Ethical Practice: Leading Through Professionalism, Social Responsibility, and System Design

Assignments

Team Assignments

The topic of all three essays will correlate with the subject of one of our classes:

1. Will address our panel on business and the professions;
2. the economic downturn of 2007 and the years following;
3. the role of income in your career choices.

Following these class discussions, the teams will meet to discuss the assigned topic and compose an appropriate 3 to 4-page, double-spaced response.

Each member of the 5-person team should contribute to the conception and writing of the team essays, and confirm their participation; failure to contribute to an essay will result in a “0” for that assignment.

Team Writing Assignment 1

“Is business a profession? Should it be? Explain why or why not.” Factor into your explanation arguments that authors in this module and our panelists make. Take pp. 3–4, double-spaced, to prepare your team response.

Team Writing Assignment 2

“What effect, if any, has the Great Recession had on your career to date, and how might it influence your professional choices going forward?” Take pp. 3–4, double-spaced, to explore this topic.

Team Writing Assignment 3

“Based on Stout’s deconstruction of shareholder value, Plato and Aristotle’s notions of the marketplace, and Paine and Elias / Dees’s review of the standards to which we can hold ourselves in the business community, what standard(s) do you think we should set for daily business operations?” Take pp. 3–4, double-spaced, to explain your views.

Individual Writing Assignment

The three team papers will serve as the springboard for your final, longer paper which should be pp. 5–7, double-spaced.

Revisit your team essays, and explore how your statements there look now, refracted through the various materials we have covered during the half-semester, as well as your own experience of meeting ethical challenges.

Guidelines

As you compose your individual and team papers please work with the following guidelines:

1. Introduction: Please provide an opening paragraph or two that succinctly states the nature of your essay, including the topic you have chosen, the central point or points you expect to make, and the overall approach you will take to your subject, including the materials on which you will draw.
2. Body: Build you argument through successive paragraphs, each of which embraces the paragraph principle; that is, a thesis sentence and succeeding sentences that provide the evidence needed to substantiate your thesis. You might consider using headers and subheaders to clarify the progress of your argument, not just to the reader, but to yourself.
3. Conclusion: Summarize what you’ve told us, and suggest—if only in passing—why your claims matter.
4. Other considerations: Draw on your texts, films, and in-class commentary for specific examples / moments that substantiate your argument. Avoid broad generalizations about the state of the world, etc.; you may achieve such relevance by making careful arguments based on what initially looks like limited evidence, but is all the more effective for its concreteness and specificity.