The Hughes Aircraft Case involves a group of employees in charge of testing chips for weapons systems. Because of the lengthy testing procedure required by the U.S. Defense Department, Hughes soon fell behind schedule in delivering chips to customers. To get chips out faster, some Hughes middle level managers began to put pressure on employees to pass chips that had failed tests or to pass them without testing. The scenarios below consist of narratives that stop at the point of decision. Your job is to complete the narrative by making a decision. Alternatives are provided to get the process started, but you may find it necessary to design your own solution. Ethics and feasibility tests help you to evaluate these alternatives and even design new ones more to your liking. This format superficially resembles the Gray Matters exercise used at Boeing Corporation. (More information on the history of Gray Matters can be found by consulting Carolyn Whitbeck, Ethics in Engineering Practice, 1998, 176-182.) This version differs in being more open-ended and more oriented toward giving you the opportunity to practice using ethical theory (which has been encapsulated into ethics tests).
- Read the following scenarios and the accompanying solutions
- Evaluate the alternatives in terms of the tests described below.
- Choose the one you think best or design your own solution if you believe you can do better.
- Summarize your results by filling in the solution evaluation matrix that appears on the page following the scenario. Notice that the first column repeats the solution alternatives.
- Be prepared to present your matrix to the class. You will also provide the other groups in the class with a copy of your matrix for their ethics portfolios
The six scenarios below were developed by Chuck Huff as Participant Perspectives. They were first published online through the Computing Cases website. (Computing Cases was developed through two National Science Foundation grants, DUE-9972280 and DUE-9980768.) A revised version of these participant perspectives has been published in the anthology, Whistleblowing: Perspectives and Experiences, edited by Reena Raj and published in 2008 by the Icfai University Press, Nagarjuna Hills, Punjagutta, Hyderbad, India. These materials can be found on pages 75-80.
Frank Saia has worked at Hughes Aircraft for a long time. Now he is faced with the most difficult decisions of his career. He has been having problems in the environmental testing phase of his microchip manufacturing plant; the detailed nature of these tests has caused Hughes to be consistently late in delivering the chips to customers.
Because of the time pressure to deliver chips, Saia has been working to make the production of chips more efficient without losing the quality of the product. Chips are manufactured and then tested, and this provides two places where the process can bottle up. Even though you might have a perfectly fine chip on the floor of the plant, it cannot be shipped without testing. And, since there are several thousand other chips waiting to be tested, it can sit in line for a long time. Saia has devised a method that allows testers to put the important chips, the “hot parts,” ahead of the others without disrupting the flow and without losing the chips in the shuffle. He has also added a “gross leak” test that quickly tells if a chip in a sealed container is actually sealed or not. Adding this test early in the testing sequence allows environmental testing to avoid wasting time by quickly eliminating chips that would fail a more fine-grained leak test later in the sequence.
Because environmental testing is still falling behind, Saia’s supervisors and Hughes customers are getting angry and have begun to apply pressure. Karl Reismueller, the director of the Division of Microelectronics at Hughes, has given Saia’s telephone number to several customers, whose own production lines were shut down awaiting the parts that Saia has had trouble delivering. His customers are now calling him directly to say “we’re dying out here” for need of parts.
Frank Saia has discovered that an employee under his supervision, Donald LaRue, has been skipping tests on the computer chips. Since LaRue began this practice, they have certainly been more on time in their shipments. Besides, both LaRue and Saia know that many of the “hot” parts are actually for systems in the testing phase, rather than for ones that will be put into active use. So testing the chips for long-term durability that go into these systems seems unnecessary. Still, LaRue was caught by Quality Control skipping a test, and now Saia needs to make a decision. Upper management has provided no guidance; they simply told him to “handle it” and to keep the parts on time.
He can’t let LaRue continue skipping tests, or at least he shouldn’t let this skipping go unsupervised. LaRue is a good employee, but he doesn’t have the science background to know which tests would do the least damage if they were skipped. He could work with LaRue and help him figure out the best tests to skip so the least harm is done. But getting directly involved in skipping the tests would mean violating company policy and federal law.
