please dp the following work

1. Summarize what you have learned from two (2) articles. Write your ideas in one full

page.

2 .Explain your personal ethical model, or fundamental rules, for determining what ought

to be done in business today. Write your ideas in 1/2 page.

ARTICLE 1

InformationWeek, Feb 19, 2001 p8 BUSINESS ETHICS — IT Takes The Lead In

Enforcing Ethics. (Industry Trend or Event) Stephanie Stahl. Full Text: COPYRIGHT

2001 All rights reserved. No part of this information may be reproduced, republished or

redistributed without the prior written consent of CMP Media, Inc. It’s Monday morning,

and you’re studying up on a large-scale project that your company intends to bid on.

You’re well into the details when you realize the company issuing the request for

proposals has accidentally included confidential information that could give you a

serious leg up on your competitors. What do you do? Pretend you didn’t see it? Take

advantage of it and act on it? Alert the company to the mistake and remove yourself

from the negotiations? You find out an employee has been circulating pornographic files

via the company E-mail system. Do you ignore it? Give the employee a warning? Fire

the employee? One of your business partners offers to pay you big bucks for access to

your customer data. You’ve assured customers that such data will remain confidential,

but your company is cash-hungry. Do you sell it? Keep your promise to customers? All

these questions come down to one thing-ethics. Many businesses have their own

standards-sometimes they’re written, sometimes they’re just understood. Sometimes

they’re followed, sometimes they’re ignored. And sometimes it comes down to your own

personal standards. The question of ethics is wide and deep. It can involve policies on

stock trading or even how a company deals with its legacy-something IBM is

experiencing now as it defends its reputation against a lawsuit and a new book that

churns up details of the company’s sale of computers to Germany’s Nazi government

during the 1930s. The discussion over what’s ethical and what’s not isn’t new. But ethics

aren’t just something for corporate officers or human-resources departments to worry

about. The involvement and responsibility of IT professionals in reinforcing standards is

becoming more evident. That’s because of technology’s central role in business

management, opportunities, and innovation. In the first of a series, editor at large

Clinton Wilder and senior executive editor John Soat examine the ethical questions

associated with doing business online (p. 38). Whether it involves confidential data

being backed up on a shared server, keeping employee Web-use logs, advising

employees on cell-phone use, or protecting sensitive customer data, the role of

technology managers and implementers is becoming more critical in setting and

enforcing ethical standards. Does your company have an ethics policy? Do most

employees know about it, or is it collecting dust on a shelf? Does your company provide

training on business ethics? For guidelines on improving awareness of business ethics,

visit our Web site at informationweek.com/825/ethics_side.htm. Tell us what your

toughest ethical challenge in business has been and how you dealt with it. STEPHANIE

STAHL Editor sstahl@cmp.comhttp://www.iweek.com/ Copyright [copyright] 2001

CMP Media Inc. Article A70769823

ARTICLE 2

International Small Business Journal, Jan 1999 v17 i2 p93(1) Competitive and Ethical?

How Business Can Strike A Balance. Laura J. Spence. Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1999

Woodcock Publications Ltd. Giles Wyburd (1998), Competitive and Ethical? How

Business Can Strike A Balance, Kogan Page, London, pp182, ISBN 0749426691, 16.99

[pounds sterling] (USA $24.95). The book by Wyburd centres on the question whether

companies can be competitive and ethical. The theme running throughout the text is

clearly an affirmative answer to this question. A recurring subtext in this respect is the

`celebration of competition’. The author begins by taking a brief look at competition, or in

fact, capitalism, as a macro structure (pp1-10). In doing this he draws predictably on

Adam smith and John Maynard Keynes, peppering his discussion with contemporary

protagonists such as Charles Handy and Will Hutton. After considering the limits to

competition in terms of, for example, restrictive practices, the special case of the

utilities, trade protection and intellectual property, Wyburd goes on to look at some

specific aspects which he, evidently, considers to be relevant to the subject area. He

chooses to focus particularly on advertising (pp34-47) and bribery (pp48-65), while

touching in less detail on products, pricing, purchasing policies, employees and

industrial espionage. Having pointed out some of the relevant areas, the author

suggests factors which may help companies and individuals deal with ethical dilemmas,

such as the law, self-regulation and codes of conduct, he concludes by arguing that

ethical behaviour is good for business (presumably in a financial sense) and restating

his opinion that you can be competitive and ethical. In the area of business ethics there

is an ongoing debate about the lack of applicability and digestibility of many texts for the

business practitioner (see, for example, Stark, 1993; Monast, 1994). This book is quite

explicitly targeted at business people. It is certainly successful in the sense that it is

readable and practical with plenty of concrete examples and no `heavy’ theory.

