LAMP-L416 is a discussion course that draws together aspects of other LAMP courses to focus on specific problems of business management and corporate policy in light of both practical and ethical considerations. Topics vary with the instructor and year and include the nature of business leadership and the legal and ethical practices of corporations.
LAMP-L416 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
It may be said that consumerism is one of the defining features of contemporary American culture: discarding the old, acquiring the new, going to the mall, shopping online, keeping up with the Joneses, buying goods and services to fulfill desires, and so on characterize common American experience.
In this course, we will explore various topics pertaining to consumerism, including what it means to be a consumer, how consumerism relates to our identities, advertising’s influence on our decisions to buy and more broadly, its role in shaping societal values. We will also consider some of the strategies American businesses use to organize, streamline and promote consumption and reflect on some of the benefits and costs of those strategies. Finally, students will pursue their own interest as it relates to the broader topic of consumerism, researching that interest, sharing their findings with the class, and writing a ten-page paper on the topic.
Course materials will include essays and articles from diverse sources as well as visual and aural media, including documentaries, news stories, and popular productions.
Offered Fall 2008
This seminar examines the troubled boundary between the value of individual liberty and the value of living in a democracy. It would be nice if these values could always be easily reconciled, but often they cannot. For example, within variously interpreted limits, we cherish the freedom to do and say what we want, and we usually, not always, acknowledge the responsibilities associated with these freedoms. But at the same time, for most of us individual liberty is not the sole virtue, and we also have loyalties and commitments to our families, our society, our employer, and our country. These considerations raise the issue of whether our individually defined freedoms can flourish only within the framework of a pluralistic society and a democratic political order. If so, then what are our responsibilities to our society and our country? What restrictions on our liberties might be warranted in the name of the public good? On the other side, what are the dangers that social, economic, or political forces might overwhelm our personal freedoms?
Offered Fall 2008
This LAMP seminar is dedicated to cultural, social, anthropological, and scientific perspectives on catastrophes, both natural and human-caused. To a limited extent we will discuss current understanding of the causes of different catastrophes; our more important objective is to understand how humans respond to events that they regard as catastrophic. Such understanding includes identifying patterns in responses; predictable human behavioral responses; the meanings that cultural, political and religious authorities assign to catastrophes: how catastrophes are re-presented by survivors, witnesses, and commentators; and how differing time frameworks and characteristics of particular disasters affect patterns in human response and representation. In other words, we want to analyze temporal, spatial, geographical, cultural, and historical aspects of catastrophes of relevance to future leaders and managers.
One larger claim within the recent literature will require our particular attention: that the identification and reaction to catastrophes today, and the avoidance of catastrophe with the concept of “risk,” are aspects of “modernity.” While some hold that the chief difference lies in the kinds of disasters possible now occur on a vaster scale (in numbers of humans involved directly) and with greater technological complexity (from toxic and nuclear accidents to the collapse of integrated biological systems), the very fact that we can study this topic at a safe, spectator and “objective” distance is also an important aspect of modernity. Moreover we can and routinely do assess the costs and probabilities of disasters that have not and might not happen. As one of our books will argue, catastrophes and their meanings are essential to American political and cultural thinking. Americans “embrace disasters as a way of escaping from the present into a better future.” Well, do we?
This course is a seminar, and depends upon the informed discussion of its members. It is also an intensive writing offering, and will therefore require frequent written work and assessment of written communication strategies.
Offered Spring 2009
Stewardship-- the careful management of resources for others’ benefit—is an important concern of public administrators, nonprofit organizers, and some corporate managers. But what’s so good about stewardship, anyway? Who benefits from stewardship, and what sort of stewardship yields the greatest benefits? How does one become a good steward, and what sorts of knowledge and skills are needed to manage the different kinds of resources that are entrusted to stewards today?
