Eid Mubarak...Ciid Wanaagsan

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1. Alla maanta ayaanta, iyo iidda wanaagsan,
Ilaaheen nasiiyay, isagaa ku abaal leh
Way ahaataye manta, si wanaagsan u iida x 2
2. Calankeena iftiimay, xiddigtaa ku astaysan
Ilaaheen nasiiyay, asagaa ku abaal leh
Way ahaataye maanta, si wanaagsan u iida x 2
3. Ardey-deena iskuulka, odayaal talinaaya
Ilaaheen nasiiyay, asagaa ku abaal leh
Way ahaataye maanta, si wanaagsan u iida x 2

Ethics in the Workplace

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The term ethics, when applied to the workplace, admonishes people having close working relationships to aspire to conduct business in the most applicable manner and to strive to overcome all sorts of acts that may hinder productivity, diminish respect and dignity, and spearhead moral degradation. Ethics, in simple terms, is defined as distinguishing right from wrong. In our lifetime, we encounter various unethical issues committed by people of all ranks, with differing color and creed, religion and origin. Ethical issues in the workplace can best be observed by following the ethical codes of conduct established for each and every office. They are rules and regulations that act and guide the material and moral principles of employees and employers.

One burning scandalous issue that gripped the imagination of the global media has been the much-publicized Halliburton Scandal in which officials from the mega-corporation overcharged the United States Department of Defense (DOD) during the Iraq War after securing a $7 billion contract in Iraq to supply fuel. Former Vice-President of the United States Dick Cheney, who was CEO of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000, finally stepped down after receiving $34 million as compensation (Guardian, 2004). Halliburton is considered to be the second biggest oilfield services corporation in the world and has over 70 operations worldwide.

The company’s corporate policy regarding sensitive transactions states “The Company will conduct its business in compliance with applicable Law (See Corporate Policy 3-0001 with respect to conflicts between United States Law and the Law of another country) and requires all Company Directors and Employees to avoid any activities which could involve the Company in any unlawful practice” (Halliburton, 2003). Even though it is stipulated in its policy, Halliburton leaders saw no problem breaking the law when it came to defrauding its own government.

Founded by Erle Halliburton in 1919, the energy corporation has remained in the spotlights of global and national controversies with officials reaping with impunity. In a well documented testimony, Bunnatine Greenhouse, an employee of Halliburton complained to army officials about the preferential treatment given to Halliburton in the Balkans, Kuwait, and Iraq. Her involvement in the investigations led her to be demoted. Halliburton did harm to its credibility by overcharging the same government that gave it contractual rights to extract oil from Iraq in the aftermath of the invasion. With help from corrupt government officials, the mega-corporation emerged the only entity to have exclusive rights to exploit Iraq’s abundant black gold. Despite the scandal and public outcry, Halliburton escaped unscathed from every scandal including the killing of three of its unarmed security guards who were indiscriminately gunned down by insurgents in Iraq after an Improvised Explosive Device or IED unexpectedly ripped apart the armored vehicle they were travelling in. Harrowing images of the shooting was captured on film by a lone survivor and shown to the world.

References

Frederickson, H. G. (1999), Ethics and the New Managerialism: An Interactive Journal 4(2), 299–324. Retrieved from http://www.spaef.com/file.php?id=1103

David, Teather (February 18, 2004), Halliburton Suspends Bills for Army Meals, World News, The Guardian, London. Retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/feb/18/iraq.usa

Corporate Policy (2003), Halliburton Company & Subsidiary Companies, Retrieved from
http://www.halliburton.com/AboutUs/default.aspx?pageid=2326&navid=976

Social Change

Cover of Public Integrity

Social change is changing the working conditions of employees and their working environment. Changes may not be workable if the employer and employee are not ready for change. Ethical decision-making, when applied to social change, helps alleviate existing problems and is best served when managers take the mantle of leadership to deter actions that may tarnish the good name and reputation of the company they represent.

Superior managers are known to be active in the preservation of good working conditions by observing the code of ethics of the organizations they serve. This implies ensuring the rules and regulations of the workplace are never violated and that all employees are treated with dignity and respect. In case of a malpractice where the company regulation has been broken by some employees with intent to cause problems, managers may feel obliged to take measures against culprits implicated in any act of wrongdoing that undermine company ethics.

As Yeager (2007) argues, “Supervisors can encourage employees to act both ethically and responsively, or they can emphasize political responsiveness without setting ethical limits.” Factors that undermine social change include kickbacks, preferential treatment, favoritisms based on familial relationships, and use of insider trading to garner wealth, bribery and other unethical and imperfect dealings that lead to low morale, frivolity, and diminished use of faculty of reasoning. In the past I witnessed the departure of a group of employees implicated in the collective theft of a refugee resettlement agency. These employees worked in cahoots with some managers to overcharge, steal, and distort important documents for their selfish gains. Eventually, the sword of Themistocles fell on them after thorough investigations by a new director leading to the termination of the group.

