Blog Due 4/9

PARTNER: JACK WITT

Chapter 10 Summary

Chapter 10 focuses on the composition of an effective evaluation and all the aspects around it. Our major is business sustainability, and as listed above, has many different perspectives that make it up. Therefore, after reading the chapter on evaluation, I cannot come to a conclusion of the evaluative process in sustainability. There is no set process of elimination for any argument other than you can conclude that what you've already tried will not work. Depending on the situation or topic, it differs from problem to problem. Business sustainability will have a completely different view than environmental sustainability. However, this chapter provides valuable information on how evaluations play an important role in our current writing project as a whole.

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Book: Business Ethics; Second Edition

Authors: Andrew Crane, Dirk Matten 

Oxford University Press Inc, New York, 2007.

The reason I have chosen to use this ebook rather than an article more relative to our genre is because the author's of this book provide evidence backing what we have already concluded from an interview. In the first chapter of this book they break up sustainability into three main categories; Economic, social, and environmental. Each of these provide a wide spectrum to cover when engaging a problem related to sustainability. The author's, after breaking it up into three parts, introduce a new working definition of sustainability. "Sustainability refers to the long-term maintenance of systems according to environmental, economic, and social considerations". The chapter continues by explaining each of the three factors more in depth. It explains how each perspective was developed and how it is used. After each section of writing the author's have added in a question, a question pertaining to the perspective that was just noted, explaining a problem that you are to solve. Each problem is accompanied by a solution for those who dont want to challenge themselves. Although whether or not my partner and I could answer any of these questions they have introduced us to some of the questions sustainability majors are answering at their own jobs. Mere exposure to these types of questions has given us a better understanding on the process described in one interview. Unfortunately the major of sustainability has conflicting systems. Many different perspectives needed to be taken in order to come up with a hypothesis. The job of the sustainability major will be different each time they start a new project, and there are relatively infinite solutions to each problem. It is their job to figure out which solution will suit then situation best. 



Article: "Sustainability: An Ethical Approach Towards Business Project Success"
Author: G.S. Dangayach
World Academy of Science, Engineering, and Technology, 2007

Claim: Project managers are oblivious to the impacts their projects have on the environment
Data: Scientific research has recorded industrialism throughout the years and supports
Warrant: Inconsiderate project managers should face a consequence
Backing: The current state of the environment reflects the outcome of project managers not taking the earth into consideration when carrying out their projects
Reservation: Some projects may not turn out to be as sustainable as thought or intended to be because it is simply not possible.
Qualifier: As often as possible, project managers should seek the most sustainable route when executing their plans.

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In-Class Work 4/3

Article: "Business Sustainabililty and Undergraduate Management Education; an Australian Study"
Author: Josie Fisher and Ingrid Bonn
 Claim: Businesses need to become more sustainableData: scholars have concluded this in their researchWarrant: the scholars' research shows that business sustainability is an important issue businesses are currently facingBacking: research and scholars support this claimReservation: Takes time; costly to become more sustainable and perhaps certain businesses would not benefit anymoreQualifier: Based on the current environmental conditions, it is essedntial that businesses take/seek a more sustainable way to manage their businesses PARTNER: Jack Witt

Blog Due 4/2

After reading Michael Carter's "Ways of Knowing, Doing, and Writing" and thoroughly analyzing the four meta-genres, I have concluded that the "Responses to Academic Situations That Call for Research from Sources." Currently, my major is Business Sustainability. As I read through the meta-genres, I found that my discipline focuses more on finding innovative and sustainable solutions to issues affecting our planet and and environment. In order to do this successfully, one must do research and use primary and secondary resources when proposing solutions. From what I have learned so far about my discipline and what I have been told from my academic adviser, research plays a huge role in my major. As a business sustainability major, you must keep up with the latest technological advancements, the current environmental risks, all while applying multiple business components. This can only be done through research and becoming informed, which is why it is essential that a person in my major is competent in conducting research and applying its outcomes in projects, arguments, problems, etc. Like Carter mentioned in his article, it is crucial that a person in my discipline views literature and research from multiple perspectives. While my major has to do with reducing the stress on the global environment, and improving our quality of life in general, there is also the business side of it that needs to be kept in mind at all times. I believe this makes my discipline a little more difficult when compared to just Sustainability or Business, for both fields of study must be taken into account. One cannot just see the business or the sustainable side of an issue; there must be equality and middle ground between the two. Carter's article provided me with the opportunity to really analyze my discipline in depth and emphasized the importance of research within the major of Business Sustainability.

Works Cited

 Carter, Michael. "Ways of Knowing, Doing, and Writing in the Disciplines." N.p., n.d. 

             Web. 2 Apr. 2013.