- Do nothing. LaRue has started skipping tests on his own initiative. If any problems arise, then LaRue will have to take responsibility, not Saia, because LaRue was acting independently of and even against Saia’s orders.
- Call LaRue in and tell him to stop skipping tests immediately. Then call the customers and explain that the parts cannot be shipped until the tests are carried out.
- Consult with LaRue and identify non essential chips or chips that will not be used in systems critical to safety. Skipping tests on these chips will do the least damage.
- Your solution….
Margaret Gooderal works in a supervisory position in the environmental testing group at Hughes Aircraft. Her supervisor, Donald LaRue, is also the current supervisor for environmental testing. The group that LaRue and Gooderal together oversee test the chips that Hughes makes in order to determine that they would survive under the drastic environmental conditions they will likely face.
Rigorous testing of the chips is the ideal, but some chips (the hot chips) get in line ahead of others. Gooderal has found out that over the last several months, many of these tests are being skipped. The reason: Hughes has fallen behind in the production schedule and Hughes upper management and Hughes customers have been applying pressure to get chip production and testing back on schedule. Moreover, LaRue and others feel that skipping certain tests doesn’t matter, since many of these chips are being used in systems that are in the testing phase, rather than ones that will be put into active use.
A few months after Margaret Gooderal started her new position, she was presented with a difficult problem. One of the “girls” (the women and men in Environmental Testing at Hughes), Lisa Lightner, came to her desk crying. She was in tears and trembling because Donald LaRue had forcefully insisted that she pass a chip that she was sure had failed the test she was running.
Lightner ran the hermeticity test on the chips. The chips are enclosed in a metal container, and one of the questions is whether the seal to that container leaks. From her test, she is sure that the chip is a “leaker”—the seal is not airtight so that water and corrosion will seep in over time and damage the chip. She has come to Gooderal for advice. Should she do what LaRue wants and pass a chip she knows is a leaker?
- Gooderal should advise Lightner to go along with LaRue. He is her supervisor. If he orders to pass the chip, then she should do so.
- Gooderal should go to Human Resources with Lightner and file a harassment complaint against LaRue. Skipping tests is clearly illegal and ordering an employee to commit an illegal act is harassment.
- Gooderal and Lightner should blow the whistle. They should go to the U.S. defense department and inform them of the fact that Hughes Aircraft is delivering chips that have either failed tests or have not been tested.
- Your solution….
Now that Goodearl had few sympathizers among upper management, she increasingly turned to Ruth Ibarra in Quality assurance for support in her concerns about test skipping and the falsification of paperwork.
One day, Goodearl noticed that some AMRAAM chips with leak stickers were left on her project desk in the environmental testing area. The leak stickers meant that the seal on the chips' supposedly airtight enclosure had failed a test to see if they leaked. AMRAAM meant that the chips were destined to be a part of an Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile. Goodearl knew that these parts could not be retested and needed to be simply thrown away. So why was someone keeping them? She also knew that these were officially "hot parts" and that the company was behind schedule in shipping these parts.
After consulting with Ruth Ibarra, the two of them decided to do some sleuthing. They took the chips and their lot travelers to a photocopy machine and made copies of the travelers with "failed" noted on the leak test. They then replaced the chips and their travelers on the desk. Later that day, as Don LaRue passed the desk, Goodearl asked Don LaRue if he knew anything about the chips. "None of your business," he replied. The chips disappeared, and later the travelers showed up in company files with the "failed" altered to "passed." So, Goodearl and Ibarra had clear evidence (in their photocopy of the "failed" on the traveler) that someone was passing off failed chips to their customers. And these were important chips, part of the guidance system of an air-to-air missile.
- Blow the whistle to Hughes’ Board of Directors. In this way they can stop the test skipping but will also be able to keep the whole affair “in house.”
- Blow the whistle to the local news media. In this way they will shame Hughes into compliance with the testing requirements.
- Take the evidence to the U.S. Department of Defense, since they are the client and are being negatively impacted by Hughes’ illegal actions.
- Some other mode of blowing the whistle….
