Business Ethics and Stakeholder Management For your SLP this session you will be asked to review four articles on business ethics from our TLC Library. You will review one paper each in Modules 1 through 4. In the final module you will also be asked to integrate some of your thoughts from your paper reviews.
In this SLP we will be reviewing an article that covers the concept of stakeholder management. Stakeholders are important to consider in significant business related decisions. This is because organizational decisions - especially substantial decisions involving significant resource allocations/re-allocations - tend to impact various stakeholder groups as you will be reminded in your reading. These stakeholders may have the power to impact the organization's success.
Assignment Instructions: In this assignment you will be asked to apply stakeholder management theory to the following scenario. A public corporation of 980 employees manufactures a popular brand of garments (mostly jeans) that are primarily made and sold in America nation-wide.
It has a large contingent of employees in several small rural communities in the Eastern US and is the primary employer in all of those communities.
Two if its 5 shops are unionized but the union and management have a good working relationship. The company has traditionally marketed its clothing line as "Made in the USA" and attracted a bit of a "cult like" following as a result, but an outside consulting firm has suggested that significantly greater profits are possible if a different strategy is employed.
The corporation is subsequently considering whether to off-shore its manufacturing facilities to a poor nation to save money on labor. It would also discretely discontinue its "Made in the USA" marketing ads and hopefully ride the wave of its previous marketing campaigns for a while. It is estimated that total cost per unit of production will be decreased by one third which equates to tens of millions of dollars. Please write a 3-page paper in which you
1). Summarize key points from your reading, and
2). Include a brief stakeholder analysis narrative of the scenario described above considering different stakeholder groups that may benefit or be negatively impacted in this scenario.
Make sure you demonstrate your understanding of the stakeholder management concepts presented in the reading.
For instance, who might be considered to be the primary stakeholders? Are there any secondary stakeholders?
How powerful are the respective stakeholder groups? Finally, make a recommendation regarding the scenario based on your analysis.