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Documentarian Morgan Spurlock's film 'Supersize Me' exemplifies, by documenting his 30-day journey of eating only fast food at a popular chain, the case study method in a modern medium. What are some examples, fact or fiction, of case studies in popular film, television, or books?

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Joshua Stredder
Joshua StredderLv10
28 Sep 2019

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AN ETHICAL DILEMMA*

Steven, a junior at Northeast State, just started working part-time at a local fast food restaurant chain. Although not his dream job, it paid for tuition and books, and the restaurant gave him the flexible schedule he needed for school. After a few months, Steven found he got along well with all of his coworkers, but it was apparent they did not respect the company or the management. The employees made fun of their bosses and treated the work area like a playground. In some respects, Steven thought it was a fun environment to work in, especially after hours when management was gone for the day. They played their music loudly, laughed, and talked with one another during the down times instead of cleaning up their work areas like they were supposed to. Despite the fact there were ethical policies telling employees how they were expected to act in the workplace, these policies never seemed to be enforced. One day, while working with his coworker Julie on the food assembly table, Steven saw Julie accidentally drop a meat patty on the floor. Without so much as a flinch, she bent down, picked up the patty, stuck it back on the bun, and wrapped it up. It happened so fast that Steven wasn’t even sure he had seen right—especially since Julie had done it so casually. Steven watched in dismay as another worker took the hamburger out to the customer. Over the next few weeks, Steven saw others, including the shift supervisor, do the same thing with burgers and other products. Once, an entire cheeseburger hit the greasy floor, was picked up, and was taken to the customer. This time the customer complained the burger tasted funny and sent it back. Steven noticed other unsanitary practices such as employees not washing their hands between handling meat and vegetables and not washing utensils between uses. Obviously, such practices were against company policies and, if reported, the supervisors in charge could get in trouble and the restaurant would face investigations from the health department. However, there was ample opportunity for things like this to occur. There was no one watching them, and the shift supervisor also engaged in these activities. Steven felt it was the company’s responsibility to hire good people, so they were to blame if these things happened. One day, Steven approached Julie and asked, “Why do so many people here serve food that has fallen on the floor to customers?” Julie thought about it briefly as though she had never considered it before and replied, “I guess it’s because it would take too much time to get another beef patty out of the freezer, cook it, and serve it to the customer. This is a fast food restaurant, after all, and I’m not interested in hearing customers complain about the time it takes for them to get their food. Besides, the restaurants with the fastest service get a bonus from corporate headquarters. Last year the supervisors rewarded us with some extra money for doing our jobs so quickly.” Steven was somewhat taken aback by the honest reply and asked, “Wouldn’t you be disgusted if you were served dirty food at a restaurant?” This time Julie’s response was quick. She said, “What I don’t know won’t hurt me.” She walked off. Several weeks went by and the same practices continued. Steven became more and more concerned about the consequences that could happen in an environment so laid back and unconcerned about safety and health. It seemed like the more time that passed, the worse everyone’s attitude became. One day, at the beginning of his shift, Steven noticed the walk-in freezer had been left open. As he went to shut the door, he discovered a smell of rotten meat. It almost made him vomit. “How could this happen?” he wondered. He threw away the rotten meat without asking anyone because he was afraid of what the answer might be. After Steven threw out the spoiled meat, he began to wonder how the culture of the restaurant got to the point of supporting such practices. He realized the seemingly minor unsanitary practices allowed major issues to arise that could possibly hurt someone. Steven felt he should say or do something, but to whom? He sat down and pondered what he should do.

QUESTIONS | EXERCISES

1. Describe the nature of the organizational culture in the restaurant. What kind of opportunities are there for unethical behavior to occur? Are there any opportunities for ethical behavior?

2. What are some of the incentives employees might have to engage in this type of behavior?

3. If the organizational culture of the restaurant does not change, what are some likely outcomes and consequences?

WRITE a one-sentence summary of each paragraph!