Table 1: Solution Evaluation Matrix
| Alternatives/Tests |
Reversibility/Rights Test |
Harm/Benefits Test |
Virtue/Value Test (Also Publicity) |
Global Feasibility Test (Implementation Obstacles) |
| Alternative One (Worst Alternative) |
Evaluate Alt 1 using reversibility/rights test |
|
|
|
| Alternative Two (Best among those given) |
|
Weigh harms against benefits for alt 2 |
|
|
| Alternative Three |
|
|
What values/disvalues are realized in alt 3? |
|
| Your Solution |
|
|
|
What obstacles could hinder implementation of solution? |
- REVERSIBILITY: Would I think this is a good choice if I were among those affected by it?
- PUBILICITY: Would I want to be publicly associated with this action through, say, its publication in the newspaper?
- HARM/BENEFICENCE: Does this action do less harm than any of the available alternatives?
- FEASIBILITY: Can this solution be implemented given time, technical, economic, legal, and political constraints?
- Identify the agent (=the person who will perform the action).
Describe the action (=what the agent is about to do).
- Identify the stakeholders (individuals who have a vital interest at risk) and their stakes.
- Identify, sort out, and weight the expected results or consequences.
- Paralysis of Action--considering too many consequences.
- Incomplete analysis--considering too few results.
- Failure to weigh harms against benefits.
- Failure to compare different alternatives.
- Justice failures--ignoring the fairness of the distribution of harms and benefits.
- Identify the agent
- Describe the action
- Identify the stakeholders and their stakes
- Use the stakeholder analysis to select the relations to be reversed.
- Reverse roles between the agent (you) and each stakeholder: put them in your place (as the agent) and yourself in their place (as the target of the action
- If you were in their place, would you still find the action acceptable?
- Leaving out a key stakeholder relation.
- Failing to recognize and address conflicts between stakeholders and their conflicting stakes.
- Confusing treating others with respect with capitulating to their demands (Reversing with Hitler).
- Failing to reach closure, i.e., an overall global reversal assessment that takes into account all the stakeholders the agent has reversed with.
- Set up the analysis by identifying the agent, describing the action under consideration, and listing the key values or virtues at play in the situation.
- Associate the action with the agent.
- Identify what the action says about the agent as a person. Does it reveal him or her as someone associated with a virtue/value or a vice?
- Action is not associated with the agent. The most common pitfall is failure to associate the agent and the action. The action may have bad consequences and it may treat individuals with disrespect but these points are not as important in the context of this test as what they imply about the agent as a person who deliberately performs such an action.
- Failure to specify the moral quality, virtue, or value of the action that is imputed to the agent in the test. To say, for example, that willfully harming the public is bad fails to zero in on precisely what moral quality this attributes to the agent. Does it render him or her unjust, irresponsible, corrupt, dishonest, or unreasonable?
This timeline is taken from the Computing Cases website developed and maintained by Dr. Charles Huff at St. Olaf College. Computing Cases is funded by the National Science Foundation, NSF DUE-9972280 and DUE 9980768.
Table 2: Time Line
| 1979 |
Ruth Ibarra beginsworking for Hughes Aircraft company's Microelectronic Circuit Division (Hughes MCD) in Newport Beach, CA |
| 1981 |
Margaret Gooderal begins working for Hughes MCD as a supervisor for assembly on the hybrid production floor and as a supervisor in the hybrid engineering lab |
| 1984 |
Ibarra becomes supervisor for hybrid quality assurance |
| 1985 |
Goodearl asks Ibarra to look at errors in paperwork, Ibarra brings errors to the attention of her supervisors and was told to keep quiet. This begins time period where Goodearl/Ibarra become aware of problems in hybrid chip testing and paperwork. |
| 1986 |
Goodearl becomes supervisor for seals processing in the environmental testing area. |
| 1986 |
Faise Claims Act (31 U.S. C 3729-3733) becomes False Claims Reform Act of 1986 making it stronger and easier to apply. |
| Oct. 1986 |
