Week 5 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 5 — Fewer Positions, More Questions: A Laundry Weighs Automation — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Business Free sample edition

Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 5 of the term — count what an automation decision does to a workforce, weigh it from both positions on a corporation's purpose, and explain the debate to someone new to business.

This week you learned how a business can be judged beyond what the law requires: ethics versus legality, the tools that shape conduct at work, the pyramid of corporate social responsibility, the triple bottom line, and the two positions on what a corporation is for. In this assignment you count what one automation decision does to a workforce, weigh it from both positions, and explain the debate to someone who has never studied business. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Business Case Workshop practise the same ideas from other angles.

The task

The case is illustrative, built for this course and not real data. A commercial laundry washes and folds sheets and towels for hotels in its city. It is a corporation owned by stockholders, and it is weighing whether to automate its folding line. Like the appliance-parts plant in this week's chapter, the case has no named people and no verdict.

The laundry's counts, line by line:

Employees before automation: 64 employees.
Positions the folding machines would eliminate: 18 positions.
Workers the laundry would retrain to run and maintain the machines: 7 of those 18 workers.

Work these two problems, showing every subtraction:

How many positions is the net change in positions if the laundry automates its folding line?
How many employees would the laundry have after automating?

Beside each answer, add a brief interpretation:

Problem 1: explain why the net change is smaller than the 18 positions eliminated, using the term net change in positions, and name the stakeholders by role who gain and who give something up, at least two of each.
Problem 2: state the strongest reason for the decision from the shareholder position, Friedman (1970), with both of its limits, and the strongest reason from the stakeholder position, Freeman (1984), without choosing between them; then run the three ethical-reasoning questions on one choice the laundry faces in how it tells its workers about the change.

Explain it to a non-expert

A relative who works at a hotel asks you, "Isn't a company only supposed to care about profits?" Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains the two positions on what a corporation is for, says that corporate social responsibility means more than giving to charity, and names one limit, including that the laundry case is illustrative and that this course gives no verdict on the debate. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good answer is possible, and the message gives no legal advice.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a small bus company that switches to an app for ticket sales. Model answer: "Some people argue a company's managers work for its owners, so they should earn a profit for them, but only within the law and ethical custom. Others argue a company should be run for everyone its choices touch, like drivers, riders, and the town. Being responsible also means earning enough to stay open, obeying the law, and treating people fairly, not only donating. This is a made-up example, and reasonable people still disagree about which view is right."

Use that pattern for the laundry, with your own wording and evidence.

Show your work. A reader should be able to rebuild every amount you report from the laundry's counts without guessing which lines you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single report containing:

the two answers, each with every subtraction shown and the interpretation the task names for that problem;
your message to the relative, explaining the two positions, that corporate social responsibility means more than giving to charity, and one limit; and
a before-and-after comparison of the laundry's positions and employees, listing the counts you used, so your amounts can be checked.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled sketch of the laundry's positions before and after with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the arithmetic, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. You may use a free spreadsheet to lay out the laundry's counts. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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