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A New Normal?

For my paper, I was thinking about addressing the topic of increased polarization in American politics.  My main goal is to find what is causing this polarization.  Before I tackle that, I have to develop a thorough understanding of current events, and policy decisions.  I have only become enamored with politics over the last couple years, but I have always been up to date on current events.  Obviously, people have always disagreed over politics, but, from what I have witnessed and researched, this this has become an increasingly harmful problem.

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SOX causes Companies to go Dark

Since I am an accounting major, I have gained a major interest in government policies that may affect my future. I also have enjoyed learning about many accounting frauds that have taken place (especially since some companies went to great lengths to cover up what they were doing, check out ZZZZ Best for example). One of the major policies that has been passed and we have discussed in class is the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002. The article that we read for class analyzed the effects of the act shortly after it was implemented. As a result, I want to see if any results and analyses have changed.

 SOX was implemented after the Enron and WorldCom scandals. It was the government’s quick response and solution to the mistrust the public was gaining of big corporations.  SOX implemented many regulations on auditors and companies in order to make sure no more economic disasters would occur in the future (the financial crisis of 2008?). For my white paper, I want to explore the actual effects of SOX on society, companies, and auditing firms. Continue reading →

Whale Wars

I wasn’t really sure what to write about for my first argument for the white paper, but I was browsing the channels and came across the show Whale Wars on Animal Planet.  I’ve watched a couple episodes with my sister so I know the background of the show.  Basically a conservation organization called the Sea Shepherd travels by boat to the Antarctic waters in search of the Japanese whaling fleet.  Their goal is to disrupt the Japanese whaling fleet so that their whaling efforts are hindered to the point where they must return home.

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Wal-Mart: It gives, and it takes

One of the topics in this class that I’m particularly interested in is the whole debate about whether or not Wal-Mart is helping or hurting our economy.  “The Wal-Mart effect” has come up in a couple of my classes, and while I’ve read some material about the debate, I thought it would be interesting to dig deeper into the subject to see if I could find out more information.

First, I looked at the works cited page from the Wal-Mart case study we read (the one titled “Wal-Mart’s Business Environment”).  Two authors, Nancy Cleeland and Abigail Goldman, were referenced several times in the works cited page.  Before I performed the cited reference search, I figured it would be useful to Google these two authors to get some background information on them.  When I typed in their names, I noticed that Cleeland and Goldman, along with a few other staff members at the LA Times, were awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for the staff’s “engrossing examination of the tactics that have made Wal-Mart the largest company in the world with cascading effects across American towns and developing countries.”

After finding out that these two authors had written so much on Wal-Mart, I immediately I knew I was on the right track, and figured I would be able to find a bunch of quality articles dealing with this topic.  One in particular, titled “An Empire Build on Bargains Remakes the Working World” looked like it might be helpful to me.  Written by Cleeland and Goldman, the article focuses on the impact of Wal-Mart, on a personal level and on a broader level.  For some people, like 26-year-old Chastity Ferguson, Wal-Mart is her favorite store because the prices can’t be beat anywhere else.  For Ferguson, it’s a no brainer to shop at Wal-Mart since she only makes $400 a week and wants to save as much money as possible wherever she can.  However, for others like Kelly Gray, who have lost their job because Wal-Mart has taken business away from the local stores, it is hard not to resent the store.

In a broader sense, Cleeland and Goldman discuss how Wal-Mart both gives and takes away.  Although the company has grown tremendously and created jobs all over the world, it has come at a heavy price.  By relentlessly cutting prices, Wal-Mart has helped hold down the inflation rate for the country, according to U.S. economists.  Consumers are undoubtedly reaping the benefits, but what about the employees and local business owners trying to compete with this competitive business model?

This article is only one of the many written about this particular topic.  Using the cited reference search allowed me to find trusted, quality sources that could help me dig deeper into this subject, and I look forward to reading stories from both ends of the spectrum.

