Business 479 Seminar: Las Vegas/Los Angeles Course
How Does Business affect Society?
(click on course name above to go to course website (if you have web access))
Andrew Gustafson
andrewgustafson@creighton.edu 402-669-9846
Description:
This is a very unique travel course which spends 1 week in Vegas and 1 week in LA, meeting business people and community leaders to understand more fully how business affects a city. Vegas provides case studies for us to examine a wide range of issues including economic development, urban planning, water resource questions, real estate development, finance, marketing and branding, public resource allocation, and more.
Business is not a singular institution, but is the dynamic multifaceted conglomeration of multiple interests pursuing profit through product or service distribution. In its wake, 'business' has a profound impact on the ways we think the goals we pursue, the 'norms' we consider normal, and also helps direct our interests and so, inadvertently, directs us away from particular values, goals and interests. Insofar as business does this, business helps construct our culture and our lives. This course will explore the ways in which hyperrealities (realities created through media/marketing or other technology) have become a regular part of our world through the internet, cellular phone, artificial values of marketing culture, and unnatural cities like Las Vegas and Los Angeles. We will thoughtfully reflect philosophically on these events in society, and this will help us to reflect on those issues as we encounter the hyperreal cities of Las Vegas and Los Angeles, as well as experiencing the desert, devoid of hyperreal constructions. Our time will be spent alternately between the Las Vegas Strip, Grand Canyon, Joshua Tree National Park, Los Angeles, and the Mohave Desert.
Objectives:
Travel component:
We will visit various casinos in Las Vegas, Hoover Dam, Mead Lake, Las Vegas Lake Development, Boulder City Nevada, Joshua Tree National Forrest Disneyland, Ventura, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills and Hollywood. We will stay for 5 days in Las Vegas spending time exploring the town with intentional assignments, and then discussing our observations.
The Purpose of this course is to help us think about the ways in which business creates alternate realities (for example through media and advertising), and how these affect our society, values, and purpose for living. Once we realize the impact real estate development has on a city, we realize some of the important questions in urban planning including housing styles, community impact, and traffic congestion impact. Once we realize some of the water resource issues facing these cities, the relevant questions about the public resource issues facing these growing communities takes on an added meaning. Once we realize the financial impact of some of the new modes of businesses, we begin to see why businesses change over time (why the old vegas struggles in the face of the new super vegas casinos, etc). Among other things, the course should help students 1) become aware of how business changes the face of culture; 2) help students become aware of the way that commodification of values as a process has permeated our lives, from religion, relationships and traditions, to our food, clothing choices, and personal hygiene; 3) To examine how that consumerism as a way of life has affected American culture, transforming our work, leisure, family relationships, friendships, and even relationship with God. 4) To think about these issues by reflecting on the concept of Hyperreality and how the construction of new paradigms through brand naming, marketing, economic development (out with the old, in with the new) and virtual worlds has created new (unrealistic?) expectations in our concepts of happiness, worth, and success.
Course Requirements:
1. Attendance at 2 classes before/after travel class.
2. Full participation in the travel course
3. 1 Book review due March 8
4. A Presentation (photostory or audio powerpoint) to be put up on our website
5. An 8 page paper dealing with something from our trip related to business’ effect on culture and society.
6. Minimum 3 pictures per file below given to me on a burnt CD
7. Reflective journal from our 1 week travel course
PLEASE NOTE!!!: These three forms must be completed and returned to me by the second time we meet:
If you are not aware of how to use either photostory or audio-powerpoint, I can help you figure it out.
technology readiness assessment
Questions to consider in your journals:
Get pictures of:
Casinos
People we meet with
Desert
This course is a business course aimed to help us see ways in which business transforms culture and society through development. Business has a profound impact on society, including:
But there are subtle ways business affects our lives as well through advertising, media, fashion and entertainment industries. Through these, business has an impact on our lives in these ways:
1. What we think is worth pursuing (our values)
This course helps us see the impact of business on society and some of the struggles involved in those arenas. For example:
Consumerism can mean simply the theory that a progressively greater consumption of goods is economically beneficial. But sometimes it is used to refer to the materialistic tendencies of our culture—the ways in which we gain our value or happiness through purchasing products (i.e., “shopping will make it all better”, “I am what I buy”, “I Shop, therefore I am!” It can be quite helpful for businesses to encourage us to buy things, and helping us identify a product as a means of obtaining happiness is a key way of making us want to buy more and more.
