Week 6 Overview — Looking Forward and the Final Paper

Week 6 is the last week of OMM 640, and it is built around a single idea: looking forward. Chapter 10 closes out the textbook by turning from historical and present-day ethics topics toward the risks an organization has not faced yet — the ethical issues that environmental scanning, trend analysis, and credible outside resources can help a manager see coming before they become a crisis. The Canvas Overview page frames this with a scenario: you are a human resource manager at an IT company considering adopting AI and other new technologies, and you need to summarize the potential ethical risks, identify reliable resources for uncovering future misconduct, analyze the economic, geopolitical, social, and technological trends driving those risks, and evaluate how emerging issues will change the ethics and compliance function itself.

Two deliverables carry the week, and they are asymmetric in weight. The discussion forum, Global Ethics and Corporate Responsibility, is worth 6% and asks you to work through the classic universalism-versus-relativism debate in global ethics. The final paper, Ethics, Compliance Auditing, and Emerging Issues, is worth 30% — by a wide margin the single heaviest deliverable in the entire course — and asks you to build a full ethics-program proposal around one emerging global risk. Budget your week's time accordingly: the discussion forum is a normal weekly assignment, but the final paper is a capstone research paper that needs to start early, not on Day 5.

Overview Table of Deliverables

The table below reproduces the Week 6 Overview page's deliverable table exactly, as it appears in Canvas.

The Canvas Overview page lists three Weekly Learning Outcomes (WLOs) for Week 6. They are reproduced verbatim below, each followed by a note on what it actually requires of you and where in the week it is assessed.

Read the three outcomes as a single arc rather than three separate topics. WLO 1 asks you to spot the risk. WLO 2 asks you to explain why it is an ethical issue and not merely a business or technical one. WLO 3 asks what the organization's ethics and compliance function should actually do about it. The final paper walks this exact arc from its opening description of a global risk through to its closing compliance-auditing plan.

The required text remains Gonzalez-Padron, T. (2025). Business Ethics and Social Responsibility for Managers (2nd ed.). The University of Arizona Global Campus, available through the Constellation website. Week 6 assigns the closing chapter.

For a full walk-through of the chapter's frameworks, key terms, tables, and closing discussion questions, see the dedicated Chapter 10 deep-dive study guide on this site — this overview does not repeat that material, only where it lands in the week's two deliverables.

Two Required Articles

Beyond the textbook chapter, the Resources page names two required articles that anchor the discussion forum specifically.

• Böhm, S., Carrington, M., Cornelius, N., de Bruin, B., Greenwood, M., Hassan, L., Jain, T., Karam, C., Kourula, A., Romani, L., Riaz, S., & Shaw, D. (2022, October). Ethics at the centre of global and local challenges: Thoughts on the future of business ethics. Journal of Business Ethics, 180(3), 835–861. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-022-05239-2. A multi-author reflection surveying where global business ethics scholarship is headed, arguing that ethical practice must operate at both the global and local level simultaneously rather than imposing one uniform standard everywhere. Directly useful for the discussion forum's universalism-versus-relativism prompt.
• Lampton, J. A., & Razack, B. I. (2020, February). Ethics must be global. Strategic Finance, 101(8), 13–14. A short practitioner article arguing that global companies function best when they adopt a single code of ethics and apply it consistently everywhere they operate, rather than varying ethical standards by country or market. This is effectively the practitioner-level case for universalism, and pairs directly against the Böhm et al. article's more nuanced global/local balance — reading them together gives you both sides of the discussion forum's core debate.

Recommended (Not Required) Resources

The Resources page also lists one recommended article that may help with the final paper, not the discussion forum.

The Week 6 Overview page assigns a short scenario video, Global Ethical Considerations, produced by the University of Arizona Global Campus and hosted on Kaltura. The video dramatizes a leadership conversation rather than lecturing directly, and it is short enough to watch in under three minutes — there is no excuse for skipping it before you draft either deliverable.

The scenario: Philip, the chief executive officer of a digital marketing firm, convenes a meeting with two members of his senior management team — Donna, the human resource manager, and Matt, the chief technology officer — to discuss future trends that may create new ethical issues for the business. Philip opens by naming three drivers of emerging risk: future workforce transitions, new business models, and technological advances, and asks the team to consider an ethics and compliance program that addresses these needs while supporting employee welfare.

Matt raises artificial intelligence as the biggest emerging issue, framing it as a tool the company must learn to incorporate effectively while safeguarding against misuse. Donna agrees that AI has become an accepted, necessary business tool that automates processes and unlocks new opportunities, but she pushes back with the drawbacks: AI can reduce the time and effort required for tasks to the point that employees fear their jobs will disappear, and in the worst case AI could make human workers obsolete, be used to cause harm, produce unforeseen consequences, or exploit customers. Matt counters that employees need to understand how AI can help them make better decisions by analyzing data, and Philip closes the scene by synthesizing both positions: to benefit from AI, the organization must learn to use it properly and ethically, with a clear set of guidelines that prohibit misuse and regulations that govern its use, ensuring safe and ethical integration of AI into the business.