Goodearl/Ibarra report problems ot Hughes management, and, after the problems were not fixed, Goodearl/Ibarra reported the allegations of faulty testing to the United States Department of Defense. |
| Jan 9, 1987 |
Earliest date that Hughes may have stopped neglecting environmental screening tests. |
| 1988 |
Ibarra leaves Hughes feeling that her job had been stripped of all real responsibility. |
| March 1989 |
Goodearl is laid off from Hughes. |
| 1995 |
Goodearl and her husband are divorced. |
Table 3: Civil Suit Timeline
| 1990-1996 |
United States of America, ex rel. Taxpayers Against Fraud, Ruth Aldred (was Ibarra), and Margaret Goodearl v. Hughes Aircraft Company, Inc. |
| 1990 |
Goodearl files wrongful discharge suit against Hughes and a number of individual managers, which was eventually dropped in favor of the civil suit. |
| May 29, 1990 |
Thinking the government investigation was taking too much time, Goodearl/Aldred file civil suit against Hughes under False Claims Reform Act of 1986 with the help of Taxpayers Against Fraud and Washington law firm Phillips and Cohen. |
| December 1992 |
Under provisions of the FCA, the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Division takes over the civil case. |
| Sep. 10, 1996 |
Hughes found guilty in civil trial. Pays U.S. Government 4,050,00 dollars and each relator 891,000 dollars plus a separate payment of 450,000 dollars to cover attorney's fees, costs, and expenses. |
Table 4: Criminal Suit Timeline
| 1991-1993 |
United States of America v. Hughes Aircraft Co., and Donald LaRue |
| December 13, 1991 |
After a lengthy investigation, the U.S. Department of Defense charges Hughes and Donald A. LaRue with a 51-count indictment accusing it of falsifying tests of microelectronic circuits (criminal suit). |
| June 15, 1992 |
Hughes found guilty of conspiring to defraud the U.S. Government in crminal case, co-defendent LaRUE acquitted following 4-week trial. Goodearl/Aldred called as witnesses in trial. Hughes appeals. |
| Oct. 29, 1992 |
Hughes fined 3.5 million in criminal trial decision. |
| December 2, 1993 |
Appellate court upholds 1992 criminal conviction and sentence. Hughes appeals. |
Table 5: Hughes Socio Technical System
| |
Hardware/Software |
Physical Surroundings |
People, Roles, Structures |
Procedures |
Laws and Regulations |
Data and Data Structures |
| Description |
Hybrid Chips (circuitry hermetically sealed in metal or ceramic packages in inert gas atmosphere |
Battle conditions under which chips might be used |
Hughes Microelectric Circuit Division |
Chip Testing: Temperature Cycle, Constant Acceleration, Mechanical Shock, Hermeticity (Fine and Gross Leak), P.I.N.D. |
Legally Mandated Tests |
Lot Travelors to document chips |
| |
Analogue to Digital Conversion Chips |
E-1000 at Hughes (Clean Room) |
Department of Defense (Office of Inspector General) |
Hughes Human Resources Procedures for Complaints |
Whistle Blower Protection Legislation |
|
| |
Radar and Missile Guidance Systems |
|
Hughes Quality Control |
Dissenting Professional Opinions |
Qui Tam Lawsuit, Civil Suit, Criminal Suit |
|
| |
|
|
Individuals: Reismueller, Temple, Saia, LaRue, Goodearl, Ibarra/Aldren |
|
|
|
- Establish a clear technical foundation.
- Keep your arguments on a high professional plane, as impersonal and objective as possible, avoiding extraneous issues and emotional outbursts.
- Try to catch problems early, and keep the argument at the lowest managerial level possible.
- Before going out on a limb, make sure that the issue is sufficiently important.
- Use (and help estabish) organizational dispute resolution mechanisms.
- Keep records and collect paper.
- These items are taken from the IEEE website, link above.
- Make sure of your motivation.
- Count your costs.
- Obtain all the necessary background materials and evidence.
- Organize to protect your own interests.
- Choose the right avenue for your disclosure.
- Make your disclosure in the right spirit.
- These items come from the IEEE (see onlineethics link) and from the manuscript of Good Computing by Chuck Huff, William Frey, and Jose Cruz.
- Government Agencies
- Judicial Systems
- Legislators
- Advocacy Groups
- News Media
- In Puerto Rico, laws 14 and 426 have been passed to protect those who would blow the whistle on government corruption. The Oficina de Etica Gubernamental de Puerto Rico has a whistle blower's hotline. See link above.
