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Global Business Ethics Program
 The Global Business Ethics Program will be web based and available on the
Internet to all of Junior Achievement International’s 112 Member Nations. The
Ethics Program will take students from around the world through a twelve-week
course simultaneously as they learn about universal and personal values,
sound character development, and business ethics. The program will link
students via the Internet giving them the opportunity to discuss ethical
issues and interact internationally, widening their perspectives on global
ethical issues and developing a cross cultural understanding (www.ja-global.org)
The issue of diverse cultural character behavior will be critical for
students to understand as they mature into adults and assume business
positions in the new international market place. The program will be taught
in the traditional Junior Achievement format using teachers, local business
and community volunteers in the classroom as mentors to guide the learning
process with a hands-on personal approach. Students will be assigned weekly
Global Partners to communicate with and discuss pre-determined topics related
to the week’s lesson.
Each class will follow a curriculum created for JAI by the Ethics Resource
Center in Washington, D.C. So far the program has been translated into
Arabic, Chinese, English, Lithuanian, Russian, Slovak, and Spanish. The
program begins with an intern who has just been hired at a food manufacturing
company. The course follows an ethical dilemma throughout every level within
the organizational structure. The course challenges each student to analyze
his/her own personal set of beliefs, values, and character.
Program topics include:
- Unit 1: What is Ethics?
- Unit 2: Universal Values – The Basics
- Unit 3: Personal Values – The Basics
- Unit 4: Your Core Values – What Matters Most
- Unit 5: Core Values in Action – Moral Decision Making and The Grey Area
- Unit 6: Conflicts Between Values – Why Is It So Hard to Do the Right
Thing?
- Unit 7: Impediments to Doing the Right Thing – Four Kinds of Motivation
- Unit 8: Personal Values and Business Ethics – How Business and Society
Work Together
- Unit 9: Business Ethics and Society – Tolerance, Ethics, and Values
- Unit 10: Business, Society, and the World – Twenty Great Quotes on the
Importance of Character
- Unit 11: Why Ethics Matter in Your Future – Growing an Ethical You
- Unit 12: Ethics, Who You Are, and Who You Are Becoming
Following is the background reading for unit 1, to show an example of the
curriculum.
What is Ethics?
When you woke up this morning, what did you do to start your day? How did
you get to school today? Who did you talk to on your way to class?
Every day you make decisions. You choose what you will wear (even if you wear
a school uniform), you choose who your friends will be, and you make
decisions about how hard you will work in school. In everything you do, you
make choices. Sometimes you might think you don’t really have choices to
make, but you always do! Even when you don’t do anything at all, you are
deciding how you will act.
Have you ever faced a situation where you had to decide what the right thing
was to do? If you have, then you’ve had to do some thinking about ethics1.
(All bolded terms in the background material are
defined in the glossary.)
Ethics are standards, or rules you set for yourself, that you use to
guide your actions. Your ethics have to do with what is right and wrong, or
what you should do. For example, if you see a friend copying someone’s
homework, you must choose whether or not you will tell the teacher what you
observed. Whenever you have to make a decision where your actions will impact
someone else, you face an ethical dilemma. The decision is ethical
because you must decide what your obligation is (especially when another
person is involved), and it’s a dilemma because you have more than one option
to choose from. A decision you make is ethical when you choose to do
the “right” thing.
Everyone has ethics that they live by. You gain your ethics from the values
and principles that you have. Your values are the things that you
consider to be important, or of worth. You probably value your family and
friends, because they’re important to you. You also may value your free time,
or a possession that you have. In addition to the things that you value, you
also have some ideas about the way you’d like to live your life, and the kind
of person you want to become. This is especially true when you think about
how you want to treat the things you value, and the way you want to be
treated by them. For example, if you value your friends, you probably want to
be a good friend. That might mean that you want to be trustworthy or faithful
to your friends. Trustworthiness and faithfulness are principles—they
are ideas about the kind of person you want to be.