Tagged to WLO 2 and worth 6%, due Day 3 for the initial post and Day 7 for peer replies. Before posting, review Chapter 10 and both required articles (Böhm et al., 2022; Lampton & Razack, 2020). The forum poses a classic ethics question: does a universal moral code exist regardless of an individual's culture, or should ethical standards flex to local custom? As organizations become increasingly global, this universalism-versus-relativism debate stops being academic and starts shaping real decisions about labor standards, anti-corruption policy, and codes of conduct across markets with different legal and cultural norms.

Your initial post must compare and contrast universalism and relativism, then evaluate how each position affects global social corporate responsibility, supported by three scholarly resources beyond your selected article and the course text. The initial post runs a minimum of 350 words, due Day 3; three peer replies of 150+ words each are due by Day 7. See the Week 6 Discussion Forum Study Guide for the full requirement-by-requirement breakdown, a Chapter 10 concept map, initial-post structure, peer-reply guidance, and a complete sample post.

Tagged to all three WLOs and worth 30% of the course grade — the largest single deliverable in OMM 640 — due Day 7. Before beginning, review Chapter 10 and Figure 10.4, the World Economic Forum's 2024 Global Risk Report table, and select one risk area: economic, environmental, geopolitical, social, or technological. The assignment casts you as a consultant building a proposal for a new CEO: describe the emerging global risk you selected, identify the countries associated with it, evaluate the role of ethical decision-making and stakeholder relationships tied to that risk, and then design a full ethics program response — a training plan with stated goals, objectives, learning methods, and evaluation criteria, plus a compliance-auditing plan — and close with a summary of key findings.

The paper must run 8 to 10 double-spaced pages (not counting title and references pages), formatted in APA Style, with a proper title page, an introduction ending in a clear thesis statement, a conclusion, and at least 5 scholarly sources beyond the course text. See the Week 6 Final Paper Study Guide for the full requirement-by-requirement breakdown with exact verbs, source requirements, a suggested outline mapped to every requirement, rubric mapping, common pitfalls, and a Quick Reference table — treat that guide as the primary tool for building this paper, not this overview.

Chapter 10 gives you two distinct toolkits that map onto the two deliverables. The discussion forum draws on the chapter's global-ethics framing — the tension between universal ethical principles (hypernorms) and locally contested or culturally variable standards, which is the same tension underlying universalism versus relativism. The final paper draws on the chapter's risk-identification and compliance-program apparatus: the scale/sensors/sensibilities framework for recognizing which issues matter, the credible-resources table for researching your chosen risk, the benign/disputed/problematic moral-pressure framework for evaluating stakeholder claims, and the chapter's closing material on strengthening the ethics and compliance profession for your training and auditing plans.

Reading Chapter 10 once with both deliverables in mind, rather than reading it twice separately, is the efficient path through the week. As you read, flag passages under two mental headings: "global ethics debate" material for the discussion forum, and "risk identification and compliance program" material for the final paper. Most of the chapter's first two sections (10.1 and 10.2) serves the final paper's risk identification directly; the chapter's closing section (10.3) on the future of the ethics and compliance profession serves the final paper's training and auditing plan.

Because this is the last week of the course and the final paper is worth 30%, treat the week as a research-paper week with a discussion forum attached, not the reverse. A workable sequence:

1. Day 1 — Read Chapter 10 in full and watch the Global Ethical Considerations video. Review Figure 10.4 and select your final paper's risk area (economic, environmental, geopolitical, social, or technological) and a short list of candidate countries.
2. Day 1–2 — Begin final paper research: locate at least 5 scholarly sources on your chosen risk before drafting any prose. Read the two discussion forum articles (Böhm et al., 2022; Lampton & Razack, 2020) alongside your final paper research.
3. Day 2–3 — Draft and post the discussion forum's initial 350-word post (due Day 3). Continue drafting the final paper's introduction, thesis, and risk-description sections in parallel.
4. Day 3–5 — Build out the bulk of the final paper: country-by-country risk effects, ethical decision-making and stakeholder analysis, and the training plan with all four required sub-elements (goals, objectives, methods, evaluation).
5. Day 5–6 — Draft the compliance-auditing section and the conclusion/key-findings summary. Post your three discussion forum peer replies (due Day 7, but earlier is better for real engagement).
6. Day 6–7 — Full APA formatting pass on the final paper: title page, in-text citations, references page, page count (8–10 pages excluding title/references). Submit both deliverables by their Day 7 deadlines.