- Enseignant-e: Bettina Palazzo
The COVID crisis showed very clearly how much business and society are crucially interdependent and that indeed society does have clear ethical expectations of companies. At the same time many companies seem to not fully understand these expectations and keep losing trust.
In this course, we will explore, why ethics and business are stuck in an eternal love-hate relationship and get a better understanding of the interaction between business and society.
We will get an overview of important ethical theories that can be useful tools of critical thinking that will help us analyse moral dilemmas in business. Case studies and films will be used to understand the role of (un)ethical decision making in business. We will see what leaders and organisations must do in order to successfully promote business ethics within their organisation.
After this look into the inside of the ethics of organisations we will expand our view to the global societal context: When you go shopping and the label in the t-shirt you want to buy says “Made in Bangladesh”, chances are high that the people who made this t-shirt are working under harsh conditions: 12-hour work-days, below-minimum wages, hot workplaces with little or no drinking water, harassment by line managers, forced overtime, bad safety situation.
These inhumane and environmentally destructive practices take place within the supply chains of the companies whose products we love and buy. How can companies deal responsibly with these challenges? What can companies do to avoid this harm-doing? What can consumers do? What role play the government, NGO’s, unions, the media?
These are the burning questions we will tackle in this course.