For the purposes of this exam question, an Ethical Issue includes both a situation in which the action the Entity would LIKE to take, for its own benefit, will lead to harm that is morally unacceptable; and/or also a situation in which there are two morally “right” courses of action which are in conflict — taking the one prevents the Entity from taking the other, thus creating uncertainty about which one to pick.
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Pick an ethical issue that arises in the management of a multinational corporation. Describe succinctly the situation. It should be either one actual situation in which the issue arose in an important way, or else it could be a synthesis of situations that arise that all contain the same issue in essential the same kind of factual situation.
Show how the situation you have picked contains an ethical issue as defined above. Articulate the issue clearly, and say how it fits the definition above. It can come out of environmental issues, human resource management issues, worker safety issues, scientific honesty issues, international contracting situations, and the like.
The archives (which you can find in the Marist College online library) of the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, the Atlantic Magazine, and similar publications should provide you with plenty to choose from.
After you have shown how the issue you picked meets the definition given above, identify the normative stakeholders (using the Phillips and Freeman definition) and the derivative stakeholders (Phillips and Freeman definition) most affected, both short-term and long-term. (In other words, you don’t have to identify and classify ALL the stakeholders, just the major ones in each category.) Explain the basis on which you did each classification.
THEN, classify those stakeholders another way: Entities Harmed you may call “EHs” and Entities Benefitted you may call “EBs”. Explain the harms and the benefits for each stakeholder.
Then make a recommendation as to
How the decisionmaking process should be approached
What the resolution of the issue should be, and why.
The safest way to organize your answer will be to follow the above instructions paragraph by paragraph. However, if you have an alternative way to do it that will be as good or better, you are free to do that.
You will do well to re-read the materials in Resources, particularly What Does “Ownership” Mean to Stockholders? and the Lecture Notes on Ethical Decisionmaking. You may also find sources in there which you want to pursue and/or update when you are looking for approaches to the last two questions, above.
Make sure that you footnote copiously, using Chicago style with full information footnotes at the bottom of the page. EACH fact gets its own footnote. There is no specific word limit, but being overly vague or general will not yield good results, and neither will being wordy. The way you ORGANIZE your paper WILL count for part of your grade, as will the quality of your research, and the sufficiency of your footnotes. Instructions for Chicago Style footnotes can be found in the Marist Online Library. Go to Research Tools>Reference Shelf>Citation Styles (blue tab)>Chicago/Turabian>Chicago Manual of Style Online.
Make sure your upload is a WORD document. Make sure it is ONE single Word document….do not create a bibliography as a separate document. Make the bibliography PART of your answer document.
Once you’ve researched and written it, leave it for a day, then come back and edit it. The way or ORGANIZE your paper WILL count for part of your grade, as usual, as will the quality of your research and the sufficiency of your footnotes.