Dr. Andrew Ruble

Lloyd International Honors College

People

Dr. Andrew Ruble

Philosophy

Dr. Ruble is a Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at UNCG. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Utah. His research focuses on applied ethics, through an approach that brings together Chinese thought, social science, leadership character traits, and business ethics. In particular, he aims to develop an ethics-based non-Western leadership model informed by empirical work from social sciences. This work is motivated by looking at how multinational organizations operate across a variety of Western and non-Western contexts, often with a lack of sensitivity to non-Western views, but rarely has the actual practice of adapting to those non-Western contexts made it back into the theorizing about these matters in the English literature. Currently, Western leadership models tend to lack cross-cultural relevance or suffer from a lack of theoretical sophistication.

The primary goal of my research is to develop organizational leadership models that benefit from distinctive ideas in Chinese thought. The Confucian model he is developing has deep implications for a leader’s character in both business ethics and political philosophy. Specifically, he believes that Confucian organizational leadership approaches provide a way to build or maintain the organizational culture for certain types of institutions through community-focused leadership. In pursuing this project, he utilizes the social sciences and other literature to refine this Confucian-inspired model and assess its applicability to modern organizations. The benefits of this research project are particularly salient in East Asia, where Confucianism has profoundly influenced not only China but also Korea and Japan. Furthermore, he seeks to re-invigorate discussions of the importance of superior leadership, a topic that philosophers have largely neglected in recent decades.