BUS020X601A Business Ethics and Responsible Management
Assessment Case Choice 1
Southern Water
Part 1
You are now required to write a brief report to senior managers at Southern Water. You should imagine and play the role of an employee who has been asked to write a report for senior managers outlining the ethical issue involved in the case. The reports you have give a good background, now you should present at report outlining the case from the perspective of business ethics.
Why should the company be looking at this issue from the perspective of ethics? What is the issue here do you think? Is it a lack of integrity? Transparency? Has the company been dishonest? Has it exploited someone or something? How would you characterise the ethical transgression? (It could be more than one thing).
How might this issue influence the public image of the company? What will be the result for the company if/when it is/was found out?
What alternatives ways are there to think about a business’ role in society? What does the issue seem to indicate that the business is focussed on? Is it for example shareholder value? Or the interests of a range of stakeholders? (Here the temptation is to say that the impact on shareholders for example is that the share price goes down when the issue is report. BUT – we want you to think about what the company had in mind when it chose this path and must have assumed it would not get caught!)
Who/what are the stakeholders impacted in the scenario you are reporting on and how are they impacted on? Again- think about who gained/lost WHEN the decision was made not when the scandal was exposed.
Where are there examples of business that act responsibly and ones that do not? You should illustrate this by including research you can find, e.g where is there research that shows good choices benefit companies and bad choices have a negative impact? We are looking for academic research first and foremost, examples of companies’ actions are OK but not without research showing – for example – that people want to work for companies that uphold values.
Finally you should conclude with some recommendations for what the company should do -a tip here is to pay particular note to the video guidance where concluding remarks for this section are covered. This part of your assessment should be written as a report, but should be referenced in the normal academic way using Harvard citations and referencing.
For this part you should again use the case study – but this time choose TWO ethical theories (using ones we have looked at in class) and demonstrate that you can apply these to the case to show how your chosen theories lead you to a view on the ethics of the case. For example, if you applied utilitarian thinking to the idea of cutting quality to boost profit what would you need to consider and how might the issue look from that perspective? Or, what if you apply Kant’s thinking here? NOTE – you do NOT have to use ‘opposing’ ideas, we are interested most in how you use theory, if, when you apply two theories they seem to give the same answer that is fine, if they seem to give different outcomes that is fine too. This section is written in a more academic style than the report.