Nevertheless, it could benefit from a somewhat more rigorous approach to the subject.

It is never made clear, for example, how Wyburd is determining what is and is not good,

ethical or best practice. He does draw on other commentators on business ethics, but

the referencing is quite poorly done with no notification of specific page numbers or year

of publication of quotations. It seems likely that the lack of referencing is intentional in

order to make the book `business person friendly’. While one can accept that this is not

trying to be an academic piece of work, I doubt whether any business person who is

prepared to read through an entire text on what in the scheme of business life is quite a

specific subject, is going to be put off by proper referencing. The book makes no

detailed reference to the case for small firms in a competitive environment, but to his

credit the author does not neglect them entirely and there are a number of references

and comments which demonstrate his awareness of the potential vulnerability of the

smaller firm, as well as the inclusion of small firm examples in some of the chapters

(pp17-18, 20, 26, 32, 50, 61, 84, 97, 99, 110 and 123). The book is on the whole geared

to large firm directors and would I think be of most interest to them. The final major

chapter in the book argues, with only minor reservations, the position that the author’s

understanding of what constitutes ethical behaviour, including integration in the local

community, a long-term stakeholder approach, respect for the environment, treating

suppliers as partners, and valuing employees, enhances competitiveness. Personally, I

am happy to see this position taken, but does it smack of somewhat evangelical zeal

and selective presentation of evidence. There are. similarities here with the rhetoric of

ecological modernisation in terms of the natural environment, where it is commonly

argued that environmental responsibility is good for profit (for a discussion see

Rutherfoord and Spence, 1998). The appropriation of `ethics’, `morals’ and `values’ into

business parlance in terms of the `profit’ and `competitive’ oriented vocabulary is not

necessarily incorrect. There is, however, a danger in tackling these notions onto the list

of `good, financially rewarding, business practices’ without basing the rhetoric on some

more careful consideration and research than has been presented here. From reading

the book one is left in no doubt that the author has much intelligent to say on the subject

of competitiveness and ethics, but on occasion the personal opinion comes through

rather more than justification or explanation. An example of this is the identification of

marketing as a particularly important function in respect to business ethics. The subject

is picked out for having a chapter on its own, and the bias of the author is stated clearly

when he says “Members of the marketing function are logically and inevitably more

open to the temptation to indulge in unethical practices than people in other functions in

most companies” (pp102-103). This position is neither argued clearly in the book nor is

it inkeeping with the views of other commentators. Sternberg, for example, points to

personnel and accounting as being of most relevance to all businesses (Sternberg,

1995, p123). Perhaps tellingly, the author himself has worked in marketing. If we accept

that this text represents the views of one man who has much relevant personal

experience in business, it is certainly a worthwhile contribution. To what extent the book

goes beyond this to offer a full, well rounded discussion of ethics and competition

remains debatable. Nevertheless I can see that it would be of interest, thought

provoking and may clarify some of the issues for directors of businesses who are

sufficiently interested in ethics to read the text. Finally, in a field such as business ethics

which is still young, the focus on competition, which is quite an unusual one, is a

welcome addition to the literature. References Monast, J. H. (1994), `What Is (and isn’t)

the Matter With “What’s the Matter …’, Business Ethics Quarterly, 4(4), pp499-512.

Rutherfoord, R., and Spence, L.J. (1998), `Ecological Modernisation: The Case for

Small Business’. Paper for Ecological Modernisation, Helsinki, Finland, 10-12

September. Stark, A. (1993), `What The Matter With Business Ethics?’, Harvard

Business Review, 71 (3), pp38-41, 44, 46, 48. Sternberg, E. (1995), Just Business:

Business in Action, Warner Books, London. Laura J. Spence Small Business Research

Centre Kingston University England Article A54271918