These are some of the questions we will discuss in this seminar, which is about conserving goods that belong to others, or which are critical to the lives and well-being of those who depend on stewards for sustenance. The management of trust funds is one example of stewardship; the efficient delivery of public services is another; environmental protection is a third; and fidelity in personal and family affairs is a fourth. In all of these examples (and many more) the avoidance of undue risk to dependents, and the minimization of managerial rewards, are imperative. In that respect stewardship is unlike managing profit-seeking companies, where risk-taking is both necessary and a highly lucrative form of behavior. A different set of values, and skills, is therefore necessary for good stewardship, and in this seminar we will describe and analyze the distinctive traits of effective stewardship.
We will read about stewardship from a variety of sources, including Biblical, environmental, managerial and financial sources. Students will also practice stewardship in an area of interest to them, and reflect on their experiences in essays that will be written, revised, and formally presented for discussion to the seminar. The seminar will fulfill the requirements for Intensive Writing in the College of Arts & Sciences.
Offered Spring 2009
Note: This section includes a required study tour to Korea over Spring Break
Thomas Friedman’s best seller “The World is Flat” is a brief history of the 20th century that focuses on the origins and evolution of the new global system in which we find ourselves embedded in the first years of a new century. Moreover, the emergence of the new global system, a system characterized by intense economic, cultural and political interactions we now refer to as “globalization,” has marked a period of challenges to U.S. leadership of global finance, business, technology, and, in many ways, culture as well. An important part of this challenge to America’s position as world leader has come from East Asia. And this is not a new challenge. Even during the height of America’s prestige and influence during the 1970s, the Japanese had begun to challenge American assumptions about the primacy of its business and economic models for world development. Subsequently, the so-called little dragons (South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore) emerged as fierce economic competitors. And most recently China has loomed as an emerging economic super-power. The global hierarchy of wealth, technological prowess/innovation, and economic dynamism that was dominated by the US and Western Europe is long-gone. In its place is an increasingly flattened world of economic competition, mobile capital, instantaneous communications, and labor exchange.
This course seeks to explore one dimension of the new globalized world order
embedded in the post-World War II emergence of East Asia as a new locus of economic, technological, and cultural dynamism. Beginning with Japan’s economic challenge in the 1970s and continuing through the rise of China as a global trading super-power, this course will study the characteristics of the unique East Asian variant of capitalism. We will seek to understand the sources of East Asian economic success in the new Millennium and how this success transformed the way Americans do business in a global setting. What cultural systems and core values underlie East Asian business practices? How did American businessmen first ignore, then contest, and finally accept these practices within our own business models? And finally how does an understanding of East Asian capitalism in general help us anticipate the future of globalization itself? These will be core questions that inform course.
Work/Life/Law, Prof. Jamie Prenkert
Offered Spring 2009
After you finish school, you are likely to spend more than one third of your life at work. Considering that another significant chunk of your life will (necessarily) be spent sleeping, the amount of time you spend at work will likely far outweigh the amount of time you spend at any other waketime activity. Because we spend so much of our time and energy at work, regulating the workplace is both a necessity and a practice in social engineering. Not surprisingly, work rules and laws often mirror important policy issues confronting other sectors of society. This course will use, as a jumping-off point, a variety of laws and legal regimes that target and regulate work and the workplace in order for students to consider how life, work and law interact and, more specifically, to analyze some important policy issues that affect how we live, by affecting how we work. Ultimately, this course is designed to allow you to engage in serious thought about your motivation for work; the proper place of work in a balanced and fulfilled life; and, a bit more specifically, society’s role, through law, in encouraging or mandating (and, concomitantly, discouraging or punishing) certain work conditions, opportunities, and behaviors. In particular, we will focus on the structure of the employment relationship, antidiscrimination laws, workplace privacy issues, employee welfare and safety, loyalty and whistle blowing, and work/life balance.