The False Income-Inequality Narrative

BY JASON L. RILEY

Published in the Wall Street Journal on Sept. 29, 2015

An enduring theme of the Democratic presidential race has been income inequality, coupled with an enduring belief that America's affluent reached their status at the expense of the poor and the middle class.

Bernie Sanders speaks of little else on the stump. And when not busy dissembling on her handling of email correspondence at the State Department, Hillary Clinton will tell you that the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top. If Joe Biden gets in, expect more of the same. The vice president is said to be contemplating a 2016 bid in large part because struggling middle-income families may have trouble relating to Mrs. Clinton on inequality given her high living since leaving the White House.

This theme, in any case, seems to resonate with voters, which is no huge shock in the sixth year of an economic recovery. Envy and resentment fuel class warfare and lackluster economic growth throughout the Obama presidency have made people less optimistic and more inclined to fault others for their circumstances. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll this week reports that four-in-five Americans “were either angry because our political system seems to only be working for the insiders with money and power or anxious and uncertain. After all, the economy still feels rocky and unpredictable or both.

Liberals want to address income disparities through wealth redistribution by taking money from more productive people and giving it to the less productive in the name of fairness as the left defines it. They want to raise income taxes, expand the welfare state, lift minimum wages, and strengthen the bargaining power of unions. Mr. Sanders has been the most explicit about this, even going so far as to propose a wealth tax. Our economic goals have to be redistributing a significant amount of [wealth] back from the top 1%, the senator said in July.

In reality, the left has overstated the problem. And all the focus on divvying up existing wealth instead of creating more risks making matters far worse for the people they are trying to help and the country in general. To the extent that the expanding welfare state allows more people to live without working and therefore without earning income or developing their own human capital—supporters of the welfare state are contributing to the very income disparities they so much decry, writes economist Thomas Sowell in his new book, “Wealth, Poverty and Politics.

Mr. Sowell is the author of more than 30 books over the past four decades, many having to do with what drives different social and economic outcomes among different groups in the U.S. and elsewhere. In his latest tome, he draws from this well of research to do what he has done so well for so long: question basic assumptions behind public policy and follow the facts where they lead him.

One common assumption is that proportionate or random outcomes are the natural order of things and that gaps or disparities are evidence of something wrong. In fact, huge disparities are the norm, not the exception, because the demographic, cultural, and political factors that influence the development of the human capital that makes people productive also tend to be unequal.

In 2013, only 9% of U.S. women with college degrees who gave birth were unmarried, versus 61% of women who were high-school dropouts and unmarried. Harvard's Robert Putnam reports that children from professional families will hear 19 million more words than their working-class peers before the first day of kindergarten.

These children don't have the same prospects. Equal opportunity, in the sense of being judged and rewarded by the same standards as others, cannot possibly mean equal life chances for children born and raised in these very different settings,writes Mr. Sowell. The fact that life is unfair is not the same as saying that a particular institution, or a particular society, is unfair.

The argument that social mobility is a thing of the past in the U.S. also is disputable. Longitudinal studies by the IRS and others that measure the progress of individuals over time show that the American dream is alive and well. One such paper, published by the Pew Charitable Trusts in 2012, measured whether a person has more or less income, earnings, or wealth than his or her parents did at the same age and concluded that the vast majority of Americans had higher incomes, while 50% had greater wealth.

In other studies, Pew has found generational stagnation but the authors have noted that it didn't apply to immigrants. If low-income immigrants can rise even when the native-born don't, writes Mr. Sowell, that strongly suggests that American society continues to offer opportunities to move up economically, but that not all groups make the same use of these opportunities.

Mr. Riley, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and Journal contributor is the author of Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed (Encounter Books, 2014).