Nozick’s False Advertising

For the second paper in our class, I will be focusing on the ethics surrounding false advertising. This issue is concerned with the rights of others compared to the rights of freedom of speech. In deciding how to go about pursuing such a topic, I thought it would be valuable to perform a cited reference search on Robert Nozick’s Entitlement Theory essay. This article discusses justice and inequality based on entitlement, thus I thought there may be some intriguing essays that reference his work using an entitlement perspective to discuss the ethics of advertising.

I utilized Google Scholar to perform a cited reference search on Nozick’s essay and over 10,000 articles were found. Performing a search within these results for “false advertising,” I discovered 18 articles that cited Nozick’s Entitlement Theory and discussed false advertising. Immediately, I found one article titled “Advertisements, stereotypes, and freedom of expression” that appeared to be exactly what I would want for my topic. Unfortunately, this article could not be obtained with Bucknell’s privileges, so I went back to the results and found another article entitled “The Value of Rights” that also focused on my aforementioned topic. Continue reading →

Hartman’s Article Cited by Thesis 20 Years Later

I chose to explore Edwin Hartman’s article “Donaldson on Rights and Corporate Obligations” for this week’s cited reference search blog post.  Just to recap, the article discusses Donaldson’s belief that certain fundamental human rights generate correlative duties for the corporation, including 1) the duty to avoid depriving people of their rights, 2) the duty to help protect people from such deprivation, and 3) the duty to aid those who are deprived.  Hartman introduces a fourth category of duty to the list, which he refers to as the duty to avoid helping to deprive. He argues that the corporation is not obligated to contribute to protecting anyone from deprivation, but it needs to make sure that no action it takes helps the depriver succeed in depriving.

Since the article was published in 1991, I thought that it would be interesting to see what other publications have cited it since then.  Using Google Scholar, I found that Hartman’s original article had only been cited by 3 other publications.

The one I chose to examine more closely is “La responsabilidad moral de la empresa. Una revisión de la teoría de Stakeholder desde la ética discursiva”/”The moral responsibility of the business. A review of the Stakeholder theory from discursive ethics”.  It is a doctoral thesis presented by Elsa González Esteban and directed by Dr. Domingo Garcia-Marza of the Universitat Jaume I de Castellón.  It was published in 2011, so it is rather recent information.  In total, it has 576 pages and it is written in Spanish.  Continue reading →

Beyond the Game

Sheth and Babiak talk mention an NBA social responsibilty initaitive in their study of CSR and sports.

Milton Freidman’s article regarding the corporation’s social responsibility has been the most intriguing article I’ve read in this class all semester.  I agree with it on many levels, but also keep finding good arguments against it, as we have discussed in class.  I decided to dig a little deeper on Google Scholar, seeing which articles, specifically about sports, had cited Friedman.  367 articles had popped up as articles about or including sports that had also cited Freidman, but many past the first page only mentioned sports in passing and was not going to be useful.  The second article that was listed was unavailable to view, so I clicked on a link that gave me related articles.  After browsing for a few minutes,  I came upon an article from the Journal of Business Ethics published by Hela Sheth and Kathy Babiak, called “Beyond the Game: Perceptions and Practices of Corporate Social Responsibility in the Professional Sport Industry.”  This was perfect, and it even cited both Friedman and Freeman.   Continue reading →

Finding Gold Mines of Info- Blog Prompt 8- Cited Ref Searches

Cited Reference Searches.

As Brody explained, the works cited of an article, case or book is a view BACKWARDS in time to what the author used.

A cited ref search is a look FORWARD.  It can be a very powerful and targeted search based on what you know is a good source.  The idea is to look at a piece of knowledge and see, from its point of publication, FORWARD, who else cited it.

Several tools can do this.  All are reachable here at the LIT page for management.

ABI/INFORM is one.

Google Scholar is another.

Web of Knowledge is the third, and perhaps the most sophisticated.

The differences are primarily around which databases it searches for references.  The second is the presence of BOOKS.  Only Google Scholar does books.

FOR NEXT WEEK,

1)      Take a “piece of knowledge” we have used or referenced and

2)       Do a cited reference search on it to find a

3)      New item that is useful to you.

4)      Briefly describe the new item. Continue reading →