There is an important relationship between ethics and the law. In most
countries, laws are created and communicated so that people know what the
rules are. Laws are based on ideas about right and wrong, and thus they come
from an idea about ethics. However, laws can also be changed to reflect the
views of people who have the most power or influence, and thus while they are
still based on an idea of ethics, they are not ethical. The law reflects the
social practices of a country while they reflect their ethics. Doing the
right thing means obeying the law. If a law is bad, doing the right thing
might also involve working to make changes in the legal standard.
Sometimes doing the right thing means helping other people, even when you
have to make sacrifices to do it. The right thing always has to do
with obeying the principles that you think are good. You apply your ethical
standards to all the situations you face in your life. We can say the same
thing about other people in different settings too. In this course, we’ll be
looking at the ethics of people in business settings, as well as your own
personal ethics.
The Ethics program is targeted at High School students aged 15-18.
Participants will meet once a week for an hour at a time for twelve weeks. At
some point between each lesson, students will need to logon to a computer
with Internet connectivity. This will allow them to read the next lesson’s
background reading and case study, take a self test, answer an opinion poll,
and communicate with their global partner group for that week. Students will
be assigned to an “in-class” group including no more than five students.
After a survey taken by each of the pilot Member Nations, it was decided that
there would be at least one student to every five who is proficient in
English. This will assist the students in their global communications. The
on-line application will automatically assign each “in class” group with a
global partner consisting of up to five students from another country. By the
end of the program each student will have communicated with peers in twelve
countries. Other program features include a glossary with all the terms
learned throughout the program, bulletin board and chat to facilitate
communication, a library to post ethics publications, relevant web links, and
a maxim section where students will create their own personal maxim.
Having students from diverse cultures interface with one another and share
their perspectives on various ethical situations will yield an understanding
of how virtues and values of different cultures may or may not vary. During
an international student conference in Chicago last June with over 80
students representing over 60 countries, we conducted an ethics seminar using
activities and lessons from the Global Business Ethics Program. When listing
ethical decisions a German student wrote “being on time.” An interesting
conversation ensued when a Brazilian student disagreed. The German student
discussed how it is seen as disrespectful if a person arrives late to an
appointment or social event. The Brazilian explained how in his country it is
understood that time is much more flexible and rarely does anyone arrive at
the scheduled time. Throughout the discussion the students became aware of
the differences in how values are acted out in different cultures. Respect is
a universal value equally important in both countries, but how each culture
lives out the value can vary greatly.
The delivery of the program will be done through JAI’s Enterprise Portal
www.ja-global.org. Equipment from
Hewlett Packard, a portion of the hosting by BellSouth, and the software
licenses, updates, and consulting from Sybase have all been donated. This
collaborative effort has given JAI a state of the art tech platform, capable
of offering multiple educational programs all over the world. With the
addition of an administrative section, JA program managers will be able to
manage the program, run reports on student numbers, localize the program,
culturally adapt it and translate the content as well as the site navigation
into their own language.
Lani Van Dusen of Van Dusen Consulting conducted a comprehensive evaluation
of Junior Achievement International’s Global Business Ethics Program. Below
are highlights from the 57-page report received by JAI on March 31, 2003.
- Before participating in the Ethics Program, only 28% of students felt
that there were universal values. After participating in the program, 62%
now held this belief.
- Ninety five percent of students believed that you sometimes have to
compromise your ethical principles to get ahead in life. After
participating in the program, this number had decreased by 28.
- Nearly half of the students (46%) suggested that they had learned the
importance of thinking critically about important ethical decisions, as a
result of participating in the program.
- Twenty one percent of the students felt the program had helped them
figure out which values are most important to them.
As more cross-cultural business alliances are formed and with the
increased shift towards a global economy, there is a heightened need to
ensure sound ethical business practices. The ultimate goal in developing this
educational program is to help young people around the world understand how
to make conscientious, ethical business decisions and realize their
responsibilities to communities and global society.
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