Seminar Five
Seminar Objectives
Students will:
Stay in the seminar debating teams.
See some more news stories that have ethical dimensions.
Discuss in teams the same case study that was introduced in Seminar One.
Preserve these notes for comparison with their analysis of the same ethical dilemma at the beginning of the module.
Take personal journal notes of their revised impressions and feelings about the case.

Preparation for Seminar
NB: Make sure that you attend the seminar with a print out of the Seminar Brief and The Case Study.
We want you to re-analyse the ethical dilemma case. This will include the thoughts and ideas of others in your team. Use the theory and frameworks that you have encountered during the module (the seminar …show more content…

Much of the employees’ social time is spent, unsurprisingly, with other employees and strong bonds of friendship have developed between staff.

The company is privately owned by its two founders who work from their German Head Office. Employees are not represented by a trade union. Unlike publicly limited and/or government organizations where a variety of stakeholder organizations can be identified and corporate governance may be contested (by shareholders, government, regulatory authorities, consumer associations, trade unions, pressure groups and so on), internal relations here are far clearer and the voices that count are those of management and customers.

The incident that forms the focus for this case concerns an Account Executive, Borries, who was due to go on holiday in a month’s time for two weeks at his girlfriend’s home in Hong Kong. This was an important holiday, especially because Borries only took one week’s holiday throughout the previous year and because his girlfriend Swee Lan would be returning to Germany immediately after the holiday to continue her studies. This was therefore an opportunity for Borries to meet Swee Lan’s parents and to experience her environment for the first time.

About a month before the holiday Borries’s manager called him in for a meeting and told him the news that one of Borries’s clients had to bring forward their product launch as they had heard that a rival was launching in the week that was