Deep links

To better understand how business school students view the relationship between law and business, we used the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique (ZMET) to elicit the unconscious thoughts and feelings of twelve students about the role of law in starting and running a business in the United States. Our study revealed three deep metaphors: system, moral balance, and force. In this subset of American culture we saw a far richer, more complex, and less negative mental model of the role of law than previous survey or anecdotal data would suggest.Includes bibliographical references. The results of this research suggest that the systems approach to law and management, which highlights the linkages between law, business, and societal welfare, may be a more effective pedagogical tool for teaching students about the role of law and ethics in business than a competing model that bifurcates a firm's external environment into market and nonmarket components and relegates law and social expectations to the nonmarket environment.