Reference

Yeager, S. J., Hildreth, W. B., Miller, G. J., & Rabin, J. (2007). The relative effects of a
supervisory emphasis on ethical behavior versus political responsiveness. Public Integrity, 9(3), 265-283.

Piracy Spearhead Social Divide

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Piracy is an act of robbery in the high seas committed by non-state actors. Piracy in Somalia has caused widespread fragmentation and social divide among the communities of this part of this Horn of Africa such that, once considered irreligious, unpardonable, and a job to be scoffed at, it has become something to be bragged about despite having ramifications on the economy, on the society, and on the political stability of the region as a whole.

Since the collapse of the Somali central government in 1991, northeast Somalia saw the emergence of highway brigands who not only interrupt international shipping but also tremendously cause untold suffering to the thousands of innocent civilians living in squalid conditions. Drawn from former cadres of the Somali Navy and volunteer militia, piracy in northeast Somalia, as the pirates and their cohorts portend, has grown into being the stable sustainer of the economy, though, to the contrary, the living conditions among majority of the population is dismally beyond comprehension. Wife-stealing by extortion, prostitution conglomeration, drug abuse and violence, insecurity and malevolent acts have reduced once peaceful communities into avenues of hate and suspicion.

According to Bowden (2010), by 2010, Somali pirates had in their custody seamen from the nations of Bangladesh, China, Ghana, Greece, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Korea, Myanmar, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Turkey, Yemen, and Vietnam.

Lack of a workable legitimate government has made Somalia a center for international piracy. The presence of al-Shabab, an extremist religious faction known for instilling fear and servitude, has been a handicap to governance and stability. The most important aspect of governance in any nation is the presence of assured security. The international community will have to assist Somalia so it can stand on its feet again. Piracy can only be defeated inland and not at sea. The millions of dollars being spent on guarding Somalia’s territorial waters by foreign navies could have served a better cause if spent inland.

Reference

Bowden, Anna (2010), One Earth Future Working Paper, retrieved from http://oceansbeyondpiracy.org/sites/default/files/documents_old/The_Economic_Cost_of_Piracy_Full_Report.pdf

Justice

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Justice is regarded as the code of moral rightness and equality of humanity before the law without regard to race, creed, color, religious and political affiliation, and sex and gender. Justice is the most important determinant that enables human beings to coexist in peace and harmony. For justice to flourish there must be sets of laws and regulations that act as guiding principles among nations and communities. In justice, every individual citizen is accorded an equal share of rights that may either be natural or legal as by law established. Justice embodies various concepts according to many interpretations. Some prime concepts of justice include distributive justice, strict egalitarianism, libertarian principles, and feminist principles (Stanford, 2007).

It is reputedly assumed that in 431 BCE, Pericles, an Athenian general became the first to speak out aloud regarding equal justice in terms of settling private disputes. Incentives, resources, and legal ability could be determined as being part of equal justice (Rhode, 1997). For a long time, the use of the phrase “equal justice before the law” has been used as a reference to how the law encompasses every individual citizen of the United States. However, the phrase has been regarded as just as rhetoric with no legal recourse by some figures who are expert in the fields of law, ethics, and philosophy.

According to Hart (1974), social equity “denotes the spirit and habit of fairness, justness, and right dealing which would regulate the intercourse of men …the rule of doing to all others as we desire them to do to us”; or as it is expressed by Justinian, “to live honestly, to harm nobody, to render every man his due”. Social equity also implies the equal distribution of resources for all. Social equity ensures all people acquire equal share and strives to see everyone gets a fair share of equitable supplies. Examples of social inequity include unequal distribution of healthcare and disproportional welfare benefits to those who cannot afford to place food on their tables.

There are some features that may be detrimental to justice and social equity which if not overturned may cause myriads of damages to human coexistence and interdependency. Dwindling socioeconomic indicators emanating from poor distribution of resources, racial/ethnic imbalances, and gender inequalities pave the way for injustices and social inequities (Krieger, 2011). Heuristically, justice and social equity are two interrelated concepts in ethics and have been known to share common grounds. The term social justice denotes that justice must apply to all sectors of society. Social justice is against the idea of having one section of society enjoying the fruits of social justice and social equity while the rest suffer in silence without a representative voice and without legal representation.

References

Distributive Justice, Retrieved from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justice-distributive/#Scope

Hart, David K. (1974) Social Equity, Justice, and the Equitable Administrator, Public Administration Review, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Jan. - Feb., 1974), pp. 3-11

Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, Written 431 B.C.E, Translated by Richard Crawley (1874).

