(ONLY ASSIGNMENTS 2 AND 3 NEED COMPLETION)
Overview
Over the final few weeks of the class, you will complete a series of short writing assignments about a
single case study from a particular business or industry. (Different people will get different case studies.
Your whole project is about only one case study, which I will assign to you.) Each business has an ethical
culture that encourages or fails to prevent one or more ethical lapses. A business’s ethical culture is
made up of the formal and informal systems which express the business’s ethical values and show
where the business stands (or doesn’t take a stand) on ethical issues. In this series of assignments, you
will explain what the ethical lapses were, diagnose what feature or features of the culture lead to these
lapses, propose and defend a practical way of fixing the culture, and anticipate possible problems or
complications that could arise when you implement your proposal. The goal is to practice applying the
techniques of moral reasoning that we have learned about in class and think about how to prevent moral failures in the workplace.
Grading
Your overall grade for the project is roughly the average of how you do on all of the assignments. Your grade for the project makes up 30% of your grade for the course, so it’s important that you do well on this, especially if you haven’t been doing well on the homework.
Assignments will be graded for both substance and presentation. A great assignment will:
– Show that you have read the case study and the topic for the assignment very closely
– Address the assigned topic clearly and in sufficient detail
– Use ideas and theories we have explored in class…
– … in a way that is relevant to the questions at hand and shows you really understand them
– Show evidence of serious, critical thought about the topic
– Not leave me guessing about what you meant
– Be organized in a way that makes clear why every sentence is located where it is
– Follow the conventions of spelling, word choice, grammar, and tone for writing in formal English
(i.e. the sort of English that you would find in published writing in the academic or business
world, or that you might find in a typical article in The New York Times or The Wall Street
Journal)
Academic Integrity and Proper Citation
I expect that the ideas in your writing are your own, and not another author’s or your friend’s. It goes without saying, but do not plagiarize any portion of this project. If the past is any indication, you have a significant chance of crying if I find out that you have plagiarized. Plagiarism is when you either (a) copy and paste someone else writing, (b) copy and paste it and change a couple of words around, or (c) take any idea that isn’t common knowledge from some text without providing the appropriate citation. Providing the appropriate citation means giving enough information for the reader to look up where you found these words or ideas (in the body of the paper or a footnote/endnote,1 and not just in a bibliography at the end), and putting quotation marks around words that you’ve borrowed. This includes the use of ideas from sources on the internet and sources whose authors aren’t known. I don’t
care what form your citations take (APA, MLA, Chicago Style, your own made up format) as long as you give me enough information to easily look up the source of each idea or passage that you have borrowed from elsewhere. If possible, citations should include page numbers.Feel free to use sources other than and in addition to the sources I provide you. Be judicious about what sources you cite. Reputable newspapers and magazines (yes to Bloomberg and the NYT, no to the Post and National Enquirer) are generally more trustworthy than websites with no visible credentials; peer-reviewed academic journal articles, articles found on websites ending in “.edu”, and articles put out by non-partisan government agencies like the Census Bureau or the Congressional Budget Office are
generally more trustworthy than newspapers. You shouldn’t be using Wikipedia, SparkNotes, or Yahoo
Answers as a source in a paper, although of course you can read these things to get started thinking about the issues in a paper.
In any case, remember that I am primarily interested in your ability to apply the ideas we have learned about in class. A paper that is mostly made up of quotes from other people doesn’t tell me much about how you think.
Drafts
I’m more than happy to read and provide comments on drafts. I’m also happy to answer any questions you have about an assignment by e-mail. Please send any drafts or questions at least two days before the assignment is due.
Lateness
The grade for an assignment will go down one letter grade (from a B to a C, for instance) for every day it
is late. If you need an extension on an assignment, ask me at least two days before the assignment is due.
Formatting and Logistics
1 To make a footnote in Microsoft Word, click on the part of the text that needs a footnote, click the References
tab at the top of the page, and click Insert Footnote. A little area will appear at the bottom of the page where you can type in your citation and whatever else you want to add.
The expected lengths of each assignment are given below. You can hand in each assignment in hard
copy, or e-mail it to me as a file I can edit (not a PDF). Please don’t play with the font or margins. It is
literally an insult to my intelligence.
These assignments are all pretty short, so you shouldn’t include an introduction or conclusion that’s
more than a sentence or two long. Get right to the point – no fluff or extra verbiage.
Assignment #1 (300 to 500 words2)
Apply two (no more, no less) of the moral frameworks we have learned about to your case study –
that is, use these theories to explain what the main moral failure or failures are in the case study. (Is it only one big failure, or is it a bunch of little ones?) The frameworks you can use are: utilitarianism,
Rawls’ theory of justice, human rights (as articulated by the UN’s Universal Declaration), Superson’s theory of sexual harassment, stockholder theory, and stakeholder theory. Be specific in how you apply the two theories. For example, if you apply utilitarianism, it’s not enough to say “this is wrong because it
makes people unhappy”; you also have to say why or how it makes people unhappy. Similarly, if you apply human rights, it’s not enough to say “this behavior violated so-and-so’s human rights”; you have to say which right(s) it violated and how it violated them. If you think there is something else that is morally important about the case study (e.g. something that is fishy to you, but that your two frame works ignore), briefly explain what that is and why you think it’s important at the end of the paper.
Assignment #2 (300 to 500 words)
How did the ethical culture of the business permit, encourage, or facilitate the ethical lapses in your case study? Look at the questions in Table 5.1 and Table 5.2 on pages 195 and 196 of Trevino and Nelson. You don’t have the space to do a full ethical culture audit of the companies in your case study,
but pick the questions in those tables that you think are most relevant to explaining what went wrong
in your case study, and answer those. Again, be specific. For example, the ethical lapses in your case study could be due to unclear guidelines or codes of conduct, a lack of transparency or accountability, a failure of communication or openness to criticism, dangerous role models, or an unhealthy way of understanding what the business was all about. Say which of these factors (or other factors discussed by Trevino and Nelson) were responsible for the ethical lapses.
If you think factors outside of the ethical culture (e.g. regulatory failures, problems in the wider society or economy) were also responsible for the ethical lapses, briefly explain their role, but the emphasis is on the business’s ethical culture (even if you don’t think that’s the main cause of the ethical problems in your case study).
Assignment #3 (400 to 600 words)
2 To find out how many words a Microsoft Word document contains, click on the Review tab at the top of the page, and click Word Count.
Propose a solution to the problem(s) that you diagnosed in the last assignment. What could have been done to fix the ethical culture of the business before the lapses, or what could be done in the future, in a way that could have prevented the ethical lapses in question? Which specific formal and informal systems need to be changed, and how would you change them? Does the solution have many parts or stages, or is it relatively simple? Why do you think it would work? Why do you think it is practically feasible – that is, something that the executives at the business could actually pull off?
Remember that you’re looking at solutions to cultural problems. Don’t just say “So-and-so should have
done things differently”. You need to say what could be done at a cultural level to prevent people from making bad decisions.
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