CHAPTER 9

Using Safety to Introduce Ethics into Operations Management Courses

Wayne Buck and Jeffrey Schaller

Eastern Connecticut State University

Introduction

One of the most significant developments in operations management (OM) over the past decade or so has been growing attention to sustainability. This has become a focus of practical concern on the part of numerous companies, regulatory authorities, and nongovernmental organizations, as well as an important area of research for academics.¹

The touchstone of nearly all definitions of sustainability was articulated by the United Nations in 1987: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”² Despite the generality of this definition, the literature does seem to have reached a rough consensus on what sustainability means in OM. Kleindorfer, Singhal, and Wassenhove have traced the origins and evolution of the concept in OM. Their construct is founded on “a broad perspective on triple-bottom-line thinking, integrating profit, people and planet into culture, strategy, and operations of companies.”³ Many, if not most, definitions of sustainability in the OM literature reference this triple-bottom-line concept.⁴

Three aspects of sustainability have received the most attention: green products, green production, and socially responsible suppliers.⁵ Health and safety (aside from working conditions at supplier factories) have received less attention in the OM literature.⁶ This relative neglect of health and safety is reflected in OM teaching practice as well, which largely bypasses these issues.⁷

Within this context, it is not surprising that instructors interested in incorporating ethics in their OM courses do so through the topic of sustainability focusing almost exclusively on the “green” and supplier components, leaving health and safety aside.⁸ Nonetheless, operating safely and delivering safe products to market are widely recognized ethical imperatives, and form an important component of corporate social responsibility.⁹

In this chapter we argue that safety has distinctive advantages as an avenue for introducing ethical issues into OM courses. Further, this chapter suggests strategies for introducing safety as an ethical issue that neither crowd out existing OM topics nor take a hasty and superficial approach that implicitly devalues ethics and social responsibility.

Description of the Discipline of OM

OM is widely understood to be “the function responsible for planning, coordinating, and controlling the resources needed to produce a company’s goods and services.”¹⁰ The scope of OM is an organization’s productive activities. The success of an organization’s OM function is traditionally measured along three dimensions: efficiency, timeliness, and quality. The aim of OM as an academic field is to develop theory, concepts, techniques, tools, and processes to help organizations achieve their productive performance targets. High levels of performance enable organizational success, whether that success is measured as increased competitiveness versus rivals and greater profitability or as more completely accomplishing the organization’s mission.

Sustainability, in effect, adds yet another standard for evaluating how well an organization’s productive activities are performing.¹¹ This significantly complicates the OM challenge.¹² First, it does so simply because sustainability adds more objectives to an already long list of objectives and thereby increases the number and complexity of the trade-offs that must be evaluated—now there are even more cakes that organizations cannot both eat and have.

Second, and more importantly for our purposes, sustainability introduces ethical considerations. Operations managers now face the possibility of having to make trade-offs between what is good for the organization and what is morally right. As we will see in the next section, making decisions that balance, for example cost and timeliness, are usually very different from decisions that require managers to balance, for example cost and safety.

Typical Ethical Issues in OM

Sustainability is widely considered to be an ethical imperative, a key aspect of social responsibility.¹³ However, given the disparate nature of the objectives that have been linked to sustainability, and the fact that the task of this chapter is to help instructors introduce ethics and not sustainability into their OM courses, we need a criterion for which specific aspects of sustainability—and ultimately OM—are properly thought of as having ethical ramifications.

Before we discuss this criterion, however, we should make clear that our focus is what have been called “pro-organizational behaviors”—actions and decisions by managers intended to benefit the organization.¹⁴ This contrasts to managerial behavior that benefits the manager at the expense of the organization. For example, a manager might embezzle funds, sexually harass a colleague, misappropriate company equipment, or select a supplier based on a personal interest instead of one that would be best for the organization. This focus is justified because we are interested in understanding how an organization should manage its operations, and when we talk about an organization doing something—manufacturing a product, setting work schedules, contracting with a supplier—we are implicitly referencing what individual managers do on behalf of their organizations.

A Criterion for Ethical Issues

The approach taken in this chapter is to identify which business decisions have an ethical aspect by referencing stakeholders’ views on the proper basis for making those decisions. In the case of some decisions, reasonable stakeholders will not object to the organization making the decision solely on self-interested economic grounds. For these decisions, methods that compare and evaluate alternative courses of action on the basis of the economic costs and benefits to the organization itself are appropriate and acceptable to reasonable stakeholders. Decisions that pass this “test” are purely instrumental, and do not raise issues of moral right and wrong.

