LAMP-L216 is a topical seminar that introduces students to fundamental issues in the relationship between business and society. Topics vary with the instructor and year and include advertising in American culture and big business in American society.
LAMP-L216 fulfills the College of Arts and Sciences Intensive Writing requirement, and it is approved by the Hutton Honors College to count toward the General Honors Notation.
Offered Fall 2008
Most people agree that the health care system in the U.S. is in crisis: The costs of health care are rising sharply and many citizens lack health insurance (by latest figures approximately 45 million Americans, among whom number 9 million children). Is it just that health care is largely distributed in the U.S. by ability to pay? Is healthcare a special kind of good that shouldn’t be distributed in the same manner as toaster ovens and iPods?The first part of this course will examine several theories of justice (Rawlsian, libertarian, socialist-egalitarian) and their implications in debates on the following topics: Is there a moral right to health care? If so, is this a universal human right? What sort of healthcare system (the Canadian single-payer health insurance system, the U.S. more market-based system, the Public Health Service of England, etc.) is a just one? In trying to answer these questions, we will compare several health care systems and will explore real-world cases of health care reform efforts: From the 1965 Social Security Act which brought about Medicare and Medicaid, to the creation of the universal single-payer system called Medicare in Canada, the Clinton Administration’s efforts in the early 1990s, the Oregon Rationing Plan of 1994, to the 2006 bill intended to guarantee nearly universal access in Massachusetts.The second part of the course will investigate the “business of babies” and questions of justice that arise in the context of reproductive medicine. First, we will investigate the business of infertility medicine, including surrogate motherhood, egg and sperm ‘donation’, and the lack of significant regulation of infertility clinics in the U.S. Second, we will address how new genetic information and technologies are being used for would-be parents to select the sex and genetic traits of the child they wish to produce. For a significant price, would-be parents can now use pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and embryo selection (widespread use of which is dramatized in Andrew Niccol’s 1997 film Gattaca, which we will screen during the semester) to avoid having a child with a significant predisposition to a genetic disease and to select for desirable genetic traits. If such technologies are available only to the wealthy, will this lead to a “genobility” that further exacerbates societal inequalities? What, if anything, is wrong with choosing our children?
Offered Fall 2008
This course addresses the need for managerial skill in responding to business crises, from deficits and layoffs to executive misconduct and toxic pollution. More specifically, this course prompts students to develop speech-communication skills that can be applied to the composition of varied messages, from external press releases to internal memoranda. Recent estimates suggest that U.S. businesspeople write100,000 speeches each year, most of which are vetted by “a committee of thinkers” if not actual speechwriters. As individuals and as team members, students examine models of crisis communication in classroom exercises, and then compose speeches responding to case studies of various types of crises. Class evaluations of these speeches leads to the development of a rating scale by which a final, individually crafted speech is evaluated.
Offered Spring 2009
This seminar combines intensive reading and writing with weekly discussion. The central focus of our work will be the automobile in America, but we will often use that subject as a platform to think widely across decades of time and around the world. The seminar will have a historical orientation (that’s the instructor’s “discipline”) but will provide abundant opportunity to think about the present and speculate on the future. We’ll study issues of technology and culture, of working men and women, of race and gender, of cities and streets, of backseat sex and rock and roll, of interstate highways, environmental challenges, oil supplies, government regulation, and other topics that might lead to the conclusion that contained in the past and present of the automobile is just about all there is to know about business and the humanities.
Offered Spring 2009
This course focuses on global marketing and advertising with the goal of showing
students the importance of recognizing and appreciating cultural differences.
Tackling this subject is an ambitious undertaking. For one thing, it requires an understanding of globalization—a rigorous course in its own right. It also requires students to mine the nuggets of their liberal arts education. They must consider and show how their courses in literature, history, fine arts, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, classics, foreign languages, and so on can be used to explain how global marketing and advertising work. Students will quickly discover that this topic raises more questions than it answers. That, however, is what makes it an ideal topic.
