Ethics is about determining value; it’s deciding what’s worth doing and what doesn’t matter so much. Business ethics is the way we decide what kind of career to pursue, what choices we make on the job, which companies we want to work with, and what kind of economic world we want to live in and then leave behind for those coming after.
There are no perfect answers to these questions, but there’s a difference between thinking them through and winging it. The Business Ethics Workshop provides a framework for identifying, analyzing, and resolving ethical dilemmas encountered through working life.
The textbook and its cases follow along as closely as possible, citing from blog posts and recent news stories. Case studies are the most important components of this text because it was written for a discussion-intensive class. Ethics isn’t something we know; it’s something we do, and trying out our reasoning is the best way to confirm that it’s actually working.
Type of Material:
Open (Access) Textbook
Recommended Uses:
This is recommended for lecture and in-class discussion, possible homework assignments, and can be used for individual or team activities.
Technical Requirements:
Firefox 32.0.0.330
Java 8 Update 241
Adobe Reader Plugin for Firefox
Adobe Flash – FP 32 for Firefox
Identify Major Learning Goals:
The student will understand a framework for identifying, analyzing, and resolving ethical dilemmas encountered through working life.
The student will learn a wide spectrum of issues and theories related to duties and rights, consequences and challenges of cultural relativism, ethics related to and between employee and employer, advertising and consumer protection, corporations and social responsibility, economics and the environment, the Star System and Labor Unions.
Target Student Population:
As this is an introductory book, this can be used at the lower or upper-undergraduate level, as a supplement at the graduate level for Business students.
It can also be used professional development
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:
None
Content Quality
Rating:
Strengths:
Current examples are provided and integrated effectively with different topics.
This is easy to read and easy to understand, and a variety of scenarios are presented to demonstrate ethics in different situations.
This textbook covers all relevant ethical areas and theories while providing a vast number of cases as examples of the theories explained.
All the theories, topics, issues, and case studies are presented in a logical structure with clarity and organization
It's user-friendly and access to other related sources is provided via links to other articles and videos.
It is properly indexed and its organization is clear and intuitive. The content is up to date in the majority of theories. there may be some cases when a little update may be considered though not compulsory.
Concerns:
Suggestions for improvement include pairing the section on Rawls on fairness with Nozick, who provides a more libertarian notion that is a standard alternative to Rawls. The decision to include only Rawls deviates from other texts, but this is not an indefensible choice - just a choice that leans a particular direction.
The content is clear, but there are no specific goals presented for the text.
Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool
Rating:
Strengths:
This text is relevant to anyone going into business as the cases cited include contemporary events with classic theories and cases that are up to date and diverse.
Current events are less about new knowledge and more about connecting cases to things the students are familiar with.
The text was written in a student friendly style and it avoids long blocks of text and favors at times a bullet point style that is especially effective for business students.
The use of jargon is minimized to what is essential for conveying ethical theory.
Learning objectives are presented in each chapter, and “takeaways” are listed after the main topics as well as review questions and literary references.
Concerns:
The decision to place union topics at the end is rare. Other texts might end with applied international business ethics or a broad unit on social and economic justice.
A more internationally focused text with even more examples from other cultures would add value for institutions with global student learning goals.
Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty
Rating:
Strengths:
For a textbook, the design is effective, especially color coding the key takeaways and review questions.
Key concepts in ethical theories are discussed in simple terms.
Live links are available in some areas to reference material.
This text is modular as case sections or topics can stand alone.
It's student-friendly and provides easy cross-reference and other related formats.
It is very intuitive. the margins provide clarity to specific concepts.
All charts and images are free of problems and the links to articles and videos work perfectly.
Concerns:
There are formatting issues such as extra white space in places, the tabbing of bullet-points, and single-word lines in the text that are probably intended as section headings.
Creative Commons:
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