Business Ethics Empowerment

LECTURE REVIEW: SESSION 11

In my opinion, I believe that the idea of empowerment is based on the traditional Western theory of Utilitarianism. I believe it is so, as on the basis of utilitarianism, decisions are made based on the outcome or consequences, where the decisions are for made for the best of society as a whole, and not for the benefit of the individual himself. Empowerment is the ideology where decision- making and such is given to others and is shared, as opposed to that of delegation, which fits the traditional Western theory of authoritarianism.

In the case of an organization or company, if the business model incorporates the idea of empowerment, more or less, the power and decision-making will not be coming from the top management (i.e., top-down approach or traditional model), but dispersed and equally shared between the employees, where they have more of a say. This gives them a greater responsibility to cater for the needs and benefits of one another (everyone is equal, thus the benefit for one is also the benefit for another), where the consequences are of dire importance and mechanism for the decision making, thus once again, it fits under the utilitarian model.

The second part of the lecture was regarding network organizations. In short, they are associations or ‘networks’ of people, where collectively they share the same or similar ideals and work together for a common goal or cause. There are mainly three types of alternate organizations: network, democratic or co-operatives, and social entrepreneurships organizations. Network organizations are broken down into many teams or organizations, and the decision-making and power is decentralized within each sector of the network. Each individual team can manage them, where again, the members share the work.

However, there are some slight problems and challenges with regards to managing democratic organizations.

A democratic organization (or cooperative), are jointly owned and...