The role and ethics of professionals in business and economics have been questioned, especially after the financial crisis of 2008. Some suggest a reorientation using concepts such as craftsmanship. In this article, I will explore professional practices within the context of behavioural theory and business ethics. I suggest that scholars of behavioural theory need a strategy to deal with normative questions to meet their ambition of practical relevance. Evidence-based management (EBMgt), a recent behavioural approach, may assist business ethics scholars in understanding how professionals infer ‘evidence’ to make decisions. For a professional, ethical issues are an integral part of decision-making at critical moments. As reflective practitioners, they develop insights related to ethical concerns when collecting and assessing evidence within decision-making processes.
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This paper discusses sustainable real estate and the role of ethics within real estate. Both terms ‘sustainability’ and ‘ethics’ needs an explanation. With this discussion the tripartite system of ‘morals – principles - laws’ is described in order to have more grip on sustainable real estate and ethics.
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This paper discusses sustainable real estate and the role of ethics within real estate. Both terms ‘sustainability’ and ‘ethics’ needs an explanation. With this discussion the tripartite system of ‘morals – principles - laws’ is described in order to have more grip on sustainable real estate and ethics.
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Moral food lab: Transforming the food system with crowd-sourced ethics
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Artificial intelligence (AI) is a technology which is increasingly being utilised in society and the economy worldwide, but there is much disquiet over problematic and dangerous implementations of AI, or indeed even AI itself deciding to do dangerous and problematic actions. These developments have led to concerns about whether and how AI systems currently adhere to and will adhere to ethical standards, stimulating a global and multistakeholder conversation on AI ethics and the production of AI governance initiatives. Such developments form the basis for this chapter, where we give an insight into what is happening in Australia, China, the European Union, India and the United States. We commence with some background to the AI ethics and regulation debates, before proceedings to give an overview of what is happening in different countries and regions, namely Australia, China, the European Union (including national level activities in Germany), India and the United States. We provide an analysis of these country profiles, with particular emphasis on the relationship between ethics and law in each location. Overall we find that AI governance and ethics initiatives are most developed in China and the European Union, but the United States has been catching up in the last eighteen months.
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OBJECTIVE: To investigate the level of agreement of the behavioural mapping method with an accelerometer to measure physical activity of hospitalized patients. DESIGN: A prospective single-centre observational study. SETTING: A university medical centre in the Netherlands. SUBJECTS: Patients admitted to the hospital. MAIN MEASURES: Physical activity of participants was measured for one day from 9 AM to 4 PM with the behavioural mapping method and an accelerometer simultaneously. The level of agreement between the percentages spent lying, sitting and moving from both measures was evaluated using the Bland-Altman method and by calculating Intraclass Correlation Coefficients. RESULTS: In total, 30 patients were included. Mean (±SD) age was 63.0 (16.8) years and the majority of patients were men (n = 18). The mean percentage of time (SD) spent lying was 47.2 (23.3) and 49.7 (29.8); sitting 42.6 (20.5) and 40.0 (26.2); and active 10.2 (6.1) and 10.3 (8.3) according to the accelerometer and observations, respectively. The Intraclass Correlation Coefficient and mean difference (SD) between the two measures were 0.852 and -2.56 (19.33) for lying; 0.836 and 2.60 (17.72) for sitting; and 0.782 and -0.065 (6.23) for moving. The mean difference between the two measures is small (⩽2.6%) for all three physical activity levels. On patient level, the variation between both measures is large with differences above and below the mean of ⩾20% being common. CONCLUSION: The overall level of agreement between the behavioural mapping method and an accelerometer to identify the physical activity levels 'lying', 'sitting' and 'moving' of hospitalized patients is reasonable.
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In this article, we describe a study on the impact of an ethics program aimed at strengthening the ethical agency of 15 social workers of three welfare organizations. The goal of the study was to make an inventory of the impact of the program, and to evaluate the relevance of this impact with the help of several stakeholders. The most significant change (MSC) approach was used as a research strategy, though some changes to the approach were made with a view to our research goal. We explain the MSC approach and how we used it in our study design. Further, we describe the research process, answering the question whether our adaptation of the MSC was helpful to inventory the impact of our ethics program and the evaluation of its relevance. The implications of MSC's focus on "most significant" changes and the need for a thorough feedback of the results of the evaluation process in the participating organizations are discussed.
