This paper aims to develop a heuristic ethical stance as a provocation for responsible leadership scholarship and practice within entangled human–environment systems. Through…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to develop a heuristic ethical stance as a provocation for responsible leadership scholarship and practice within entangled human–environment systems. Through consideration of the failures of ethics – in particular Uyghur mass atrocities and their residues in global supply chains – the stance offers a reflexive pathway between the inner value orientation of leaders and the scope of interconnected interests affected by leader action and inaction.
Design/methodology/approach
Through an autoethnographic narrative, the applied ethic brings together work by the contemporary Holocaust philosopher John Roth with a motto spread by Anglican educational philosopher and social entrepreneur Charlotte Mason (1842–1923). The failures of ethics centre material, sensorial, religious and relational tensions that are explored through three conversational vignettes relating to the current mass atrocities of Uyghur Turkic Muslims in the Xinjiang region of China.
Findings
The resulting ethical stance relates individual personhood to meso and macro levels through Mason’s motto –I am, I can, I ought, I will –and is developed to contain self-reflexivity and identity, conscience informed by testimony, consciousness of the power to protest and resist and intention to pivot. The failures of ethics highlight the apparent centrality of religious ethical traditions to considerations of responsible leadership.
Originality/value
The lack of serious and sustained attention to the ethics in responsible leadership, in particular ethical failures and religious ethics, limits its relevance within entangled systems The paper brings to responsible leadership novel philosophical perspectives to link reflexivity between individual and governance level responses and enliven the imagination of conscience through the ubiquity of complicity.
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Matthew Eriksen and George H. Tompson
This case describes a real family that has been running a labor-intensive business since 1992. The father, Phil Mason, runs the business with the help of his wife and two of his…
Abstract
This case describes a real family that has been running a labor-intensive business since 1992. The father, Phil Mason, runs the business with the help of his wife and two of his sons in southwestern Rhode Island. The business is a franchisee of ServiceMaster Clean. In 2006, the franchise employed 20 full-time employees and was the 50th largest ServiceMaster Clean franchise among the approximately 1,200 franchises located in the United States. Annual revenue is approximately $2.5 million. In late 2005, one of Phil℉s sons began researching the biodiesel industry. As he was growing weary of the labor-intensive nature of his franchise business, Phil fully researched the industry himself. By the middle of 2006, Phil was convinced that he could profitably manufacture biodiesel in his spare warehouse space. In July 2006, he formed Mason Biodiesel, LLC and financed the $1.5 million start-up costs through a combination of personal savings and bank debt.
Merging library traffic from dispersed service points into a combined services desk is not new, and many reasons prompt this move. George Mason University, Virginia’s largest…
Abstract
Purpose
Merging library traffic from dispersed service points into a combined services desk is not new, and many reasons prompt this move. George Mason University, Virginia’s largest public research institution, combined a total of 10 service desks located in four libraries on three distributed campuses. To consolidate services and reduce costs, the Mason Libraries established a “one-stop” service point in each library. With the goal of “one-stop” service point in each facility, the Mason Libraries recrafted physical spaces, reviewed policies, procedures, and workflows as well as revised staff roles and responsibilities.
Methodology/approach
This chapter explores why institutions embark on redesigning the traditional library service desk; discusses how changing service needs impact desk space; and addresses the effect on public services personnel. Observations are based on highlights from the evolution of George Mason University Libraries’ goal of a “one-stop” service point in each library to provide more efficient and consistent user-focused interactions and services.
Findings
As a manager of one of the facilities, the author provides insights on achieving a “one-stop” service point.
Originality/value
This chapter considers library staff needs, in concert with internal effort to not only refine user services influencing changes, but also revisit policies, procedures, and workflows to align staff roles and responsibilities. Mason Libraries is one of a few university library systems trying to implement single service points in all libraries.
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In light of contemporary critiques of New Zealand comprehensive schooling published mainly in the popular press, it is timely to re‐examine the origins of and the rationale for…
Abstract
In light of contemporary critiques of New Zealand comprehensive schooling published mainly in the popular press, it is timely to re‐examine the origins of and the rationale for the widespread adoption of this model of education. The comprehensive schooling philosophy, it was recently alleged, has produced a situation in which ‘as many as one in five pupils in the system is failing’ and where ‘there is a large group at the bottom who are not succeeding’. This group was estimated to include some 153,000 students out of the total current New Zealand student population of 765,000. In this context, however, Chris Saunders and Mike Williams, principals of Onehunga High School and Aorere College in Auckland respectively, have noted that having underachieving students in secondary schools in particular is not a recent phenomenon. A large ‘tail’ of poor performing high school students has long been a cause of concern, Williams suggests.