Hyperreality is an alternate reality that sometimes
takes the place of actual reality. For example, when we visit the Venetian
Casino in Las Vegas, the whole place is supposed to remind you of venice, but it
is much better than venice in some ways-- the water is clorinated and clean
(Venice's cannals are pretty dirty), its always bright and cheery in the
venetian (venice can be kind of drab and dark some days), and there is always
excitement and action going on (unlike real life, which has quite a few spots of
fairly boring mundane spaces). SO the Venetian, which is immitating Venice, is
in some ways even better than reality.
Another example of hyperreality might be Disneyland, which is an imaginary world
of escape where we can forget the worries of the world and pretend we are in a
different better reality.
Virtual reality games present a sort of hyperreality as well. But even
marketing and advertisement does this for us-- think of particular brands, such
as "Lexus" or "Gap" or "Abercrombie and Fitch" or "FUBU" or "Addidas" or "Applebees"--
each brand wants to elicit a whole web of ideas and feelings-- all the good
vibes that go along with going out to Applebees, etc (sorry, maybe you don't
like Applebees) or the notion of what it is to be the sort of person who owns a
lexus, or who buys all their clothes at the Gap, etc etc.
Whether it is through the development of Casinos or Disneyland, or even builds
up brand names, business creates hyperrealities which affect the way we think
about life, about what is important and worthwhile. Hypperealities aren't bad
necessarily, but they do affect us and how we respond to reality, and they are
often invented and sponsored directly or indirectly by business.
Commodification: Commodification often simply refers to the process of giving non-market items marketable value through associating them with particular commodities. For example, you can’t buy love, but you can be convinced that to show love you need to purchase a card, or a ring, or flowers. You can’t buy happiness, but you can be convinced that you need to buy a lexus or a ring or the latest technology product to gain happiness. In this way then, business can play a role in helping us identify particular values in particular products. Technically, commodification is process that transforms the market for a unique, branded product into a market based on undifferentiated price competition. Commodification can be the desired outcome of an entity in the market, or it can be an unintentional outcome that no party actively sought to achieve.
As we think through the things we see, we need to ask ourselves some questions:
Most of these events are definite. We may rearrange some of the schedule but this gives you a good idea of the many things we will do in our class. There won’t be a lot of reading, but there will be discussion after and during various visits.
Because this class studies two very dynamic cities which are constantly changing, the class itself varies each year. We come to Vegas in 2013 five years after a real estate bubble burst and financial meltdown. Vegas has been particularly hard-hit, with over 10% of homes in default on their mortgage, a gigantic 8 Billion dollar casino-hotel-condo project in the center of the strip (City Center) which has neared bankruptcy on several occasions, dramatically affected its parent company MGM's stock and which currently has sold 100 of its 2500 condos. Yet Vegas continues to be an icon for American hope and adventurous living, a dynamic center of American creativity and ingenuity.
Tentative Schedule for the Course 2013 (events are tentative):
Saturday March 9th Arrive in Vegas by air
Gustafson picks you up at airport.
Sunday March 10th
10am Plaza tour
12pm Casino Tour: Circus Circus, New York/New York, MGM, Luxor, Mandalay Bay
Share exploring-experiences at buffet 6pm
Monday March 11th Las Vegas
9 Mayor & Meet with Vegas Economic and Urban Development Department (229-6551)
1130pm Tour Bellagio
1pm World Market Center
Supper with Real Estate Developer
Tuesday March 12th
9:30 Wynn/Encore Tour
11:30 Lunch at Ceasars
12:30 Venetian Tour
2:30 Meet with Las Vegas Regional Economic Development Council
Wednesday March 13th
Mutual of Omaha Bank in Suburbs 9am
Redrock Casino10:30 am
Tour Southpoint Casino 12pm, Meet with Creighton Alum Michael Gaughan
2:00 Meet with Oscar Goodman, Former Mayor, now with Visitor and Convention Authority
Thursday March 14th
9:00am Zappos
12noon Boulder City/Hoover Dam visit
3pm Alfalfa Farm visit (with banker also)
Friday March 13th
6:30 Supper with John Obrien (Creighton University and College of Law Alum ('69)