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External Influences 4: Business Ethics and Moral Behaviour - Lesson Plan: 2 x 1 hour lessons
A series of 'off the shelf' lesson plans and resources for use in the classroom. These lessons deal with External Influences 4: Business Ethics and Moral Behaviour and are relevant to the following specifications:
- AQA: Module 3, 12.3
- Edexcel: Unit 1, sections 2, 4
- OCR: Module 2871
Aim:
The lesson uses the controversy over Coca-Cola's activities in India as the basis for an investigation into stakeholder relationships, business ethics and moral behaviour. The story, on first view, looks damaging. The BBC news team that reported the story highlighted the alleged excess use of water by the company and the 'dumping' of toxic waste on the land of local farmers through the guise of 'fertiliser'.
On closer investigation, the claims made against the company begin to take on a different perspective, demonstrating the complexity of such issues when they involve such subjective material. Subsequent tests and court cases appear to offer support for Coca-Cola's case but the Activity invites students to question how reliable such actions are given the power that Coca-Cola has.
The links given are all useful for some supporting research without being excessive in length. The question posed encourages students to develop both their skills of analysis and evaluation. As a follow-up, some extension work is given, asking about the role of a social and environmental audit in helping Coca-Cola to present its case more effectively.
Learning Objectives:
At the end of the lessons, students should be able to:
- Understand the meaning of the concepts of moral responsibility and business ethics
- Apply these concepts to a case study involving a major corporation in a developing country
- Develop analysis and evaluation skills
- Understand the term 'stakeholder' and to appreciate the conflicts between stakeholder objectives
- Offer some suggestions about ways in which such companies can seek to meet these conflicting objectives
Resources:
Lesson Structure:
Lesson 1
- Start with what students already know - begin the lesson by asking students to write down on slips of paper a definition of 'moral behaviour' and 'ethics' along with one example where they think a business has not acted in an ethically responsible manner (or where they have done so). (5 minutes)
- Get students to feed back to each other their ideas and build a discussion of the key points to come out of the discussion. Put the key points on the board or on a piece of flip chart paper to allow students to refer to these later. (15 minutes)
- Introduce the notion of 'stakeholders' - the PowerPoint Presentation may be useful here. (15 minutes)
- Get students, in pairs, to discuss where conflicts between different stakeholder needs might arise and then feed back the ideas to all the class. (10 minutes)
- Introduce the Activity - go through the story and discuss the issues that are raised by it. Introduce the task and highlight the learning objectives. (10 minutes)
- Highlight to students the task in the next lesson - again utilising the principle of the reticular activation system (RAS). (5 minutes)
Lesson 2
- Review the Activity and the learning objectives. Go through the guide to the structure of the answer and emphasise the assessment objectives for the piece (mainly analysis and evaluation). (10 minutes)
- Students commence the Activity - 25 minutes research and 25 minutes to write up the answer. Additional time can be given for homework if desired. The 25 minute writing-up time is meant to mimic the time frame available in an exam for a question of this type. (Working on the basis of approximately 1 mark per minute).
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