By contrast, a decision does have an ethical aspect if reasonable stakeholders would object to the organization making the decision solely on the basis of economic costs and benefits to itself. In other words, ethical issues arise when reasonable stakeholders would consider it inappropriate and unacceptable for an organization to make a decision strictly on the basis of self-interested economic and financial considerations.¹⁵

To illustrate how this criterion works, consider the following two examples. First, setting a target maximum defect rate in manufacturing computer microchips. Assuming that the microchips are intended as components in equipment whose failure would not threaten life or limb, a decision that factors in only production costs and the costs of defective chips (inspection, rework, return, customer complaints, reputation, etc.) in relation to revenue, is perfectly appropriate. A manager may quite reasonably decide to accept a higher than practically possible minimum defect rate because the costs of doing so are outweighed by the additional revenue—and because the costs of reducing the defect rate would not be outweighed by additional revenue. Customers, suppliers, employees, investors all understand and accept management making a decision about an acceptable defect rate based on a cost–benefit analysis. A business decision purely based on maximizing profitability, even if it meant a higher than necessary rate of defective computer chips, would be acceptable to stakeholders. Hence, in this case, decisions about what defect rate is acceptable do not have an ethical aspect—the business case is decisive and nonbusiness factors need not be considered.

The second example concerns contamination of a processed food product such as potato chips. In this case, a manager who accepts a given contamination risk because doing so maximizes profitability, when it is possible and practical to reduce that risk by giving up some profits, would be criticized by customers as “putting profits ahead of people.” Contaminated potato chips are in a different category, in the eyes of stakeholders, than defective computer chips. People get sick, suffer long-term debilitating injuries, and die from eating contaminated food. Yet consumers have every right to expect the food they eat to be safe.¹⁶ Just as poisoning a relative in order to acquire an inheritance is unethical, so it is widely acknowledged that it is unethical to poison people in order to make greater profits. These ethical judgments arise from the fact that we value human life and human well-being much more highly than mere things or money.

Of course, reasonable customers do not expect food-manufacturing businesses to completely forego cost–benefit analysis, nor do they believe that contamination risk should be reduced to zero, or that human health should be assigned an infinite dollar value. Reasonable customers will accept some limits to how much a company should spend to reduce contamination risk, but they will do so only if they perceive that the company and the people at the company care about their health beyond purely financial considerations. This is why OM decisions about how to manage food contamination risk have an ethical aspect, while decisions about managing rates of computer chip defects do not.

Safety as an Ethical Issue

Every business—every organization—has to make trade-offs between cost and safety. The snack foods company making potato chips could always spend more on pest control, mold detection, equipment cleaning, product testing, and employee training. Even though the marginal benefit of every additional dollar spent on safety is likely to diminish, nonetheless, there would likely be some improvement. But if the company insisted on continuing to increase safety spending as long as the marginal benefit was greater than zero, it would go out of business.

Managers cannot spend infinite amounts of money on safety, but how much? How safe does a car company, a drug company, or a processed food manufacturer need to make their products? How safe does a chemical process, airline flight, or medical procedure need to be? How accurate does a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) need to be in filling out a client’s tax return? How complete does a pharmaceutical product disclosure need to be? At what point should a company stop testing, evaluating, and verifying its products, services, suppliers, and operations and bring them to market?

These ethical challenges arise from the fact that the question “how safe is safe enough?” cannot be answered using cost–benefit analysis. Profit and safety are, at bottom, incommensurable and cannot be weighed on the same scale. They are incommensurable because safety is an ethical and not simply an economic issue.

Of course, sometimes—perhaps more often than some managers believe—safety pays.¹⁷ But sometimes it does not. In any case, when faced with specific operating decisions that must be made quickly, with limited and to some degree inaccurate information, it is often very unclear or uncertain whether safety will in fact pay, or if it will, when. And it is exactly this hard reality—that every business is faced with having to make hard, ethically laden choices between benefits to itself and risks to employees, customers, and the public—that serves as the entry point for ethics into OM. The fundamental OM ethical challenge is: how much risk can I (we) expose others to in order to gain some benefit for myself (ourselves)? This kind of challenge is ubiquitous in business, especially in OM. These are decisions not about balancing risk and reward for oneself, but risk to someone else versus benefits to oneself.¹⁸

As one of us has argued elsewhere, these types of challenges are not ethical dilemmas in the sense of a conflict of values.¹⁹ They are better thought of as “ethical conundrums.” They have no obvious right or wrong answers; they are “confusing or difficult problems.”²⁰ These are tough problems to solve in large part because risk to others and benefit to one-self are incommensurable. The two cannot be measured on the same scale of economic analysis. This means that what is needed is not better, more accurate, more sophisticated calculation, but good ethical judgment.