- Serious and Considerable Harm
- Notification of immediate supervisor.
- Exhaustion of internal channels of communication/appeal.
- Documented Evidence.
- Likelihood of successful resolution.
- Richard T. De George, "Ethical Responsibilities of Engineers in Large Organizations: The Pinto Case," in Ethical Issues in Engineering, ed. Deborah G. Johnson (1991) New Jersey: Prentice-Hall: 175-186.
- Carolyn Whitbeck (1998) Ethics in Engineering Practice and Research. U.K. Cambridge University Press: 55-72 and 176-181.
- Charles Harris, Michael Pritchard and Michael Rabins (2005) Engineering Ethics: Concepts and Cases, 3rd Ed. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth: 203-206.
- The notion of dramatic rehearsal comes from John Dewey's Human Nature and Moral Conduct. An agent works through a solution alternative in the imagination before executing it in the real world. The dramatic rehearsal tests the idea in a mental laboratory created by the moral imagination. Steven Fesmire in his book, John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics (Indiana University Press, 2003), provides a comprehensive interpretation of Dewey's suggestive idea.
- Frank Saia has worked at Hughes Aircraft for a long time. Now he is faced with the most difficult decisions of his career. He has been having problems in the environmental testing phase of his microchip manufacturing plant; the detailed nature of these tests has caused Hughes to be consistently late in delivering the chips to customers.
- Because of the time pressure to deliver chips, Saia has been working to make the production of chips more efficient without losing the quality of the product. Chips are manufactured and then tested, and this provides two places where the process can bottle up. Even though you might have a perfectly fine chip on the floor of the plant, it cannot be shipped without testing. And, since there are several thousand other chips waiting to be tested, it can sit in line for a long time. Saia has devised a method that allows testers to put the important chips, the “hot parts,” ahead of the others without disrupting the flow and without losing the chips in the shuffle. He has also added a “gross leak” test that quickly tells if a chip in a sealed container is actually sealed or not. Adding this test early in the testing sequence allows environmental testing to avoid wasting time by quickly eliminating chips that would fail a more fine-grained leak test later in the sequence.
- Because environmental testing is still falling behind, Saia’s supervisors and Hughes customers are getting angry and have begun to apply pressure. Karl Reismueller, the director of the Division of Microelectronics at Hughes, has given Saia’s telephone number to several customers, whose own production lines were shut down awaiting the parts that Saia has had trouble delivering. His customers are now calling him directly to say “we’re dying out here” for need of parts.
- Construct a dialogue in which Saia responds to the pressure from his supervisor, Karl Reismueller
- Be sure to address the customer complaints
- Each drama point revolves around one or more conflicts. What is the conflict in your drama point. How did you play this conflict out through your dramatization?
- Your drama takes place over a socio-technical system. Look at the above table. What are the key values at play in the Hughes STS? How did these values enter into your dramatization? For example, did a value conflict drive and confrontation between characters in your dramatization? Think, in this section, about how the STS and its values enter into your dramatic portrayal of the events in this case.
- What kind of narrative form did your drama take on? Was it a tragedy? A comedy? A story with a happy ending? Something else? What is it about the case that led you to pick the narrative form that you did?
- Finally, did you learn anything about the case by constructing and acting out your drama? What was it? What is different about these dramatic rehearsals in comparison with other learning activities you have undergone this semester?
- Frank Saia has discovered that an employee under his supervision, Donald LaRue, has been skipping tests on the computer chips. Since LaRue began this practice, they have certainly been more on time in their shipments. Besides, both LaRue and Saia know that many of the “hot” parts are actually for systems in the testing phase, rather than for ones that will be put into active use. So testing the chips for long-term durability that go into these systems seems unnecessary. Still, LaRue was caught by Quality Control skipping a test, and now Saia needs to make a decision. Upper management has provided no guidance; they simply told him to “handle it” and to keep the parts on time.
- He can’t let LaRue continue skipping tests, or at least he shouldn’t let this skipping go unsupervised. LaRue is a good employee, but he doesn’t have the science background to know which tests would do the least damage if they were skipped. He could work with LaRue and help him figure out the best tests to skip so the least harm is done. But getting directly involved in skipping the tests would mean violating company policy and federal law.
