Business Ethics and Stakeholder Management

For your SLP this session you will be asked to review articles on business ethics from the Trident Online
Library. You will review one or more articles each in Modules 1 through 4 dealing with different ethical
concepts.
In this SLP we will be reviewing articles that cover the concept of stakeholder management. Stakeholders are
important to consider in significant business-related decisions. This is because organizational decisions –
especially substantial decisions involving significant resource allocations/re-allocations – tend to impact various
stakeholder groups as you will be reminded in your reading. These stakeholders may have the power to impact
the organization’s success.
Assignment Instructions:
In this assignment you will be asked to apply stakeholder management theory to the following scenario:
A public corporation of 980 employees manufactures a popular brand of garments (mostly jeans) that are
primarily made and sold in America nation-wide. It has a large contingent of employees in several small rural
communities in the Eastern US and is the primary employer in all of those communities. Two of its 5 shops are
unionized, but the union and management have a good working relationship. The company has traditionally
marketed its clothing line as “Made in the USA” and attracted a bit of a “cult-like” following as a result, but an
outside consulting firm has suggested that significantly greater profits are possible if a different strategy is
employed. The corporation is subsequently considering whether to off-shore its manufacturing facilities to a
poor nation to save money on labor. It would also discretely discontinue its “Made in the USA” marketing ads
and hopefully ride the wave of its previous marketing campaigns for a while. It is estimated that total cost per
unit of production will be decreased by one third which equates to tens of millions of dollars.
Please write a 2-3 page paper in which you respond to the following:
Provide a paragraph summarizing the concept of stakeholder management based on your readings.
How do you think the following stakeholder groups in the above scenario will be impacted?
Employees/unions
Communities
Stockholders
What would you recommend the employer described above should do?