In-Class Assignment 3/27

Businesses around the world are looking for more sensible business decisions for both the short and the Long term. With vast new improvements in technology businesses are at the forefront of developing new techniques, and attempting to prolong the use of these techniques. Sustainability combines many different disciplines and combines there viewpoints. Therefore instead of focusing solely on sustainability as a whole, we will need to break up the disciplines that comprise sustainability. Sustainability can be broken up globally and specifically for business aspects. For business, sustainability majors would be in charge of finding a way to cut costs, or developing new policies used to improve work efforts. On the other hand a sustainability major looking at the global scale could be asking questions on how to sustain our environment. The types of questions asked from this discipline really will vary due to the type of field each person is specific in. With that being said each sustainability major will have different filters to their questions. What those filters might be we do not know yet. Although this might not be a bad thing. All of the different disciplines that comprise sustainability will add to the amount of questions that can be asked. This brings us back to our main point that sustainability is a very diverse department. As we look closer at the questions we have to ask, we may run into an abyss. An abyss of questions that never end. As my partner and I discuss the implications of becoming a sustainability major we have came across that we both excelled in all aspects of school, not just one study. So now we can look at what we don't know. We don't know how a sustainability major would go about approaching a problem, as well as how they would solve it. Addressing this in our interview would be the first step to understanding. It would seem to be beneficial to be able to pick the brains of people in different industries with a similar sustainability background. Knowing how someone approaches a problem would ultimately help us understand our major much more, as well as helping us figure out how to ask questions in this specific discipline. To the best of my knowledge each situation will be different in sustainability. This is the main question we will need answered to move ahead; Does each specific project need to be approached in a different way? Or does each problem have a universal approach by the sustainability discipline. Are hypothesis needed in sustainability? Businesses hire sustainability majors to save them money, while the government hires them to help keep the earth clean and green. Sustainability majors have limitless possibilities with what their job details might entail.

Interview Questions

1. What is the main goal of studying sustainability? What are the experts in Business Sustainability trying to accomplish? Do you believe they are trying to accomplish a common goal, or do they have different ideals?
2.  What are the main ideas, principles, and theories that guide thinking within Business Sustainability? Is there a specific mindset that a person needs to have when entering the field?
3. What, if anything, is taken for granted in this discipline?
4. What kind of information and proof is used to settle controversial disputes within the discipline?
5. Is there somewhat of a cutoff line where a project or belief is "not sustainable enough?"
6. How important do you think your fieldwork is for society?
7. What are current debates in your field?
8. What sources do you view as credible when learning new management tactics?
9. If the field of Business Sustainability were to devote all of its time, energy and resources to one thing in your field what would it be?
10. What assumptions do people who study your discipline hold?

Blog Due 3/26

     After reading Henry David Thoreau's "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For", "Our Picture of the Universe" by Stephen Hawking, and Ruth Benedict's "The Individual and the Pattern of Culture", I discovered that they address several questions in the "Essential Questions" handout. While all three readings have an abstract connection, each reading answers different questions from the handout that are more specific to the topic and its purpose. First, in "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For" by Thoreau, he begins his piece of writing by describing a peaceful scene where he describes what Walden Pond looks like where he worked cutting down pines that were to be used as timber to build himself a home. In his writing, Thoreau describes many modern commodities as unnecessary and redundant in a sense. He insists that we do not really need things like newspapers and post offices. While he has a valid argument, I disagree with him. Simple things like that make day-to-day tasks much more simpler and improve our quality of life in general. Yes, they make life a little more complicated, so I would agree with him on that. In "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For", Thoreau emphasizes the simplicity and beauty of humanity and nature and how we need to appreciate it much more than we do. Sometimes we take for granted the little things, but we should not, because we may never get them back.
     The second piece of writing, "Our Picture of the Universe" by Stephen Hawking, unlike Thoreau, focuses more on ideologies and beliefs.  In his writing, Stephen Hawking focuses on explaining why society should focus on sharing one simple ideology. He goes into physics and talks about Newton but makes it a point that it is flawed and it does not accurately represent the theory of the entirety of humanity as a whole. I feel like Thoreau and Hawking kind of had the same argument, but Thoreau took a more simplistic route and Hawking took it up a notch and went in depth, taking a more scientific approach.
     Finally, the third reading, "The Individual and the Pattern of Culture" written by Ruth Benedict, takes yet another different route to state her argument. In "The Individual and the Pattern of Culture", Benedict correlates and establishes a connection between society and the infamous "social structure". Benedict describes every social status and explains how they all come together to form a whole. I agree with Benedict's argument that the culture that we are born into shapes us, but there may always be exceptions. Her argument may not apply to everyone out there, so I believe she should have included a sort of gray area for those that do not necessarily conform to society.

