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MGT 3110 Business and Society 2012/13 Group Coursework Professional report about an issue pertaining to business ethics or CSR Option 1 You are a newly appointed ethics manager for a large UK service company that runs a range of ‘outsourced’ public services, from street cleaning to local public transport to research laboratories. The chair of the company’s CSR committee calls you in for a meeting. She has come across a new report by the charity Alcohol Concern which claims that the vast majority of FTSE350 companies “bury their heads in the sand” over alcohol issues in the workplace. The charity has appealed to the Secretary State for Business, demanding that businesses need to do more to help change employees’ attitudes to alcohol. The main findings of the Alcohol Concern report include:

• Around 10 million men and women in England drink above the recommended guidelines

• Every day, around 200,000 people go to work in the UK with a hangover

• Excessive consumption of alcohol leads to lost productivity and absenteeism. It costs the economy about 14 million working days and up to £6.4bn each year

The CSR committee chair asks you to write a report assessing the charity’s demand and setting out what the company should do to address the problem. Option 2 You are a newly appointed ethics manager at StarAlphaMedicines (SAM), a global pharmaceutical company, which has recently been fined 1 billion dollars in the US over its aggressive sales tactics in relation to its anti-depressant drugs. The company was found to promote one of their drugs for treating ‘off-label’ conditions, such as sexual dysfunction and obesity – illnesses beyond the scope of the drug’s regulatory approval. The company was also found to encourage the use of another drug for treating depression in children, for which it had no approval either. At the same time, SAM played down studies that linked the anti-depressant to cases of suicide among vulnerable patients and funded ‘independent’ studies that reported results in favour of their anti-depressant drugs. SAM sales representatives were also found to engage in practices (common in the industry) designed to influence doctors to prescribe the drugs. For example, they offered doctors and their spouses all-expenses paid trips to conferences held in five star hotels where speakers, paid up to $2,500, gave presentations on the drugs, and where the conference attendants could enjoy diving, golf, fishing and other extra activities arranged by SAM. Other offers of entertainment included tickets to sports events and paid-for golf lessons. You have been asked by SAM’s newly installed ethics and risk committee to write a report setting out what the company should do to ‘clean up its act’.

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Option 3 You work in the CSR department of SuperFizz, a global soft drinks company that has operations in over 100 countries. Your department has come across an article in a national newspaper article that accuses SuperFizz of ‘propping up’ the dictatorship of country X, a small sub-Saharan African country, in which the company operates a large concentrate-manufacturing plant. The country is ruled by an absolute monarch, who is said to have amassed a personal fortune of more than £50 million, whilst most of its 1 million inhabitants live in poverty and many are dying from HIV/Aids and Tuberculosis. The country has high levels of unemployment. Political parties are banned in the country and activists are regularly arrested, imprisoned and tortured. A campaign group estimates that the SuperFizz plant may contribute up to 40% to the GDP of country X. There is no democratic control over how the taxes that country X receives from businesses operating in the country are used. Apart from the accusation that SuperFizz’s presence in the country makes the company complicit in the way the monarch runs his kingdom, campaigners found it particularly offensive that SuperFizz’s local management took out full-page adverts in state-owned newspapers to wish the monarch a happy birthday. The head of the CSR department asks you to write a report that sets out possible responses to the criticisms and accusations levelled at SuperFizz in the newspaper article. Option 4 You work in the CSR department of SAINCO, a leading supermarket chain. The Head of the Department hands you a report by a well-known environmental charity, which was brought to her attention by the company’s media monitoring team. The report claims that SAINCO’s own-label canned beef contains meat sourced from BIG, a large South-American company that supplies meat and cattle by-products to many food and clothes manufacturers around the world. BIG has been found to source its products from ranches in the Amazon that use deforested land for grazing grounds (often illegally) and that have caused a widespread destruction of the rainforest. Your boss asks you to investigate the charity’s claim. It takes you a while to track down the information, but finally a colleague responsible for meat buying confirms that a small but significant percentage of beef that is used in the company’s own label canned beef, which is manufactured by a selected supplier of meat products, is being sourced from BIG. After reporting your findings to the Head of Department, she asks you to write a report setting out what SAINCO can do to address the issue.

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Instructions: Choose ONE of the four options above. Your report to the company should cover the following:

• A brief outline of the ethical issue. Use ONE ethical theory to justify why this issue deserves attention.

• An outline of one or several courses of action that the company can undertake to address this issue.

• A reflection about the LIMITATIONS of the courses of action you have suggested.

• Evidence that all group members contributed to the process to sufficient degree to justify an equal award of marks.

Your word limit must not exceed 1,300 words. Do not forget to include your word count in your essay. The essay will be marked using the following criteria:

• Outlining of the ethical issue(s) described in the case

• Correct application of one ethical theory to the issue described in the case

• Quality of the recommendations made to the company

• Quality of reflection about the limitations

• Style and Presentation (including accurate referencing and authenticity)

please turn over

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Process:

1. Choose your group members. You are expected to work in groups of 3-5. (Some marks will be deducted if you don’t work in a group of that size.)

2. Email the module leader (Mr. Kieran Ross at k.ross@mdx.ac ) your group members

by Thursday, 14 February, 2013.

3. A final appendix to the report (1 page) must also be submitted which will detail how the group worked as a collaborative team (i.e. Meeting logs, Allocation of work etc.).

Each member of a group will receive the SAME mark for the report unless any member fails to contribute a fair share, in which case, tutor will have the discretion to decide the student’s mark based on the group feedback and evidence provided using a group meeting log. The meeting log could include the following: who attended, apologies received, issues discussed, decisions made, and implementation.

Submission deadline is Thursday, 11 April, 2013, 4:30pm. Failure to submit on time will result in a fail grade. You are required to submit your coursework both electronically through TurnItIn (see instructions on MyUniHub module site), and as hard copy to the Student Office in Block 16. Please ensure that you submit exactly the same versions of your work as hard copy and electronic copy. The electronic copy is the one that will be marked. You should also be aware that students may be asked to attend a viva should there be any doubts regarding the authenticity of their work.