Business, Society and Ethics BUSA 5200

At the end of this course the student will be able to:

• Describe the main features of the utilitarian, rights, and justice approaches to ethics.
• Recognize cases where each of the utilitarian, rights, and justice approaches have guided decision-making and action.
• Critically analyze typical business and management situations calling for principled ethical judgment, including situations involving interactions between persons with different cultural backgrounds.
• Conduct a case study analysis that makes intelligent use of the moral principles and methods explored in the course.
• Recognize the violation of a moral principle in an action or proposed course of action.
• Describe the obstacles that stand in the way of individuals acting ethically in the business world.
• Develop management procedures, processes, and structures that serve to overcome or minimize obstacles to ethical behaviour in the business world.
• Apply corporate and other codes of conduct to evaluate the acceptability of actions or policies.
• Explain the concept of corporate social responsibility and the main elements of stakeholder relations theory.
• Apply stakeholder relations theory to specific examples of business organizations and their stakeholders.
• Assess who the relevant stakeholders of an organization are and what their potential for cooperation with or threat to the organization is.
• Develop a practical action plan for an organization to deal effectively and ethically with its stakeholders, including (if appropriate) changing the nature of the relations between the organization and its stakeholders.
• Analyze product failure and other crisis situations that sometimes face business organizations.
• Develop practical action plans to minimize the adverse consequences of crisis situations to business organizations and their stakeholders.
• Apply issues management concepts to analyze the actual and potential challenges faced by business organizations.
• Develop practical action plans to guide lobbying and other issues management activities in order to effectively and ethically manage significant public policy issues faced by business organizations.
• Explain the nature of the role of government in society, the main elements of the government public policy process, and the main ways business and government interact with one another.

Effective as of Fall 2003