To make this course manageable, we will adopt a social psychological perspective in seeking to understand how advertising works. In general, this means that we will consider how advertising influences people’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior. More specifically, we will narrow our theoretical approach by laying the foundation of this course upon the work of Geert Hofstede, a social psychologist who identified five dimensions of national culture: power distance, individualism/collectivism, masculinity/femininity, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term orientation. Built upon this foundation, students will then explore the challenges of global marketing and advertising. Class meetings will take the form of problem-based discussions, where students can raise questions, discuss ideas, and offer solutions for particular problems. These classes will prepare students for the final project, a presentation of a multinational advertising campaign. As this suggests, developing strong critical thinking skills is the primary goal of this intensive writing course.
Offered Spring 2009
Upton Sinclair's The Jungle triggered the creation of the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA. Charged with protecting consumers from poisonous, contaminated, or otherwise dangerous products that they might eat, inject, or slather onto their skin, the FDA has moved back and forth over the years from lax oversight to implementing overly-burdensome regulations. Who writes these regulations, and who determines the precise phrasing? Who determines if regulations are too lax, or too burdensome? Protecting public health requires a complex dance between science, economics, and politics, to determine the best balance between a low cost, high risk extreme on one end, and a high cost, low risk extreme on the other. The role of science is to provide the best interpretation of the available information, objectively and dispassionately, so that policy-makers can strive for the best protections. Economics determines the cost, measured in dollars (but how can we quantify the "quality of life?"). Politics does the rest; on the floor of the Senate, in the Oval Office, and in board rooms and back rooms around the country. Final decisions factor in the arguments from multiple constituents with differing goals, and with differing access and influence. What is the public perception of all of this? Half a century ago, public trust favored science and scientists; things have changed since then. Most remarkable is the blossoming of the perception that personal testimony is of greater validity than information derived through scientific investigation. It is all the more remarkable that this holds true even when the "testimony" is fictitious. Is this a cultural shift, or is it a part of human nature? Perhaps we are by our very nature programmed to believe the snake oil salesman, even against our better judgment, because he looks and sounds convincing. These are complex issues. They have the potential to change our future dramatically—for better or for worse, depending on what we do from this point onward. How far have we actually come since The Jungle?
In this seminar, we will read articles and reports at various levels of technical expertise, along with excerpts from longer works. We will discuss the significance of the readings, and try to develop an understanding of what has occurred at the interface of science and politics. We will do much of our reasoning in writing, sharing thoughts and alternative explanations about why things have transpired as they have. Human nature—genetically coded, inborn behavior—has undoubtedly played a major role; if we can articulate this role, perhaps we can develop strategies to avoid pitfalls that have snared us in the past. The seminar is open to all majors and assumes no particular scientific expertise.
Not Being Offered During 2008-2009 Academic Year
In this seminar, students investigate and analyze the role and practice of management in arts-based settings. Students study the business of theater production and apply that knowledge to other arts-related enterprises. They are expected to develop a full vocabulary of arts management critical to grant writing and fund raising. Students will formulate a managerial toolkit to facilitate decision-making strategies that are appropriate to an art organization’s strategic vision. Students of Management and the Arts will gain an appreciation of the past, current, and future challenges of arts management, and they will become seasoned connoisseurs of the arts who possess an understanding of the balance of business and passion necessary to enact artists’ visions.
Not Being Offered During 2008-2009 Academic Year
This course begins with the premise that gender is serious business. We’ll be considering gender as a social construction (that is, how various people and cultures in the U.S. have defined masculinity and femininity), but we will also examine the actual experiences of men and women in the business world. We’ll analyze a variety of topics, keeping three general themes in mind: (1) men and women as entrepreneurs and managers; (2) images of businessmen and women in American popular culture; and (3) gender and policy in the workplace. We need not be limited to these themes; I’m sure we’ll discover more as the semester progresses. This course takes a historical perspective; exploring the past helps us to understand the present and appreciate change and continuity over time. But we’ll also devote time and attention to exploring the present and thinking about the future.
Last updated:
July 10, 2008