subsystems. Such interconnected sys- tems always cause conflicts, dilemmas and structural problems in their interpenetration zones (cf. Göbel 2006, p. 79), i.e., their intersections with adjacent subsystems (e.g., politics, legislation, education, etc.). In the follo- wing, we argue that those phenomena—within the scope of school education—need to be reflected from a perspective beyond an analysis of simple operational mechanisms, decidedly focusing on the moral content. Socio-economic education and issues of business ethics are therefore very closely connected. If (conventional) socio-economics wants to apply to imparting economic and social expertise, then business ethics accompanies this via reflecting the development of socio-economic rationality. The genuine contribution of business ethics is to endow this guidance as a “critical reflection authority“ 1 (Ulrich, Maak 1996, p. 15), and to offer explanatory discourses regarding values, purposes, principles and extra-econo- mic framework requirements to both lecturers and learners of socio-economic education. This is meant to include those issues and aspects which are shunned by “pure“ economics in order for it to be acknowledged as a value-free, descriptive science. We hold the view that the separation of ethics and economics, of explanatory and applicational discourses, is artificial, and that the two-world-conception of value-free economic rationale on the one hand and “extra-economic“ ethics on the other hand can be transcended by a socio-economic education. In this regard, ULRICH (2005a, p. 6) points out: “Thus, we do not have a choice between a value- free or an ethical perspective on economic activity, but only a choice between a reflected or unreflected dealing with the inevitable normativity of every statement concerning issues of reasonable economic activity. Every conceivable notion of economic rationality always includes the normative.“ 2 This essay discusses socio-economic education from a business ethics point of view. Generally speaking, we consider every person involved in economic inter-rela- tions (consumer, investor, entrepreneur, executive or member of an organization) to be a beneficiary of this education. It needs to be embedded into the general school system, since relatively young students already take on the role of economic subjects or develop ideas about economic activity during their occupational orien- tation or via decisions regarding consumption and saving. During tertiary and quaternary education, socio- economic contents of teaching gain importance along with the increase of potential role models (entre- preneurs, employees, executives, etc.).