Not Being Offered During 2008-2009 Academic Year
This course is designed to investigate and analyze the complex relationship between law and society. The course will explore the ongoing debate about the nature of this relationship: does law exist for the benefit of the common person? That is, do people create and direct the law rather than the law defining and directing them? Or, on the other hand, is the law used as a tool by those who can control the legal system, those with power—people like judges, for instance? Does law reflect the society it governs, or does law create and shape that society? How do we, as a collective society, envision the role and purpose of law and the legal system?To conduct this investigation, the course will draw on historic and contemporary judicial opinions, statutes, constitutional amendments, legal treatises, law review articles, and other secondary sources to explore the context of the interaction between law and society. Within the course, we will examine “law” within several contexts: legislative, judicial, and popular notions of legal discourse. We will similarly examine “society” within a critical context by looking at issues of gender, race, and science and asking whether the law defines these constructions or whether it reflects these social constructions. We will also examine the topic of popular culture and the law.Students will complete weekly reading assignments accompanied by weekly reading notes. There will be a series of writing assignments, including two analytic reflection papers and a substantial independent research paper that explores the student’s choice of a topic related to the interaction among law, culture, and society.
Not Offered during 2008-2009 Academic Year
John Maynard Keynes concluded The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money with a warning that economists’ ideas can have a lasting and powerful influence, even when those ideas are wrong. For example, public goods, such as lighthouses, must be publicly provided because markets will not do so. We are stuck typing proposals and other word-processed documents on an inefficient QWERTY keyboard when there is a superior alternate keyboard, the DVORAK, available. QWERTY dominates us simply because it was available first, not because it’s better. Irrational exuberance overtakes financial market participants and leads to a trading frenzy followed by a depression when the inflated underlying asset prices collapse. Internet stock speculators bid up prices to irrational, unsustainable levels before the March 2000 market crash. Their mania’s irrationality was similar to the breakdown of rational markets that overtook seventeenth century Dutch tulip bulb traders and gave birth to the term Tulipmania.These stories frequently serve as the foundation for discussions of market failure in economics classes. The market did not work in the way Adam Smith’s famous unseen hand was assumed to do so. Students are told about these (and many other) examples. They are taught each example’s market failure implies the government must remedy the situation. Public policies are proposed—changes in financial market regulations, changes in property rights, antitrust policies, new environmental laws, and even government industrial policy are all put into discussion. Yet what is not discussed in class is the truth or historical basis for the alleged market failures. It turns out that many of these examples are either outright false, or there is much that is left unsaid in the simplistic versions that reach students.The purpose of this LAMP seminar is to investigate several of the most famous economic myths and fables. Students will read and discuss cases that connect to public economics, welfare economics, financial economics, and industrial policy (with particular reference to the ongoing information revolution). For each fable, its background and relevant theory will be developed. Students will be asked to explore the myth’s veracity as well as to discuss why it has taken hold in the economics literature. The policy and management implications of debunking the myths or supporting them will also be analyzed.
Not offered during 2008 - 2009 Academic Year
In spite of the fact that citizens of advanced modern democracies live in free and abundant societies, many of them acknowledge that they are unhappy. Various studies have documented that for most types of people in the West, happiness has not increased since 1950, although living standards and real income have more than doubled. Yet, we have a right to happiness: we can be happy and should always strive to be happy. That is why it is important to take happiness seriously and figure out what should we do differently if we shifted our goal towards achieving a happier way of life. To what extent does happiness depend on our inner life and on our outer circumstances? Does extra income increase happiness? Or should we work less and have more leisure?
This course will seek to answer these questions by concentrating on the relationship between economics, politics, and happiness. To this effect, we shall examine a representative selection of works in sociology, economics, political theory, literature, and philosophy. We shall begin by asking how we do live today and shall explore next how we ought to live and what are the main ingredients of happiness. The books that we’ll read in this class include David Brooks’s novel Bobos in Paradise, Juliet Schor’s The Overworked American, Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and selections from Seneca’s Epistles to Lucillius, Emerson’s Essays, Bentham’s and Mill’s writings. Students will also be required to watch and comment on a few movies that shed light on our topic: Woody Allen’s Another Woman, Andrei Codrescu’s Road Scholar, Alexander Payne’s About Schmidt, and Canadian director Denys Arcand's 2004 film The Barbarian Invasions, which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film.
Last updated:
July 9, 2008