Few fields of empirical economic research offer virtual unanimity of findings. Yet, independent work on the economic impact of stadiums and arenas has uniformly found that there is no statistically significant positive correlation between sports facility construction and economic development (Baade and Dye, 1990; Baim, 1992; Rosentraub, 1994; Baade, 1996; Noll and Zimbalist, 1997; Waldon, 1997; Coates and Humphreys, 1999). These results stand in distinct contrast to the promotional studies that are typically done by consulting firms under the hire of teams or local chambers of commerce supporting facility development. Typically, such promotional studies project future impact and almost inevitably adopt unrealistic assumptions regarding local value-added, new spending, and associated multipliers. They often use a regional input-output model that depends on outdated technical coefficients which are treated as invariant to shifts in supply and demand (Center for Economic and Management Research, 1991; Deloitte & Touche, 1994, 1996; KPMG, 1996; Economic Research Associates, 1996; KPMG, 1998; C.H. Johnson Consulting, 1999). The academic work on the economic impact of sports facilities and teams does not rely upon projection. Rather, it compares the local economic performance of areas with and without stadiums, arenas, and teams, controlling for other variables that affect local economic conditions. Among cross-section studies, for example, Baade (1994) found no significant difference in personal income growth from 1958 to 1987 between 36 metropolitan areas that hosted a team in one of the four premier professional sports leagues and 12 otherwise comparable areas that did not. Looking at 46 cities over the 1990-94 periods, Waldon (1997) found that higher high school graduation rates and more spending on police are what encouraged economic growth, while the presence of a major league sports team actually put a drag on the local economy. Both Baade and Waldon controlled for other factors affecting underlying trends in economic growth. Time-series studies confirm the cross-section results. Baade and Sanderson (1997), for example, found no perceptible net increase in economic activity or employment in 10 cities that acquired new sports teams between 1958 and 1993 after factoring out other economic trends affecting each area. They did observe a reordering of leisure expenditures within the cities that acquired new teams, but there was no evidence that the new sports teams brought output or employment growth to the local area. A more recent study, by Coates and Humphreys (1999), finds that new stadiums and sports teams actually reduce per capita income in the host communities. This result is consistent with a higher (negative) multiplier for the displaced leisure expenditures than for the expenditures on a new team or in a new stadium because the latter likely involve substantial leakages from the local economy to the remote residential locations of some players and team owners. The conclusion that sports teams and facilities do not stimulate economic growth is surprising to many people. With live telecasting of games, daily coverage on television news and in the sports sections of newspapers, professional sports play a huge role in U.S. culture. Yet sports teams are small businesses. Yearly average team revenues in 1999 are around $55 million in the NHL, $75 million in the NBA, $85 million in MLB and $100 million in the NFL. For a medium-sized city like St. Louis, the baseball team accounts for less than 0.3 percent of local economic activity; for a large city like New York, a baseball team contributes less than 0.03 percent of economic output. Sports teams typically employ between 70 and 130 people in their front offices. Beyond this, they hire approximately 1000-1500 day-of-game personnel who work in unskilled, low wage, temporary, part-time jobs. An NFL team is assured of playing 10 home games a year (including preseason games). At four hours of work per game, an NFL team provides day-of-game employment for the equivalent of 20 to 30 full-time, year-round jobs. As we shall see, however, it is problematic to attribute even these jobs to the sports team. Of course, the controversy about the economic impact of professional sports teams on their local economy is not just about the teams themselves, but also about how specific local restaurants, hotels, and other businesses might be affected. However, even if one assumes, optimistically, that on average people spend as much outside the sports facility as they do inside, the economic impact of sports teams in proportion to a typical metropolitan economy is diminutive. Apart from their relatively small size, there are three key reasons why professional sports teams do not promote economic development: the substitution effect; extensive leakages; and the likely negative effect on local government budgets. The analysis of these three effects that follows describes the situation when a team or a facility is new to an area. Of course, in many cases, the choice is whether or not to build a facility for a team that is already there. In such a case the incremental consumer surplus, external benefits or new spending will be considerably less. From the city's perspective, however, the opportunity cost of not building a facility with public funds may be perceived to be the loss of the team and all of its attendant benefits.

-------------------------------------------------Question

1. . The authors discuss the role of leakages in determining the impact of sports teams on the local economy. What are they talking about? Be specific so as to convince me that you read the article carefully

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