We suggest that safety is an especially effective vehicle for raising ethical issues in OM courses. Safety is an easily appreciated value and of great interest to employees, customers, and the general public. Safety is directly tied to operating decisions, and many familiar business processes raise safety issues. And because of safety’s connection to risk, safety is often (but not always) quantifiable in ways that enable incorporation into OM decision-making methods and models.

Types of Safety

The term “safety” covers a variety of distinct risks. Personal safety hazards (often termed occupational or worker safety) are the most widely recognized and studied in both the OM and safety literature. This type of safety concerns hazards to the health and well-being of individual workers, hazards that do not threaten the continued functioning of a facility as a whole.

Process safety hazards, by contrast, threaten the operations of the facility itself, have the potential to seriously disrupt, either temporarily or permanently, the facility’s output, and the potential to kill or injure large numbers of people, either workers or the public.²¹ Process safety hazards include fires and explosions, toxic releases, flooding, and large-scale physical destruction.

Product safety—the risk products pose to consumers—represents a third type of safety, and also has an ethical dimension. Consider the design of the General Motors (GM) ignition switch, which made the switch vulnerable to rotating into the “off” position, shutting down the engine, and disabling the airbags. This defectively designed switch is reported to have cost the lives of dozens of drivers and passengers.²²

Ethics Teaching Strategy: Experiential Learning

Safety, whether personal, process, or product, is clearly a large field, with its own methods, concepts, principles, and practices.²³ Despite this, we believe that it is not necessary to add new material into existing courses in order to use safety to introduce ethics to OM students. The keys to success in this endeavor are (a) modest expectations combined with (b) an experiential approach.

First, we suggest that OM instructors seek to raise students’ awareness of the reality that operating decisions have an ethical aspect, and to present them with that reality in the context of problems they are already solving. Success will be achieved when students come away from solving an OM problem realizing that the best solution cannot always be determined on the basis of purely technical, pragmatic, or economic reasoning. They do not need to have the tools to actually find the very best, most ethically informed, solution. Rather, the goal is to get students to recognize that at some point, for some OM decisions, the “best” solution is one that relies on ethical judgments and results in a decision that is less than optimum from a purely cost–benefit perspective.

Second, in addition to these modest expectations, we propose that experiential learning methods, not concept acquisition, are the best way to raise students’ ethical awareness. What is needed is an approach that shows students why safety issues arise in production environments and shows them how safety is entwined with meeting production objectives. This showing may or may not be accompanied by formal discussion of safety issues, but in any case students will come away with a foundational experience that explicitly includes ethics in OM.

Simulations

Experiential teaching methods are especially appropriate in OM. This is because experiential learning opportunities in the form of production simulations are already in common use and have been shown to be effective.²⁴ Moreover, simulations are widely applied in OM practice to support decision making.²⁵

Simulation games immerse students in the complexities, uncertainties, and ambiguities of decision making. They provide an opportunity for students to experience what it is like to feel the pressures of cost, production, time, and quality. Moreover, simulation games provide students with an opportunity to watch and reflect on their own revealed behavior as they react to the pressure to out-compete their classmates and struggle with the temptation to sacrifice other values for the sake of personal gain.²⁶

One of us has developed and used, for a number of years, an operations-oriented simulation game in his business ethics class.²⁷ The simulation game, commercialized under the name “Deepwater,” provides a concrete example of how OM simulations can be used to raise ethical issues and provides valuable general lessons for utilizing simulations.

In Deepwater, students manage the operations of a deep water oil production platform in the Gulf of Mexico. The objective is for students to operate at a profit, outperforming rival oil companies. The game is played over several rounds, typically 8 to 12. Students make operational decisions in each round about oil production, spending on maintenance and safety, crew size and training, and equipment overhauls. After a round closes, the simulation model processes the decisions and determines outcomes. Students receive reports on the outcomes of their decisions. These reports include not only operating and financial information, but information about worker injuries and fatalities, accidents including well blowouts, and social impacts such as pollution and the company’s carbon footprint.

