Individual response to ethical challenges of international business
Additional Instructions:*As a reminder this requires 2-pages single-spaced and is due on October 11th, 2015 by 11:59 pm.
Each response to this exercise should be unique, so DO NOT COPY from your friends work or others or believe that there is one absolute correct answer. Each student should craft and submit their own plan. I am more interested in each student going through the process of crafting a plan/strategy to respond to ethical challenges as they arise in their career. Having said this I must also make it clear that this will be graded and some submissions will be better than others, and there are certain elements that I am looking for alongside a general way to approach including them…
So what are those elements am I looking for..?
1) Please remember that this is a course on international business not business in general. So understand that each business may conduct international operations which have ethical implications as a result of differences with domestic, foreign, or global ethical practices. This is to say that issues you will encounter most if not all nations may agree are violate certain human rights (see chapter 5), other issues may be legally okay in some countries but not legally okay in others, still other issues may be legally allowed but challenge our moral obligations in various cultures and societies. Consider the following as some, but not all, area issues in which you may encounter ethical challenges: discrimination based on race, gender, culture, sexual orientation, religion, age..; poor or unsafe labor conditions and pay; bribery and corruption; thievery of land, money and other natural resources and/or intellectual property; slavery; pollution; violations of political, economic and cultural sovereignty; national discrimination based on trade partnerships (tariffs, barriers, embargos); currency manipulation; price-fixing;product-safety; treatment of animals; national security; stakeholder importance (primacy); job creation or destruction; wealth creation and distribution; healthcare, global disease and contagion, life-expectancy; among others.
2) Please note that there are various stakeholders, internal and external, direct and indirect, and at various levels that must be considered. You must consider what represents your view of morality and ethical obligations to yourself (personal ethics), your family, your coworkers, your community, your country, your world…You must consider how your organizational culture connects with your ethical decision making…i.e., do you work for an ethical or unethical business in an ethical or unethical industry, in an ethical or unethical national and global market(organizational and industrial culture/ethics)?…As an employee you are an internal stakeholder, yet as part of a family, a community, a nation, and the world you are an external stakeholder. Other internal stakeholders are your coworkers, owners (shareholders, institutional (e.g., banks) and private (e.g., families) owners, maybe direct partner firms (e.g., partially-owned and controlled businesses, joint-venture partners, organizational partners). Other external stakeholders can be just about anyone in the human race (those that are alive, those that have died, and those that have yet to be born) including consumers, the community both local and global, the industry, the markets both domestic and global, taxpayers, suppliers, related industries, people who are young, old, working or not, and people who have yet to be born, animals, plants, etc…
3) Ultimately, I am looking for the general way in which you plan to identify and address any/all of these ethical issues, at various levels, as they arise. Here is where it gets tricky and where your plan will begin to take shape. I AM NOT looking for a plan to respond to a specific ethical challenge in a specific company or country. I am looking for you to create a plan that you can use for the rest of your life no matter what the country, business, or situation you are in…As part of this process I would like you to explore how you can identify ethical issues as they come up (remember that some people do not even see issues as being unethical so how can you avoid this?). What is your priority or moral obligation in life, yourself, your family, your company, your community, the world today, the world tomorrow, or maybe even to your ancestors’ sacrifices? Will life circumstances matter and when? If you compromise your ethics, how much and for how long. Finally, how you will you respond and what will your decision process look like?
I recommend making an extensive decision tree to assist you in this process, if you do not know what that is you can look it up, but I do not want you to simply turn in a decision-tree. I want you to provide a individual written explanation for your strategy for response to ethical challenges of international business. It may help to envision a scenario or company but again I I DO NOTwant a plan to respond to a specific ethical challenge,from a specific company or country. I want a general plan for whatever you may encounter.
This plan should be at least 2-pages in length (single-spaced, 12 point font Times New Roman, well organized but without exaggerated spacing between paragraphs) but let’s try not to exceed 4-pages. Please note that aside from the instructions I provide here, I will not provide more details. While there is a deliverable in this assignment and I will be grading on the aforementioned areas, the critical thinking process is the main goal.
Grading weights…
Comprehensive inclusion of International Business issues for ethical evaluation (30%).
Comprehensive inclusion of stakeholders of direct and indirect consequence to decisions (30%).
Comprehensive thought process and logical planning, from identification to decisions (40%).
Total 100%
The latter portion for thought process and logical planning will be the most important area of concern in my grading as it will show how much thought and consideration you gave to this assignment (in order to produce a good piece of work it should take you on average 4-6 hours of thinking at minimum). If you put little effort in it will be apparent and this will have implications in all three areas of grading. Please do not simply relist what I have listed here, try to group an aggregate into areas of ethical concern.