Course content
Digital formats have allowed companies like Apple, Amazon, and Alibaba to scale quickly and expand globally, making them some of the largest companies in the world. These rapidly growing businesses have changed the way people live, work, and interact with the world around them. As these businesses grow, they present new ethical dilemmas for entrepreneurs, managers, regulators, and consumers. This course provides students with an opportunity to consider why digital businesses present new ethical dilemmas and explore how managers and entrepreneurs can apply business ethics to emerging dilemmas in digital business management. Students will have the opportunity to explore the ethical dilemmas around issues like artificial intelligence, speech on digital platforms, regulating gig workers, winner-take-all markets, big data, and gender disparities in Silicon Valley. Students in Apple, Amazon, Alibaba will explore digital and platform businesses, ethical decision-making in management, and the social issues that emerge as the influence of digital businesses grows.
This course explores how perspectives from business ethics including virtue ethics, deontology, and utilitarianism, can provide insight into ethical behavior. The class explores the extent to which ethical principles ought to vary in digital and global contexts. While the course does not provide a prescriptive guide to ethical behavior, it introduces students to a set of frameworks they can apply to the practical ethical dilemmas they will face as they engage with digital businesses in the future.
Using the Harvard Business School case study method, students will discuss real-life ethical dilemmas for businesses, identify and weigh the relevant information, and present options for the future. By the end of the class, students will be able to analyze the ethical dilemmas created by digital businesses and present informed assessments of the potential impact of management decisions on relevant stakeholders. Apple, Amazon, Alibaba explores issues around regulation, community management, and quality control that managers of digital businesses must take seriously.
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