In Deepwater, students face several operational risks including personal accidents that can injure or kill individual workers and process accidents that can cause their oil well to blowout, potentially killing or injuring workers, causing an environmental disaster and putting the company on the sidelines for a portion of the simulation. Virtually all of the operating decisions that students face in Deepwater have an impact on both personal and process safety. The more oil they produce, for example, the greater the chances of an accident or blowout. The more spent on maintenance, the lower the chances of an accident or blowout.

It is important to note that outcomes in Deepwater are probabilistic. That is, the decisions students make affect the probability of certain events happening, but do not mechanistically determine those events. This is intended to capture the day-to-day reality of many OM decisions—and, for that matter, of most management decisions. Many traditional OM simulation games share this characteristic.²⁸

In addition to being probabilistic, OM simulations utilized to raise ethical issues can usefully incorporate nonlinear functions. Nonlinear relationships—relationships between an independent and a dependent variable that display either diminishing or increasing returns to scale—are common in business and economics.

For example, after a certain point spending an additional dollar on training has less of an impact on reducing accidents than the first dollar had. Likewise, after a certain point each increment of additional production will raise defect rates more than the first increment. Understanding changing returns to scale is fundamental to making decisions about how to trade-off increased risk for increased benefits, or increased costs for decreased risk. Here too, many standard OM simulations display non-linear behavior. In these simulations, small changes in production or inventory inputs can result in surprisingly large changes in throughput or inventory levels.

Consider the relationship between maintenance spending and blow-out probability in Deepwater, which displays decreasing returns to scale (see Figure 9.1). As more money is spent on maintenance, the better the equipment condition, and the lower the chances of a blowout. Simulation players can improve their equipment’s condition by producing less crude oil and by spending more on maintenance. What is the “right” level of maintenance spending? This is very difficult to say in the abstract, but one thing is clear: while increasing spending from $2.00/bbl to $3.00/ bbl noticeably reduces the chances of a blowout, an increase from $10 to $12—or even $20!—provides only a very slight benefit.

So far we have simply recommended a set of design characteristics that make OM simulation games especially useful in raising ethical issues. We recommend that such simulation games be operationally and risk-oriented and model risk using probabilistic and nonlinear input–out-put functions. These design characteristics also have the benefit of being completely neutral on the question of how to resolve the resulting ethical issues. The ethical issues raised in simulation games with these design characteristics can be tackled using consequentialist, deontological, virtue ethics, care ethics, or any other ethical framework one might prefer.

Figure 9.1  Maintenance spending versus blowout probability

The maintenance issue raised previously provides a good example of an ethical issue that arises in the context of the Deepwater simulation game: what is the ethically responsible level of spending on maintenance in a business that risks significant harm if things go badly? If a student playing the game wanted to make the ethically right decision, how much would he or she spend on maintenance?

Clearly, it would be unethical to spend no money on maintenance. The risks of a blowout or other problems that could harm employees or the environment would go much higher than they need be. Sooner or later—probably sooner—there would be an accident. But how much maintenance spending is enough? We cannot require managers to spend so much money on maintenance (or safety, or product quality, or service) that it is impossible to make a profit. And because the relationship between maintenance spending and blowing out is nonlinear, spending huge amounts of money on maintenance would in any case produce very little benefit compared to smaller amounts.

In the simulation, the baseline maintenance spending is $8.00 per barrel of oil produced. This is the amount recommended by the “manufacturer” of the oil rig and its equipment. Yet, even at this level, it is still possible for something to go wrong and a piece of equipment fail—even possible that the rig suffer a blowout. The chances are small at $8.00 per barrel, but still not zero.

Let’s consider the option of spending less than $8.00 per barrel on maintenance in the simulation, say $7.75. Would this be irresponsible? A look at the graph shows that the increased risk is going to be quite small, so why not? If two players in the simulation are virtually tied in terms of profitability, would it really be irresponsible for one of them to shave a few pennies off of maintenance in order to out-compete the rival? And then the question arises, would it be irresponsible of the first competitor to “up the stakes” by shaving yet another $0.25 off their own spending?

