3.1 Writing and analyzing ethics cases in business and research  (Page 4/5)

The following table compares and contrasts participant vs. evaluator cases. in general, the difference comes down to this: participant cases are excellent for practicing decision-making while evaluator cases do an excellent job of teaching students how to apply ethical theory.

What you will do...

Choosing your case

• Tie your case to areas that interest you and tie directly to your research.
• Chose narratives that raise an ethical issue such as how to mitigate or prevent harm, how to resolve value conflicts, how to balance and respect different stakeholder rights, how to balance out conflicting elements of a socio-technical system, and how to transform a dysfunctional organization into an ethical organization.
• Choose a case that can be built out of readily accessible information. Looking carefully at the case's socio-technical system can help you identify and assess information needs.
• Your case should interest and engage you. You and your group should find preparing it a good investment of your time, energy, and expertise.

Structuring your case

• Abstract : Begin your case with a short paragraph that summarizes or outlines the narrative events. It should draw the reader in.
• Historical Narrative : Here, in about 5 to 10 pages, you should detail the "story" of your case. Elements in a narrative or story include a beginning, middle, and end. Protagonists or main characters confront difficulties or obstacles. (This is called the agon in Greek.) At the end of your case, the reader should be clear about how successful the protagonist dealt with the agon and the antagonists.
• Socio-Technical Analysis The case narrative unfolds in a particular context called a socio-technical system. Identify the components of your case's STS. Generally these include hardware, software, physical surroundings, stakeholders, procedures, laws, and information systems. Summarize your STS in a table. Then unpack it in a detailed analysis. Frequently, you will find the conflict in your case's narrative in the form of conflicts between values embedded in the STS.
• Participant Perspectives : If you were detailing the Enron case, you would identify a key decision point and then weave a mini-narrative around it. For example, an important moment occurred when Enron decided to implement mark-to-market accounting. Invent a dialogue where this was discussed and reenact the reasons the eventually led to the decision.
• Ethical Perspective Pieces : The cases prepared by graduate students in APPE's seminar in research ethics were followed by commentaries by the authors and the ethicists who directed the seminar. They explore ethical issues in the context of the case's narrative in issues such as privacy, confidentiality, and informed consent. These ethical perspective pieces can be drawn out into a full blow analysis that follows a framework such as (1) problem specification, (2) solution generation, (3) solution testing, and (4) solution implementation.
• Chronology : A table outline in chronological order the key events of the case helps you and your reader stay on track.