Learning Guide Unit 7
Overview
Unit 7: Professional Ethics, Work Environments & Marketing Ethics
Topics
Ethics, Advertising and
... [Show More] Professions
Workplaces, Alternative Work Arrangements and Digitization
Marketing, Ethical Constraints and Controversial Products
Learning Objectives
By the end of this Unit, you will be able to:
Identify ethical challenges relating to entrepreneurial start-ups, describe positive and negative effects of growth in a start-up and discuss the role of the founder in instilling an ethical culture.
Discuss how social media has altered the advertising landscape, explain the influence of advertising on consumers and analyze the potential for subliminal advertising.
Discuss whether the underlying business model of the insurance industry is an ethical one, identify the reasons why the government offers certain kinds of insurance, discuss the ethical issues in insurers’ decisions whether to offer disaster insurance and explain the concept of redlining.
Identify ethical problems related to the availability and cost of health care in the United States and elsewhere and discuss recent developments in insuring or otherwise providing for health care in the United States.
Identify the benefits of permitting employees to work from home, explain the drawbacks of telecommuting for the business and for employees and discuss the ethical dilemmas related to telecommuting and some of the solutions.
Compare the workplaces of yesterday, today, and the future, describe the benefits and potential drawbacks of workplace campuses and identify ethical challenges in the development of workplace campuses.
Explain the benefits, drawbacks, and ethical issues of job sharing and flextime, describe the business models that have emerged in the new millennium and discuss the ethical challenges businesses face in the gig economy.
Discuss the application of robotics and the workplace changes it will bring, identify artificial intelligence applications in the workplace and explain the ethical challenges presented by the use of artificial intelligence.
Discuss legal and ethical constraints on marketing and advertising, describe the role of marketing ethics in relation to objectionable advertising, harmful products and controversial brans and debate the ethics and regulation of marketing practices.
Tasks
Read the Learning Guide and Reading Assignments
Complete the Discussion Assignment by posting and participating in the Discussion Forum
Respond to three of your fellow classmates’ posts in the Discussion Forum
Complete and submit the Written Assignment
Take and submit the Self-Quiz
Take and submit the Graded Quiz
Ethics in Business
What are the ethical challenges in entrepreneurship? In social media and advertising? In insurance and health care?
READ and TAKE NOTES on the following chapters to examines these industries through an ethical lens.
Business Ethics. Chapter 9: Professions under the Microscope.
Business Ethics. Chapter 10: Changing Work Environments and Future Trends.
Good Corporation, Bad Corporation. Chapter 6: Marketing Ethics: Selling Controversial Products.
Public Awareness and Consumer Activism
This introductory video from the SDG Academy discusses the topics of the civil awareness of environmental sustainability goals and how individuals can act toward their achievement through ethical consumer choices and changing behavioral patterns. In this video, Prof. Sachs discusses how celebrities, leaders and citizens can deploy the tools of social media to promote the principles of sustainability as concerns that public and private organizations need to consider. According to Prof. Sachs, especially in relation to consumer choices, individuals can collectively exert pressure on companies and corporations to bring their practices in line with the values of workplace equity, environmental sustainability and social justice.
Take a moment to watch Public Awareness and Consumer Activism [Video]. Alternately, you can read the Public Awareness and Consumer Activism transcript [PDF].
Licenses and Attributions
Byars, S. M., & Stanberry, K. (2019). Business ethics. OpenStax College and Rice University. Retrieved from: https://opentextbc.ca/businessethicsopenstax/.
Discussion Assignment
Please read the case study “A New Slice of the Apple?” from the chapter 10 of the Business ethics textbook that you find in the reading assignment.
Based on what you have learned in this unit, answer the following questions:
Should a company build in the inner city to integrate its workforce with the community and reduce the traffic consequences of adding its workforce to the local population?
Is it better for a company to support local restaurants or build its own restaurant facilities?
Is it ethical for a company to spend so much on building a corporate facility instead of increasing shareholder dividends?
Should there be zoning laws regarding corporate campuses?
Discussion Requirements
Your Discussion should be at least 250 words in length, but not more than 750 words. Use APA citations and references for the textbook and any other sources used; you should use at least 1 APA citation and reference, but you can use more if needed. Refer to the UoPeople APA Tutorials in the LRC for help with APA citations.
Discussion Responses
It is your responsibility to respond to three classmates by providing comments, asking questions, or having a conversation about their main post. Feedback should be appropriate, meaningful, and helpful. For instance refer to how your own experience supports/contradicts the opinions developed by your peers. If you think they are too general or not rooted enough in personal experience, you may also ask for more detailed examples supporting these opinions. In particular make sure that the examples provided are properly referenced and that you are able to access them. Overall, your comments should contribute positively to the conversation by broadening or clarifying it. Feedback should be at least 3-4 complete sentences (100 words).
Rating Discussions
After posting an appropriate, meaningful, and helpful response to your three classmates, you must rate their posts on a scale of 0 (unsatisfactory) to 10 (Excellent). The rating scores are anonymous; therefore, do NOT mention in your remarks the separate rating score you will give the peer. The instructor is the only person who knows which score matches the comment given to a peer. Some classmates may worry that some peers will not provide a fair rating, or be unable to provide accurate corrections for grammar or other errors. It is the instructor’s responsibility to ensure fairness and accuracy.
10 (A) - Excellent, substantial, relevant, insightful, enriching, and stimulating contribution to the discussion. Also, uses external resources to support position where required and/or applicable.
8 - 9 (B) - Good, quite substantial and insightful, but missing minor details which would have otherwise characterized it as an excellent response.
6 - 7 (C) - Satisfactory insight and relevance, but required some more information and effort to have warranted a better rating.
4 - 5 (D) - Limited insight and relevance of the material; more effort and reflection needed to have warranted a satisfactory grading.
0 - 3 (F) - Unsatisfactory insight/relevance or failure to answer the question, reflecting a poor or limited understanding of the subject matter and/or the guidelines of the question.
Here are some questions to consider as we think about the feedback and rating to give our classmates:
Did the peer respond to everything asked by the assignment prompt?
Was the peer’s overall response organized and logical? Was it easy to follow and smooth?
Was it easy to understand the ideas the student was trying to communicate, or did you have to make assumptions to make sense out of what the peer wrote?
Did the peer use their own words, or if they borrowed from somewhere else, did they give credit to the source they used?
Were there consistent errors in grammar and punctuation that made it hard to understand or make sense out of the writing?
If at any time you suspect that a post in this Discussion Forum violates UoPeople's rules regarding plagiarism and/or any aspect of UoPeople’s Academic Code of Conduct, please notify your instructor immediately.
Remember that your instructor will be reviewing responses, ratings, and comments. Your instructor will adjust ratings if he/she believes that they do not seem warranted or supportable.
Written Assignment
Please read the case study “What Would You Do?: Staffing Trade-offs” from the chapter 10 of the Business ethics textbook that you find in the reading assignment.
Based on what you have learned in this unit, answer the following questions:
What points support the job-sharing plan? How would it benefit the company? The employees?
What negative effects might it have on the company and the employees?
Do you have any concerns about potential employment discrimination if this plan is implemented? If so, what would they be?
Is creating job-sharing positions the right thing for the company/customers/employees to do in this situation?
Written Assignment Requirements
Submit a written paper that is a minimum of one typewritten page (approximately 500 to 700 words) with an introduction and conclusion. This paper shall demonstrate the use of standard written English with respect to organization, grammar, spelling, composition, sentence structure, punctuation, and construction. The paper should cite sources to support your ideas. Refer to the UoPeople APA Tutorials in the LRC for help with APA citations. [Show Less]