Helet Botha is an Assistant Professor of Business Policy and Strategy at the UM-Dearborn College of Business. She received her Ph.D. from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia (2019), and does research at the intersections of Ethics, Strategy, and Entrepreneurship. As an existentialist philosopher and an experimentalist, she studies 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. 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).
Helet 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.
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).
