In this class we hope to learn to understand our social world. In this assignment, you need to choose an organization to be the subject of your analysis. Your choice should be based on your interests, and should be an organization that you can interact with in a significant way.
In preparation for engaging with your chosen organization, you must do some background research. At minimum, you will need to visit the organization’s website and read at least two additional sources related to the organization or its activities. This could include, for example, popular media accounts of the organization’s activities or those of similar organizations. You should cite these sources in the bibliography for your assignment.
After completing your background research, you will need to engage with the organization in a way that gives you deeper insight into its mission, function, relation to other key stakeholders, and the motivations and aims of its members and leadership. This could be accomplished, for example, by volunteering several times for the organization, participating in a project or initiative, or attending multiple events sponsored by the organization. You are encouraged to make several visits to engage with the organization in multiple ways or meet with different members of the organization.
Based on your experiences, produce an analysis of the organization and its role operating within other, larger complex systems such as the city or state. Identify relevant stakeholders, networks, multiple causes and effects of the organization’s activities, and the dynamics of the system as a whole. The goal is for you to produce substantial insights into the ethical problems that the organization focuses on by applying your understanding of characteristics of complex systems, based upon meaningful engagement with people who are contributing to and impacted by the mission of the organization.
To accomplish this, your analysis should include the following:
A brief description of the organization you have chosen to analyze.
An explanation of the ethical problem the organization targets, and the significance of this problem in the city or broader community.
An analysis of the organization’s role within a relevant complex system, such as the city or state.
Your analysis of how the work of the organization addresses a problem of distributive justice, drawing on the learning outcomes and readings from this class.
After concluding your analysis, document your experience by adding 1-2 sentences to explain your engagement with the organization. This does not count towards the word limit for the assignment.
Be sure to draw attention to your most prominent applications of learning outcomes by adding footnotes. In the footnote text (at the bottom of the page), provide the hashtag of the learning outcome and a 1-2 sentence explanation of your application. Help the professor understand exactly why this constitutes a strong application. For a given learning outcome, create at most one footnote per page. Remember that learning outcomes should be concise (one or two complete sentences) and explain how you applied a particular habit or concept as specifically as possible without extending the analysis present in your main text. Footnotes do not count toward the word limit of the assignment, and all applications of the LO (not just those that are footnoted) may count toward your grade.
Also make sure to include a bibliography, formatted in APA style. Quotations (if any) or ideas and examples that are summarized or paraphrased from other authors must be appropriately cited. This includes quotations from any interviews you conduct. If you have any questions about this, please contact your instructor.
Note: Your analysis should focus on analyzing and understanding the ethical problem your organization focuses on, along with their efforts to address it, and does not need to include new solutions or new initiatives for the organization to pursue. You may choose to deepen your engagement with the organization through further work along these lines in your Spring LBA. You may not, however, base your Fall Semester Final Project on this LBA.
Learning outcomes to be graded include:
#purpose
#ethicalconsiderations
#ethicaljudgment
#systemanalysis
#emergentproperties
Assignment Information
Length:
600-800 words. Please include the word count (not including footnotes) at the end of your paper above the bibliography
Weight:
23%
Learning Outcomes Added
purpose: Identify and evaluate underlying goals and the values on which they are based, as well as the guiding principles that determine how an individual or group will try to attain these goals.
ethicalconsiderations: Identify ethical problems, framing them in a way that helps to resolve them.
ethicaljudgment: Resolve conflicts among competing ethical claims and act in a way that best satisfies relevant ethical considerations.
systemanalysis: Analyze and apply decompositions of systems into constituent parts at multiple levels of analysis.
emergentproperties: Identify emergent properties of complex systems and discern their causes.