- Construct a dialogue in which Saia confronts LaRue about skipping the tests
- Address the following issues:
- Should Saia work with LaRue to identify tests that are not necessary and then have LaRue skip these?
- How should Saia and LaRue deal with the concerns that Quality Control has expressed about skipping the tests?
Your first item here
- Each drama point revolves around one or more conflicts. What is the conflict in your drama point. How did you play this conflict out through your dramatization?
- Your drama takes place over a socio-technical system. Look at the above table. What are the key values at play in the Hughes STS? How did these values enter into your dramatization? For example, did a value conflict drive and confrontation between characters in your dramatization? Think, in this section, about how the STS and its values enter into your dramatic portrayal of the events in this case.
- What kind of narrative form did your drama take on? Was it a tragedy? A comedy? A story with a happy ending? Something else? What is it about the case that led you to pick the narrative form that you did?
- Finally, did you learn anything about the case by constructing and acting out your drama? What was it? What is different about these dramatic rehearsals in comparison with other learning activities you have undergone this semester?
- Margaret Gooderal works in a supervisory position in the environmental testing group at Hughes Aircraft. Her supervisor, Donald LaRue, is also the current supervisor for environmental testing. The group that LaRue and Gooderal together oversee test the chips that Hughes makes in order to determine that they would survive under the drastic environmental conditions they will likely face.
Rigorous testing of the chips is the ideal, but some chips (the hot chips) get in line ahead of others. Gooderal has found out that over the last several months, many of these tests are being skipped. The reason: Hughes has fallen behind in the production schedule and Hughes upper management and Hughes customers have been applying pressure to get chip production and testing back on schedule. Moreover, LaRue and others feel that skipping certain tests doesn’t matter, since many of these chips are being used in systems that are in the testing phase, rather than ones that will be put into active use.
- Construct a dialogue that acts out Gooderal’s response to her knowledge that LaRue is regularly skipping tests
- Address these two issues in your dialogue:
- Should Gooderal first talk directly to LaRue? What if he responds defensively?
- Should Gooderal go over LaRue’s head and discuss his skipping the tests with one of his supervisors? To whom should she go? How could she prepare for possible retaliation by LaRue? What should she know before doing this?
- Each drama point revolves around one or more conflicts. What is the conflict in your drama point. How did you play this conflict out through your dramatization?
- Your drama takes place over a socio-technical system. Look at the above table. What are the key values at play in the Hughes STS? How did these values enter into your dramatization? For example, did a value conflict drive and confrontation between characters in your dramatization? Think, in this section, about how the STS and its values enter into your dramatic portrayal of the events in this case.
- What kind of narrative form did your drama take on? Was it a tragedy? A comedy? A story with a happy ending? Something else? What is it about the case that led you to pick the narrative form that you did?
- Finally, did you learn anything about the case by constructing and acting out your drama? What was it? What is different about these dramatic rehearsals in comparison with other learning activities you have undergone this semester?
- A few months after Margaret Gooderal started her new position, she was presented with a difficult problem. One of the “girls” (the women and men in Environmental Testing at Hughes), Lisa Lightner, came to her desk crying. She was in tears and trembling because Donald LaRue had forcefully insisted that she pass a chip that she was sure had failed the test she was running.
Lightner ran the hermeticity test on the chips. The chips are enclosed in a metal container, and one of the questions is whether the seal to that container leaks. From her test, she is sure that the chip is a “leaker”—the seal is not airtight so that water and corrosion will seep in over time and damage the chip. She has come to Gooderal for advice. Should she do what LaRue wants and pass a chip she knows is a leaker?
- Construct a dialogue in which Gooderal advises Lightner on what to do
- Consider these issues in constructing your dialogue:
- Should Gooderal and Lightner go over LaRue’s head on this issue?
- If not, how should they confront LaRue?
- Each drama point revolves around one or more conflicts. What is the conflict in your drama point. How did you play this conflict out through your dramatization?
- Your drama takes place over a socio-technical system. Look at the above table. What are the key values at play in the Hughes STS? How did these values enter into your dramatization? For example, did a value conflict drive and confrontation between characters in your dramatization? Think, in this section, about how the STS and its values enter into your dramatic portrayal of the events in this case.
