MGF5020 Business ethics in a global environment

The Complete Study & Assessment Guide · S2 2026

Business ethics in a global environment

MGF5020 studies how business decisions can be justified in a global environment where legal boundaries, economic benefits and human or ecological burdens often occur in different places. The unit materials available here begin with globalisation, the 2008 financial crisis, the social and ethical economy, morality, law and business ethics as practice. Week 2 then connects the Sustainable Development Goals to capability, corporate citizenship, PRME, the UN Global Compact, civil-society partnership, shared value and critical questions about sustainability. The unit schedule extends that arc through ethical theory, recognition and representation, corporate sustainability, organisational power, inequality, modern slavery, precariat work, climate justice, democratic governance and reassessment of the field.

The guide uses a consistent analytical chain: identify the decision and affected relationship; establish evidence and uncertainty; select an ethical lens that explains the mechanism; compare benefits, duties, capabilities, status and voice; reach a bounded judgement; and translate it into a recommendation with actor, action, implementation, indicator and remedy. Chapters 2–5 are closely grounded in the open Week 1 and Week 2 materials. Weeks 3–12 are not present in the available Moodle snapshot, so Chapters 6–10 are explicitly labelled standard disciplinary canon. They explain conventional accounts of utilitarian, Kantian, integrity, capability, Fraserian, critical-sustainability, labour and climate-justice reasoning without claiming to reconstruct missing classes.

Assessment is entirely within semester and uses four tasks worth 100% in total. AT1 is a 20% group Ethical Business Practices Investigation presentation. Its official timing appears in three forms—Week 3–10 except Week 6, Week 3–11 except Week 6, and Week 3–10/11 except Week 6—so students must confirm their allocated slot. The task page decomposes the unit value into Presentation Details 15% plus a literature/resources list 5%; the rubric separately weights six criteria 20/10/20/10/20/20 within AT1. These are different denominators and must never be added. The peer-rating sheet asks every member to score themselves and all peers from 0 to 10 across eight behaviours and may be used to moderate grades.

AT2 is a 2,000-word individual reflective essay worth 30%. It requires at least two covered ethical theories or perspectives, at least 10 peer-reviewed academic sources and APA. The detailed brief names self, cultural, political and ecological reflexivity, while a later evaluation summary says self, cultural, social and political; this guide preserves that wording difference and recommends checking Moodle. AT3 is a 2,500-word individual research report worth 40%. Its exact official section budget is 100 words for the abstract, 250 for the introduction, 600 for literature and challenges, 200 for method, 800 for findings and 550 for discussion and conclusion, including 200 words of policy recommendations. Its rubric requires a minimum 12 scholarly sources and says Harvard style, conflicting with the unit-level APA instruction. AT4 is worth 10% and requires two weekly posts across Weeks 1–10: a strictly 30–40-word case-reading post and a tutorial-learning reflection, described as 20 words on the task page.

The current S2 submission links visible here show 4 September 2026 at 11:55 pm for AT2 and 23 October 2026 at 11:55 pm for AT3, consistent with the unit summary. Separate pages still contain stale April and May strings; these are not treated as S2 deadlines. The unit-level hurdle section merely says to see the Handbook, so a unit-level hurdle is not stated in the materials available here and must be confirmed in the Monash Handbook. The AT3 task page separately says hurdle requirements are not applicable to that assessment. The Week 1 table applies the same condition to all four tasks: generative AI cannot be used to generate materials or content in relation to the assessment. The worked examples in this guide are original learning material, never official answers and never text to submit.