There is no easy way to decide on the ethically responsible level of maintenance spending for a business such as deepwater offshore oil drilling. The purpose of drawing a student’s attention to maintenance spending, equipment condition, blowout risk, and the (nonlinear) relationships between them is not to get them to learn how to make the “right decision.” Rather, the objective is to encourage students to reflect on their own decision-making behavior as the simulation unfolds and note how that behavior changes under the pressure of pursuing profits in competition with each other. The benefit of participating in the simulation is not that students will discover the right “formula” for how much care to take in making management decisions. The value of the simulation is that it presents students with an opportunity to experience how their own judgments and decisions about the right degree of care are affected by the desire for profit and the pursuit of competitive advantage. Only after managers become aware of such effects on their own behavior will they be in a position to weigh economic considerations appropriately by bringing ethical judgment to bear.

Advice for Teachers Using Simulations

The success of an ethically oriented simulation requires that students reflect on their own simulation decision making and behavior.²⁹ This is, perhaps, the greatest challenge facing an instructor. Four years of experience with Deepwater has provided some insights into how to encourage productive self-reflection.

It is often assumed that reflection should take place after an experiential exercise ends and that the purpose of reflection is to get students to attend to their own individual subjective experience and then guide them to a deeper understanding of the significance of that experience.³⁰ Our own experience with Deepwater suggests that instructors should broaden the scope of reflection in two ways.

First, instructors should consider not only focusing on a student’s subjective experience, but also on her actual behavior—that is, on the decisions she has made as a simulation player. A dual focus on subjective experience and actual behavior provides an opportunity for students to recognize any gaps that open up between what they think they did and what they actually did. When actual behavior becomes a subject for reflection, students have an opportunity to step back from a very natural absorption in their own individual decision-making and see those decisions in the context of the entire simulation. Moreover, by examining their own behavior in the context of the behavior of their classmates, students may see commonalities and differences that prompt them to reevaluate their own interpretations of why they made certain decisions.

Second, experience with Deepwater has shown that, especially for multi-round OM simulation games, there can be very real benefits to students from multiple reflection opportunities. We suggest that instructors initiate reflection even before the simulation begins, support an ongoing reflection process that parallels the simulation as it advances, and then, after the simulation has concluded, engage in the more traditional post-simulation reflection.

Consider first the need for a pre-experience reflection, which Kriz terms a “briefing” or “introduction.”³¹ A student’s a priori understanding of why she is participating in an experiential exercise, her understanding of what the experience is supposed to accomplish and of how the experience is supposed to accomplish that end profoundly inform, shape, and color the experiences to come. Students asked to participate in simulation games are fully aware that these simulations are artifices, and thus in many important senses “fake.”

Given that a simulation offers only a fake and not a real opportunity to manage a business, the success of a simulation depends on students approaching the simulation with the right attitudes, with appropriate expectations and with an understanding of the nature and limitations of the simulation. To benefit from a simulation, students need to “suspend their disbelief.” They must learn to approach the simulation “as if” it were the reality itself while at the same time acknowledging, accepting, and even embracing its falsity. Unless the instructor prepares the student with the appropriate mindset, the simulation experience will be weak and impoverished, providing little of substance to reflect on during the postexperience debriefing activity. An initial briefing by the instructor on the experience ahead can be helpful in establishing the understanding and attitudes necessary for students to get the maximum benefit from a simulation.³²

Moreover, as the experience unfolds the character and quality of a student’s simulation experience is significantly determined by the student’s own evolving mindset. A student can have a rich and useful learning experience only if the development of that mindset—of her attitudes, expectations, and understanding—is supported from the moment the simulation starts until it concludes.

For example, students who experience the simulation, as it proceeds, as in some way rigged to produce a specific outcome are unlikely to benefit from the simulation, and nothing said subsequently, in debriefing, could undo that experience. For students to have the “right” experiences—that is, the ones that the instructor intends for them to have—a certain trust in the instructor, a faith in the simulation itself, and a confidence in their own ability to play the simulation game well must be implanted and constantly nurtured. Students absorb a stream of new information during the course of the simulation, including round results and the moves of their competitors. This new information is subject to interpretation and rein-terpretation by students in an attempt to make sense of their experiences. Instructors need to be aware of these interpretations and be available to influence those interpretations in ways that support the simulation’s learning objectives. In particular, instructors need to intervene to instill and maintain student’s trust, faith, and confidence in the simulation, and their own experiences.

