Case Study – Ford Pinto Case
Order Description
Business ethics courses taught in colleges and universities are sometimes thought to be primarily about making students more ethical. However, this is typically, not what business ethics regards as their primary task. Rather, business ethics faculty typically regard their job as one of helping students to understand the complex ethical issues managers must confront, best practices with respect to ethical management, and sound public policy regarding the relationship of business to society. You will discuss the legal and ethical issues surrounding the historic product liability case mentioned in most Business Ethics books as the Ford Pinto case.
You will need to research the company through the University. We also have additional sources created for our class. Please use this link: https://apus.libguides.com/BUSN623 ( select the tab for Business & Legal Issues created for this course)
Incorporate three specific laws (e.g. contract, tort) or ethical codes that apply to the corporate decisions in this case. Discuss how the philosophy of economist Milton Friedman may have influenced the employees, executives/managers of the company. Discuss Ford or Lee Iacocca moral responsibilities to stakeholders and to the safety of customers. In addition, identify an ethical framework other than Free Market Ethics that applies to this situation and discuss how it may have influenced the executives of the company.
Your essay should be 1500 – 2000 words and in APA format. Use at least seven credible sources for your essay, including at least two sources from the University library. Refer to the Writing Assignment Grading Criteria for assignment requirements in content, organization, writing style, grammar and APA 6.0 format. Please name your assignment file as ‘lastnamefirstinitial-BUS623-6″. Submit this essay as a Microsoft Word attachment in the Assignment section of the class no later than Sunday of week seven.
SPAIM3036 ESSAY GUIDANCE
§? I value a well thought through Introduction as it means you have done at least half the work in
thinking through the key messages and significance of your essay. What this means to me is:
1. Background, context, why is this important, why should I care i.e. what is at stake
2. What is the conventional wisdom, what have people been saying/writing about the issue
i.e. what is the conversation so far and who or what has dominated that conversation.
(This is what we call a literature review in more advanced stages of research.)
3. What is wrong or missing or weird in that conversation? What question or gap
does this lead us towards (what we call the ‘research gap’)
4. What is the question that the ‘gap’ leads us to ask. Usually this is the set essay
question, but I would recommend that you add a narrower, more focused question that
gets us to the concept, issue and idea that you want to explore.
5. Your one to two sentence direct answer to that question, your argument statement. In
the military, they call it your BLUF, your ‘Bottom Line Up Front’. I don’t want an
adventure story with the ‘revelation’ at the end. I want a nice clear expression of your
argument, your contribution to the conversation.
6. Lastly, a short sentence or two overview of the structure of the essay. In other words,
in order to explore your argument you will look at …, …., ….
This, in a nutshell, to mix metaphors, is my ‘recipe’ for an introduction. There are variants
and you are free to use them.
§? Be creative. Be inspired and inspiring. Do not zombie-like reproduce arguments presented in
class, but get excited about your topic and look for an interesting and new way to express.
Your choice of issue or idea will be a key part of this.
§? Burrow down into your topic. Go for more specific and deeper analysis rather than engaging in
a broad, and often too superficial, analysis. Again, your choice of concept, issue and idea will
help with this. Stay focused, stay narrow and this will help you to make a strong focused and
critically analytical argument.
§? Of the sources you reference, no less then 70% must be academic sources (i.e. books and
journal articles published in well-respected journals.) I do not want to see random scatter-gun
google-searched sources, I want to see that you can search for, sort, read and engage with
scholarly writing. You should draw on the unit reading, but you must go beyond it. Close
readings of texts are welcome but you will need to justify this.
§? I like a title. And I don’t mean repeating the set essay question. I mean a title like you would
find on a book or a journal article. Good titles are another way of focusing your reader on what
is important.
§? Feel free to use images and graphs etc.
§? Your bibliography matters not only in content (see above), but in the formatting. Bad formatting,
especially when it is evidently produced by importing sources from an electronic resources, will
be penalised.
§? Most importantly, come and see me or speak to your tutors about your ideas. Have them
challenged and again be inspired.