Catalog

Acting Responsibly: Ethical Decision-Making in Business is a comprehensive, interactive open educational resource designed to help learners develop ethical awareness, apply ethical decision-making, and make responsible decisions in complex business environments.

The resource is structured in two main sections. The first introduces five core ethical theories: utilitarianism, ethics of caring, justice, virtue ethics, and universal rules, each offering a different lens for evaluating right and wrong. The second section presents a clear, four-stage ethical decision-making process that guides learners from identifying a business decision to reflecting on outcomes and long-term impacts.

Throughout, learners are encouraged to think critically, consider multiple stakeholder perspectives, and recognize ethical tensions between competing values. Real-world scenarios, H5P activities, and glossary terms create an engaging and practical learning experience. Developed by faculty for use in undergraduate business courses, this OER supports values-driven leadership, responsible management education, and the broader goal of ethical business practice in today’s interconnected world.

Note: In preparing this course book, AI tools like ChatGPT were utilized to generate some of the content and assist with sourcing interactive questions using H5P. These tools supported the creation of foundational explanations, key concepts, and interactive learning activities, enriching the learning experience. While the content was AI-assisted, all material has been carefully reviewed and edited by the authors to ensure accuracy, relevance, and pedagogical value.

This resource book is being updated and added to.
Suggestions?
Send your suggestions for content that you would like included.

The goal of this textbook is not to make you an expert. True expertise in any field is a years-long endeavor. Here I will survey some of the basic topics of chemistry. This survey should give you enough knowledge to appreciate the impact of chemistry in everyday life and, if necessary, prepare you for additional instruction in chemistry. Throughout each chapter, I present two features that reinforce the theme of the textbook—that chemistry is all around you. The first is a feature titled, appropriately, “Chemistry Is Everywhere.” Chemistry Is Everywhere” focuses on the personal hygiene products that you may use every morning: toothpaste, soap, and shampoo, among others. These products are chemicals, aren’t they? Ever wonder about the chemical reactions that they undergo to give you clean and healthy teeth or shiny hair? I will explore some of these chemical reactions in future chapters. But this feature makes it clear that chemistry is, indeed, everywhere. The other feature focuses on chemistry that you likely indulge in every day: eating and drinking. In the “Food and Drink App,” I discuss how the chemistry of the chapter applies to things that you eat and drink every day. Carbonated beverages depend on the behavior of gases, foods contain acids and bases, and we actually eat certain rocks. (Can you guess which rocks without looking ahead?) Cooking, eating, drinking, and metabolism—we are involved with all these chemical processes all the time. These two features allow us to see the things we interact with every day in a new light—as chemistry.

This book is designed to help students organize their thinking about psychology at a conceptual level. The focus on behaviour and empiricism has produced a text that is better organized, has fewer chapters, and is somewhat shorter than many of the leading books. The beginning of each section includes learning objectives; throughout the body of each section are key terms in bold followed by their definitions in italics; key takeaways, and exercises and critical thinking activities end each section.

To facilitate learning outcomes, three techniques have been used:

1. Chapter openers.The focus on behaviour begins each chapter with an opener showcasing an interesting real-world example of people who are dealing with behavioural questions and who can use psychology to help them answer those questions. The opener is designed to draw the student into the chapter and create an interest in learning about the topic.
2. Psychology in everyday life.Each chapter contains one or two features designed to link the principles from the chapter to real-world applications in business, environment, health, law, learning, and other relevant domains. For instance, the application in Chapter 7 “Growing and Developing” — “What Makes a Good Parent?” — applies the concepts of parenting styles in a mini handbook about parenting, and the application in Chapter 4, “Brains, Bodies, and Behaviour,” is about the difficulties that left-handed people face performing everyday tasks in a right-handed world.
3. Research focus.Empiricism is also emphasized throughout, but without making it a distraction from the main story line. Each chapter presents one or more close-ups on research — well-articulated and specific examples of research within the content area, each including a summary of the hypotheses, methods, results, and interpretations. This feature provides a continuous thread that reminds students of the importance of empirical research. The research foci also emphasize the fact that findings are not always predictable ahead of time (dispelling the myth of hindsight bias) and help students understand how research really works.

In short, the authors  have attempted to bring psychology to life in ways that really matter to students while, at the same time, maintaining content and conceptual rigor, with a strong focus on the fundamental principles of empiricism and the scientific method.