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Patrick T. Kelly and Christine E. Earley
This chapter examines ethical leaders in accounting. We analyze the actions of individuals broadly associated with the accounting profession who have been presented with…
Abstract
This chapter examines ethical leaders in accounting. We analyze the actions of individuals broadly associated with the accounting profession who have been presented with challenging situations and evaluate their responses to difficult circumstances. Our subjects are transformational leaders who have demonstrated a commitment to the public interest along with the moral motivation and character to persevere under challenging circumstances. By providing examples of leaders who have had a positive impact on the public accounting profession, both students and practicing accountants will learn how ethical leadership can make the profession stronger.
D. MIDGLEY and RICHARDSON
Signal flow graphs for networks of electronic systems are often reduced to transfer functions by Mason's theorem. An interactive software package is presented to make this process…
Abstract
Signal flow graphs for networks of electronic systems are often reduced to transfer functions by Mason's theorem. An interactive software package is presented to make this process fully automated. The nodes are numbered. Input to the program specifies the transmittance between node pairs, first noting the start‐node‐number followed by that of the destination‐node. Transmittances are represented either as real numbers or as a string of characters. With real transmittances the output of the program takes the form of a numerator and a denominator of the transfer function, each as a real number. With character‐string transmittances the numerator and denominator of the output are available both as strings and as arrays of products of prime numbers, where each prime number has uniquely represented an input character string.
Entrepreneurial ecosystems have quickly become one of the most popular topics in entrepreneurship research. Ecosystems are the characteristics and factors of a place that support…
Abstract
Entrepreneurial ecosystems have quickly become one of the most popular topics in entrepreneurship research. Ecosystems are the characteristics and factors of a place that support high-growth entrepreneurship. This provides the ability for the field to provide important policy insights about how to aid the development of high growth, innovative ventures, as well as generate new insights into the relationship between the entrepreneurship phenomenon and the contexts it takes place within. However, work in the field remains undertheorized, with a little understanding of how the entrepreneur benefits from being in a strong ecosystem. This chapter argues that it is helpful to return to Ed Malecki’s work in a previous volume of this series, which explored the importance of networks. His work has contributed to a very broad stream of work on entrepreneurial environment. Using this as a starting point, this chapter distinguishes between “top-down” approaches to study ecosystems, which focus on the actors and factors that make up an ecosystem, and a “bottom-up” approach, which instead examines the ways in which entrepreneurs use their ecosystem to get the resources, knowledge, and support they need. The chapter concludes by suggesting how a research agenda for a bottom-up study of ecosystems can be informed by Malecki’s work.
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Omar E.M. Khalil and Ahmed A.S. Seleim
The information technology (IT) related ethical issues will only increase in frequency and complexity with the increasing diffusion of IT in economies and societies. The purpose…
Abstract
Purpose
The information technology (IT) related ethical issues will only increase in frequency and complexity with the increasing diffusion of IT in economies and societies. The purpose of this paper is to explore Egyptian students' attitudes towards the information ethics issues of privacy, access, property, and accuracy, and it evaluates the possible impact of a number of personal characteristics on such attitudes.
Design/methodology/approach
This research utilized a cross‐sectional sample and data set to test five hypotheses. It adopted an instrument to collect the respondents' background information and assess their attitudes towards the information ethics issues of privacy, property, accuracy, and access. Egyptian business students at Alexandria University were asked to participate in the survey. A total of 305 responses were collected and analyzed.
Findings
The analysis revealed that students are sensitive to the ethicality of information privacy, information accuracy, and information access. However, students are insensitive to the ethicality of property (software) right. In addition, years of education have a main effect on students' attitudes towards property, and gender and age have an interaction effect on students' attitudes towards access.
Research limitations/implications
The findings of this research are based on a cross‐sectional data set collected from a sample of business students at a public university. Students, however, may make poor surrogates for business or IT professionals. Future similar research designs that employ large samples from Egyptian working professionals and students in other private and public universities are needed to verify the findings of this research.
Practical implications
The findings suggest that the investigated university as well as the other similar Egyptian universities should consider integrating ethics education into their curricula. Teaching information ethics, especially from an Islamic perspective, is expected to positively influence students' information ethical attitudes. The enforcement of the existing property right protection laws should also curb software piracy in the Egyptian market.
Originality/value
It is vital to expand the ethical research currently being performed in IT in order to help bridge the gap between behavior and IT. The findings of this research extend the understanding of students' attitudes towards the information ethics issues in Egyptian culture and contribute to the growing body of knowledge on global information ethics.