Instructors should engage in a culminating, end-of-experience debriefing process immediately after the conclusion of a simulation. This will give students an opportunity to integrate multiple perspectives and share experiences and insights with each other. This final debriefing represents the culmination of the entire reflective process that has accompanied the simulation throughout.

This three-step process—initial briefing, responsive reflection during the course of the simulation, and a final debriefing—can dramatically enhance the effectiveness of a simulation game and improve student learning.

Ongoing assessment of students’ experiences can be a valuable tool for supporting productive reflection. Assessment is often utilized in an attempt to measure learning outcomes, yet these outcomes are for many reasons the least tractable results of an experiential exercise.³³ Experience with Deepwater suggests that assessment can play a role not only in determining whether learning objectives have been met, but in better understanding of how they are being met and, if they are not being met, why. Assessments during the course of the simulation can help reveal the nature of students’ unfolding simulation experience. They might, for example, uncover perceptions that the simulation is somehow “rigged” or unfairly manipulated by the instructor. Addressing these perceptions as early in the simulation as possible will clear obstacles to a successful simulation experience. And finally, assessments after the simulation concludes can provide the raw material to spark an extended in-class debriefing discussion about the entire simulation experience.

Developing Versus Developed Country Perspectives

Manufacturing facilities in developing countries tend to have three characteristics that are especially relevant for instructors who wish to use safety to introduce ethical considerations into OM. First, there tends to be less government regulation of workplace practices and weaker enforcement of process standards and best practices.³⁴ As a result, workers are injured at a significantly greater rate than in developed countries.³⁵ Moreover, individual managers are, paradoxically, in both a stronger and weaker position to improve safety at their facilities. They are in a stronger position simply in the sense that government inspectors and auditors play a smaller role, especially on a day-to-day basis, and hence are not in a position to “usurp” management decisions to the same degree as in developed countries.³⁶ Operational managers are, at the same time, more limited simply because their companies are often suppliers to large, more economically powerful buyers. As a result, the pressures to meet short-term production goals are often greater than they would be in developed countries, and production shortfalls have greater potential to significantly impact the supplier’s relationship with buyers.

Second, operations managers in facilities operating in developing countries tend to have fewer resources available to them for capital improvements, routine maintenance, and quality control. As a result, implementation of new technologies to support increased safety tends to happen over a longer time frame; there is more of a practice of “making do” with existing parts and spares, refurbishing worn-out components rather than replacing them with brand new parts, and greater pressures to take shortcuts to resume production as quickly as possible.³⁷

Third, manufacturing facilities in the developing world tend to be sited closer to significant population concentrations.³⁸ This not only increases risks to the public, but also means that students are more likely to have had experiences with these facilities and their operating practices.

While all three of these realities increase the safety challenges of operating in developing countries, they also provide instructors and students with many real-world experiences that can be fruitfully imported into the classroom.

Summary and Conclusion

This chapter suggests that OM instructors can use occupational, process, and product safety issues to introduce ethics into their courses. Safety is especially appropriate for raising ethical issues in OM courses because it is an easily appreciated value and of great interest to employees, customers, and the general public. Moreover, safety is directly tied to many operating decisions, and many familiar business processes raise safety issues. And because of safety’s connection to risk, safety issues often arise naturally when presenting OM decision-making methods and models.

OM instructors should adopt modest expectations and employ an experiential approach for introducing ethics into their courses. Their aim should be to raise students’ awareness of the ethical aspects of operating decisions, not to give students the concepts and tools to actually weigh ethical considerations and make good ethical judgments. Moreover, instructors can do this by taking advantage of the experiential exercises that are already a part of many OM courses.

Simulations, in particular, are a very common component of OM syllabi. We describe a concrete example of an operationally oriented simulation and explain how instructors can utilize their own existing OM teaching simulations to raise ethical issues.

OM instructors have readily available to them opportunities and methods for introducing ethical issues into their courses. This can be done (a) without crowding out any existing OM material, (b) without compromising a focus on production outcomes, while (c) nonetheless avoiding a hasty and superficial approach that implicitly devalues ethics.

Suggested Exercises/Projects

 

¹ Gualandris et al. (2015); Linton, Klassen, and Jayaraman (2007); Seuring and Müller (2008).

² WCED (1987).

³ Kleindorfer, Singhal, and Wassenhove (2005, 482).