- What kind of narrative form did your drama take on? Was it a tragedy? A comedy? A story with a happy ending? Something else? What is it about the case that led you to pick the narrative form that you did?
- Finally, did you learn anything about the case by constructing and acting out your drama? What was it? What is different about these dramatic rehearsals in comparison with other learning activities you have undergone this semester?
- Ruth Ibarra (from Quality Assurance) has seen Shirley Reddick resealing chips without the authorization stamp. Ibarra has asked Gooderal to find out what’s going on. When Gooderal asks LaRue, he replies, “None of your damn business.” Shortly after this, Gooderal receives a phone call from Jim Temple, one of her superiors, telling her to come to his office. Temple informs Gooderal in no uncertain terms that she needs to back down. “You are doing it again. You are not part of the team, running to Quality with every little problem.” When Gooderal insisted she did not “run to Quality” but Quality came to her, Temple replies, “Shape up and be part of the team if you want your job.”
- Construct a dialogue in which Gooderal reacts to Temple
- Consider the following issues in constructing your dialogue:
- Is Temple harassing Gooderal? (How do we define “harassing” in this context?)
- Should Gooderal prepare for the possibility of being fired? How should she do this? What are her legal options at this point?
- Each drama point revolves around one or more conflicts. What is the conflict in your drama point. How did you play this conflict out through your dramatization?
- Your drama takes place over a socio-technical system. Look at the above table. What are the key values at play in the Hughes STS? How did these values enter into your dramatization? For example, did a value conflict drive and confrontation between characters in your dramatization? Think, in this section, about how the STS and its values enter into your dramatic portrayal of the events in this case.
- What kind of narrative form did your drama take on? Was it a tragedy? A comedy? A story with a happy ending? Something else? What is it about the case that led you to pick the narrative form that you did?
- Finally, did you learn anything about the case by constructing and acting out your drama? What was it? What is different about these dramatic rehearsals in comparison with other learning activities you have undergone this semester?
- Margaret Gooderal and Ruth Ibarra have made several attempts to get their supervisors to respond to the problem of skipping the environmental tests. The general response has been to shoot the messenger rather than respond to the message. Both Gooderal and Ibarra have been branded trouble makers and told to mind their own business. They have been threatened with dismissal if they persist.
- So they have decided to blow the whistle, having exhausted all the other options. They initiated contact with officials in the U.S. government’s Office of the Inspector General. These officials are interested but have told Gooderal and Ibarra that they need to document their case.
- One day they find two hybrids (chips that combine two different kinds of semiconductor devices on a common substrate) on LaRue’s desk. These chips which are destined for an air-to-air missile have failed the leak test. It is obvious that LaRue plans on passing them without further testing during the evening shift after Gooderal has gone home. Gooderal and Ibarra discuss whether this presents a good opportunity to document their case for the Office of the Inspector General.
- Construct an imaginary conversation between Gooderal and Ibarra where they discuss different strategies for documenting their concerns to the Office of the Inspector General?
- Have them consider the following:
- By looking for documented evidence against their employer, have Gooderal and Ibarra violated their duties of trust and confidentiality?
- Some argue that before blowing the whistle, an employee should exhaust internal channels. Have Gooderal and Ibarra discuss whether they can do anything more inside Hughes before taking evidence outside
- Each drama point revolves around one or more conflicts. What is the conflict in your drama point. How did you play this conflict out through your dramatization?
- Your drama takes place over a socio-technical system. Look at the above table. What are the key values at play in the Hughes STS? How did these values enter into your dramatization? For example, did a value conflict drive and confrontation between characters in your dramatization? Think, in this section, about how the STS and its values enter into your dramatic portrayal of the events in this case.
- What kind of narrative form did your drama take on? Was it a tragedy? A comedy? A story with a happy ending? Something else? What is it about the case that led you to pick the narrative form that you did?
- Finally, did you learn anything about the case by constructing and acting out your drama? What was it? What is different about these dramatic rehearsals in comparison with other learning activities you have undergone this semester?
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Computing Cases