Blog Due 3/19

Both Duke University´s Thompson Writing Program ¨Short Guides to Writing for Specific Disciplines¨ and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill´s ¨The Writing Center¨ boast many valuable resources available to students during the writing process. However, Duke University´s writing guide is geared more towards a specific subject or discipline. For example, if you are writing a history paper and need help, Duke University´s website would provide the best guidance. On the other hand, The University of Carolina at Chapel Hill´s guide is a bit more general, focusing on the entirety of an essay. This writing guide has two columns titled "Writing the Paper" and "Citation, Style, and Sentence Level Concerns" which have essential material that one should look over when writing a paper in college. The Writing Center, created by University of North Carolina, has a third and fourth column titled "Specific Writing Assignments/Contexts" and "Writing for Specific Fields" respectively. The third column provides help when writing a business letter, a resume, a report, etc. I found this very helpful, because even though we might have been taught the formats and how to write these types of writing some time along high school, we definitely need to how to write these specific forms of documents if we want to be taken seriously by our professors and potential employers. The fourth column is similar to Duke University's Thompson Writing Program. It bestows multiple handouts on different subjects, such as philosophy, drama, and history. I also found this very helpful because it explicitly tells you how to build a dissertation and argue it in order to persuade the audience in the writer's favor. Because the Duke University Thompson Writing program is tailored to a specific audience looking for help in a definitive topic, I believe that it provides crucial guidance to a person writing about a topic within the Arts or Sciences department. Once you click on a certain topic, such as Communications or Drama, you are directed to a type of handout that has a great amount of information, all the way from helping the student understand their assignment to helping them select a topic. While these guides intend to help those writing about a distinct discipline, any student can skim through all the guides and retrieve valuable information that may help him or her write their paper. After exploring through both Duke University's Thompson Writing Program and The University of Carolina at Chapel Hill's Writing Center and the writing guides they have to offer, I will definitely keep them on hand the next time I have to write an essay for any of my classes. Both websites provide quality information that will help any college student having a rough time writing a college paper. Even if a student feels confident about his or her writing, I would still suggest consulting these two handy websites on their next assignment. Even though both websites grant some of the same information and some that is distinct from one another, I admit that both sites possess worthy counsel that will do nothing but improve one's writing abilities. 

Part 3

Dear Mr. Estrada,

I am currently a freshman here at Arizona State University, and I have a concern that I would like to address, for which I believe you, along with Residential Hall Association, posses an effective solution. 

Depression among college freshman is a major issue that needs to be brought out of the shadows and made known among the Arizona State University community. The transition between high school and college and from the comfort of home to living with a stranger in a dorm is not always a smooth one. Depression can be caused by many factors. Homesickness, in my opinion, is one of the major causes. Residing in a dorm and interacting with unfamiliar faces all the time can bring about a feeling of absence and loss of identity. Another main cause for despondency amid first year students is balancing one’s social life with school. By this I mean trying to meet new people and establishing social connections while maintaining a solid performance in school. The pressure in doing both can get the best of us sometimes, whether we like it or not. In addition, another cause for depression among first year college students is culture shock. The college environment is unlike any other; and, if you come from a small town or another country you will be in for a big surprise. I definitely noticed it, and I am sure many other freshmen also did. Depression has many causes and greatly affects undergraduate students.

I have experienced a little bit of unhappiness myself during my time here, and I firmly believe that if my Community Assistant and Peer Mentor were trained to address matters like these I would be comfortable going to them for advice and consolation. For many, it is much easier to open up to people who are around their same age, which is why I believe not very many college students seek assistance from the counseling department at Health Services. Because Community Assistants and Peer Mentors literally live a few feet away from us it would be so much more convenient and accessible for us dorm residents to go to them whenever we see necessary if they had the proper training and certification.

Because Residential Hall Association is involved in managing university housing and improving the overall housing experience, they would serve as my ideal audience for my proposal. RHA is deeply involved with student life at the dormitories so they would understand how big of an impact this would have on first year students here at Arizona State University. Their purpose is to improve the overall experience for college freshman and adding this service would only have even more of a positive impact on dorm residents. In the past there have been suicides here on campus and it is simply unacceptable that suicide after suicide there are not further precautions and concerns being taken into account. I cannot imagine being a parent of an ASU student receiving a phone call saying my child has caused self-inflicted injuries because of depression. What would that say about Arizona State University as an educational institution? I love my school and I am happy to be attending here, and I would like to see everyone else around me also cheerful and optimistic. After all, college is a major stepping stone in life and if ASU can do something as simple as providing guidance to Community Assistants as to how to deal with their resident’s depression there is no reason why they should not take action. 

I would like to thank you for your time, and take my proposal into consideration. Residential Hall Association has the power to do this and more, and I strongly believe this would add a great amount of depth to RHA and would receive a lot of support.

Sincerely,

Regina Soto