Rhode, Deborah, Equal Justice Under Law, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University, Retrieved from http://ww.scu.edu/ethics/publications/submitted/rhode/equal-justice.html

Krieger, Nancy (2011), Advice to the Next President, Harvard School of Public Health, Retrieved from http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hphr/social-health-hazards/spr08dispkreiger/

Plagiarism and self-plagiarism

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Plagiarism is the act of deliberately stealing by way of copying either partially or wholesale previous academic work of another person without acknowledging its use. Plagiarism is considered an intellectual theft in the academic world and that students must shun it at all cost to avoid apprehension and dismissal from institutions of higher learning. Rewriting, copying, or pasting previous academic works of another person with the sole aim of claiming it, as fresh intellectual material, without signaling acknowledgement is an infringement and a violation of academic integrity according to accepted literary norms. Self-plagiarism is the act of surreptitiously or explicitly presenting previous scholarly work as proof of fresh ideas without acknowledging authorship and originality. However, there are circumstances that permit authors to avoid self-referencing previous works and that are when the work to be cited is small in context. According to APA (2010), extensive self-referencing must be commensurate with citations so as to avoid false impressions.

Even though the two paragraphs may not be entirely identical, what is clear is that the student in question has committed an act of plagiarism that could result his work being rejected as scholarly work. Using phrases like “ending a study too soon”, “negative results”, and copious words like “skimming”, “drawbacks”, and “buffing” is cause for scholarly exploitation. The clever student has been manipulative in that he carefully selected ideas that don’t belong to him. He used synonyms to hide the original author’s wordings. For example, he substituted “very difficult” for “hard to know”, “tainted by conflict of interest” for “tainted the results” and so on.

According to Renfrow, D. (2009), there are many ways of avoiding plagiarism. For example, it is important to adapt your own language rather than stealing the works of other academics word for word. The use of “cosmetics” as substitutes, applying alterations, and changing terminologies must be avoided at all cost. We can recognize plagiarism by comparing the document being plagiarized with what has been plagiarized.

References
American Psychological Association (2010), Washington, DC

Renfrow, D. (2009). Avoiding plagiarism, Retrieved from http://library.ucr.edu/?view=help/plagiarism2.html

Steroids in Sports

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Organizational culture can spearhead the creation of ethical policies in any organization as long as the top echelons of the said organization espouses higher standards of management and moral leadership skills. The same organization may as well find itself immersed in an unethical ocean of deceit and debauchery if those endowed with authority practice concepts that cause fragmentation, divide, and schisms. Organizations require optimism, courage, and fairness (Cooper, 2006) in all endeavors of strategic decision-making. A leader in an organization may find himself being controlled by culture instead of him or her controlling culture. There are various dimensions of culture, and because organizations have different cultures, no culture is better than another culture. To better understand culture and how best to transform it, strategic leaders will need to understand the dynamics of culture and comprehend what is to be discarded and what will need transformation in their spheres of influence.

Wide scale use of Steroids (synthetic drugs that mimic male testosterone) have become so common in American sports such that it is gaining momentum among many sportsmen who wish to boost their body metabolism and strengthen their hobby and sport integrity. As such, the rising use of steroids among sportsmen has resulted in increased consultations among sports leaders seeking social change for the afflicted sports industry. Identifying most important critical problems and finding remedies and viable solutions for those affected by steroid use has been some of the major challenges of the overall organizational culture of the sports industry that is known to advocate sobriety in all major sports leagues and challenges. With a zero tolerance policy for the use of performance enhancers among sportsmen, the sports industry has embarked on strategies that are meant to overcome such dismal conditions. The extensive use of steroids among America’s sports celebrities especially in baseball was documented by Dr. Sanjay Gupta in a past television series that attracted millions of viewers worldwide. Among sports celebrities to have appeared before congressional hearings include Pitcher Roger Clemens and former Yankees second baseman Chuck Knoblauch who has been quoted as saying, “I want baseball to be clean” (CBS, 2009). The forces that made players to be attracted to the use of anabolic steroids include insatiability, acquisitiveness, and self-interest related to winning a game or accumulating fame and wealth.

The prohibition of steroids use by top management necessitated the strengthening of the laws and regulations of an organization that was in drastic decline. If everyone in the organization could be held accountable or responsible for his or her conduct, we could have seen a rise in individual attributes, organizational structure, organizational culture, and societal expectations (Cooper, p.188). By identifying the ethical problem that is tarnishing the image of the industry, leaders will be able to describe the situation and define the ethical issue. Thereafter, leaders should be able to identify several alternatives that project probable consequences. Finally, they will have to select an alternative before coming to a state of resolution (Cooper, p. 30).

References
Cooper, Terry L. (2006), The Responsible Administrator: An Approach to Ethics for the Administrative Role, John Wiley & Sons, San Francisco, CA.

The Truth about Steroids in Sports, Retrieved from http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/02/03/sunday/main3783478.shtml

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