⁴ For example, Carter and Easton (2011); Winter and Knemeyer (2013); Huchzermeier, Kohl, and Spinler (2014); Laasch and Conaway (2014).

⁵ Huchzermeier, Kohl, and Spinler (2014); Fan et al. (2014, 335).

⁶ Cantor (2008, 66); Das et al. (2008); De Koster, Stam, and Balk (2011); Pagell et al. (2014, 1161).

⁷ References to safety and safe operations, for example, are rare in the indices of the most widely used introductory operations management texts.

⁸ Huchzermeier, Kohl, and Spinler (2014).

⁹ Stewart, Ledgerwood, and May (1996); Zwetsloot (2004); Cantor (2008); Montero, Araque, and Rey (2009); Hart (2010); Lorenzo, Esqueda, and Larson (2010); Hart (2013); Hajmohammad and Vachon (2014).

¹⁰ Reid and Sanders (2012, 3).

¹¹ Jiménez and Lorente (2001); Sustainability is not the only recent addition to strategic operational objectives—service, flexibility, and innovation have also been tossed in as “must achieve” priorities.

¹² Devinney (2009); Wu and Pagell (2011); Longoni and Cagliano (2015).

¹³ Hajmohammad and Vachon (2014).

¹⁴ Umphress and Bingham (2011).

¹⁵ Notice that this criterion for ethical relevance applies not only to OM decisions, but to any decision an organization makes, whether that decision be in finance, human resources, marketing, or any other function.

¹⁶ “Blue Bell C.E.O. apologizes for recall” (2015).

¹⁷ Pagell et al. (2014).

¹⁸ Macpherson (2008).

¹⁹ Buck (2014).

²⁰ Merriam-Webster (n.d.).

²¹ Hopkins (2009).

²² Mathews and Spector (2015).

²³ Key journals include: Safety Science, Journal of Safety Research, Journal of the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health, Journal of Safety Research, Accident Analysis and Prevention, Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, Reliability Engineering and System Safety, Process Safety and Environmental Protection Professional Safety.

²⁴ Lewis and Maylor (2007); Tan, Tse, and Chung (2010); Pasin and Giroux (2011).

²⁵ Jahangirian et al. (2010).

²⁶ Ezz, Loureiro-Koechlin, and Stergioulas (2012).

²⁷ Buck (2014).

²⁸ For example, production and inventory management simulations such as the Beer and Cups game are effective because students’ intuitions about how the system will behave in response to certain strategies are usually completely wrong.

²⁹ For example, Thatcher (1990); Crookall (2010); Hill and Lance (2002); Lederman (1992); Sims (2002).

³⁰ For example, Sims (2002, 186).

³¹ Kriz (2010, 667–668).

³² See, for example, Snow, Gehlen, and Green (2002).

³³ Mayer et al. (2011, 70).

³⁴ Chen, Zhang, and Delaurentis (2014).

³⁵ Hämäläinen, Saarel, and Takala (2009); Takala et al. (2014); Molla, Salgedo, and Lemu (2015).

³⁶ Lorenzo, Esqueda, and Larson (2010).

³⁷ Eti, Ogaji, and Probert (2005, 2006).

³⁸ Porto and Freitas (1996); Renjith and Madhu (2010); Porto and Freitas (2003).

³⁹ For example, Carnes (2014).

⁴⁰ Ammar and Wright (1999); Lewis and Maylor (2007).

References

Ammar, S., and R. Wright. 1999. “Experiential Learning Activities in Operations Management.” International Transactions in Operational Research 6, no. 2, pp. 183–97.

“Blue Bell C.E.O. Apologizes for Recall.” 2015. The New York Times, April 21.

Buck, W.F. 2014. “A Theory of Business Ethics Simulation Games.” Journal of Business Ethics Education 11, pp. 217–38.

Cantor, D.E. 2008. “Workplace Safety in the Supply Chain: A Review of the Literature and Call for Research.” The International Journal of Logistics Management 19, no. 1, pp. 65–83.

Carnes, M.C. 2014. Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Carter, C.R., and P.L. Easton. 2011. “Sustainable Supply Chain Management: Evolution and Future Directions.” International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management 41, no. 1, pp. 46–62.

Chen, C., J. Zhang, and T. Delaurentis. 2014. “Quality Control in Food Supply Chain Management: An Analytical Model and Case Study of the Adulterated Milk Incident in China.” International Journal of Production Economics 152, pp. 188–99.

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