Reflections on teaching business ethics

The start of the twenty-first century witnessed a number of company scandals and ethical breaches that have brought to the forefront community feelings of anguish and disgust towards large companies in addition to spawning more legislation aimed at avoiding a repeat of these collapses. The question that arises is whether the past measures (including legislation) have worked, given the recent Global Financial Crisis (GFC) as it has raised more questions than it has answered. Against this backdrop, we need to consider whether business ethics can be taught to a person irrespective of their age? Should we as community members, customers, shareholders of today give up on the current senior managers who are mostly representatives of the baby boomers and concentrate on increasing ethical awareness of our current undergraduate students (at least of Generation Y and Z)? If we proceed with this argument as being both valuable and also possible, the next step is to consider the ways by which to teach business ethics to a group of students and this aim is the focus of the chapter.<br /

Plagiarism: catalysts and not so simple solutions

Plagiarism has gained much public attention with media, corporations and researchers leading the way. The general public’s perception is that plagiarism is a ‘plague’ spreading without control within our educational institutes. Furthermore, a social perception has been created that the Internet is the ‘catalyst’ of modern-day plagiarism. This chapter explores the domain of plagiarism, taking into consideration some definitions of plagiarism, the recent history, the cultural context, the view of students and teachers, and the situation in Distance Education. The chapter goes on to discuss the actual catalysts of plagiarism and methods used to detect plagiarism. Finally the chapter forwards some good practices that may help prevent and act as deterrents of plagiarism and addresses challenges faced in tackling the problem of plagiarism