Legal and Ethical Environment of Business

The Unit 5 individual project can sometimes be challenging for students. You can ask me questions or for clarification about it any time but I wanted to create this guide to help you out.

Here’s what you are asked to do from the assignment:

· Identify two firms with similar problems from different countries

· Conduct a comparative analysis of the firms

· Analyze political, social, ethical and legal differences and their impact on management decision making

· Provide substantive conclusion and recommendations

The two companies cannot be from the same country. This is because one of the main goals of the assignment is to help you analyze and learn about what factors can be unique to the place a company is located and to practice analyzing how business is different around the world as well as drawing strategic conclusions about those differences.

Note: Using the U.S. business unit and an overseas business unit of that same company would NOT work. So, for example, you could not use McDonald’s in the U.S. and McDonald’s in China.

Most students pick one country from the U.S.A. and one from another country. You are not required to do it that way but the ease (for most students) of researching U.S. companies or the desire to learn more about a possible employer are the typical reasons for this.

Some tips to help you

The following list consists of my main tips for the assignment. We’ll have more discussion on these and other ideas in the live chats for Unit 5 so know that this isn’t the only place for help. I can also talk to you about these things as needed. Here’s that list:

· The best way to approach this assignment is to work on selecting your firms and work from there. Start with picking your companies rather than an abstract search for common problems.

· Picking two firms that provide a similar product or service works best. This is because that means they will face similar problems. This tip is a great way to save time on selecting companies to fulfill the requirements for the assignment.

· The larger the company the better. A larger company will have more articles written about it and is more likely to be mentioned in a book. They also tend to be publicly held so that more information about them is released to the public.