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Sarah Banks (2012) describes ethics work mainly as the effort people put into developing themselves as good practitioners. She discerns six aspects of ethics work: identity work, framing work, reason work, emotion work, role work and performance work. Although ethics work focuses on the ethical development of individual practitioners within their profession, the concept and all its aspects can be transferred into an ethical guideline for the collective development of practitioners in interprofessional cooperation. As such the concept of collective interprofessional ethics work can also be used as a set of criteria for the ethical evaluation of interprofessional cooperation, as is shown on the basis of an experiment in Belgium
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The ideology of inclusive education signifies that every child should be able to attend a regular school, unless there are insoluble barriers which make this impossible. This principle is voiced in treaties such as the Salamanca Statement and the No Child Left Behind Act. Accordingly, many countries nowadays aim at integrating students with special educational needs (SEN) in mainstream education.A specific challenge for teachers who apply for inclusive education is teaching students who show challenging behaviour in the classroom1. A growing number of teachers report feelings of professional inadequacy in teaching students with behavioural difficulties. Feelings of professional inadequacy are said to occur when a teacher lacks pedagogic and/or didactic skills to act adequately in demanding classroom situations.Teachers of students with behavioural difficulties are found to be particularly at risk for experiencing occupational stress. Moreover, these teachers are more likely to end their career in education earlier than teachers who are teaching students with other SEN or without. Many teachers of students with behavioural difficulties tend to pay too much attention to controlling student behaviour rather than to teaching.At the same time, in this respect, students with behavioural difficulties are a population at risk as well. Regardless of the underlying cause of their behavioural problems, students with behavioural difficulties gain less academic progress than students who go through a normal development. Strikingly, this academic delay appears to increase rapidly over the years.For all the feelings of professional inadequacy, there are also teachers who are somehow able to bring out the best in all their students. These teachers are able to engage students, meet their differing needs and increase their potential. These teachers are commonly said to be equipped with a teacher’s X-factor; an enigmatic, yet unexplained talent causing a teacher’s excellence in the classroom.A widely accepted key determinant of successful schooling is teacher quality. Accordingly, the competencies of expert teachers have already been studied in detail. However, recent evidence points at personality as an underlying core factor from which these competencies may arise. In the literature, personality is defined as relatively enduring patterns of thoughts, feelings and behaviours.Much literature has already been published on the relationship between personality and job performance. Virtually all studies on the subject report strong correlations between the Five-Factor Model of Personality and job performance. However, until recently, these relations were not explored in the field of education. A first study of this kind was conducted by the authors. The results of this study were presented at last year’s ECER in Istanbul.The personality dimensions of Conscientiousness (facets of competence, self-discipline, ambition) and Neuroticism (facets of depression, vulnerability, shame) were found to discriminate expert teachers from non-experts. Furthermore, significant relationships were found between teacher personality and teacher quality in teaching students with behavioural difficulties for Conscientiousness, Neuroticism and Extraversion (assertiveness).With the aim of contributing to finding ways to accurately recruit expert teachers of students with behavioural difficulties, a cohort of in-service teacher-trainees was studied on their personality and performance in teaching students with behavioural difficulties. The authors wondered whether the relationships found in the previous study could be established or replicated in teacher education?
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Research studies and recruitment processes often rely on psychometric instruments to profile respondents with regards to their ethical orientation. Completing such questionnaires can be tedious and is prone to self-presentation bias. Noting how video games often expose players to complex plots, filled with dilemmas and morally dubious options, the opportunity emerges to evaluate player’s moral orientation by analysing their in-game behaviour. In order to explore the feasibility of such an approach, we examine how users’ moral judgment correlates with choices they make in non-linear narratives, frequently present in video games. An interactive narrative presenting several moral dilemmas was created. An initial user study (N = 80) revealed only weak correlations between the users’ choices and their ethical inclinations in all ethical scales. However, by training a genetic algorithm on this data set to quantify the influence of each branch on recognising moral inclination we found a strong positive correlation between choice behaviour and self-reported ethical inclinations on a second independent group of participants (N = 20). The contribution of this work is to demonstrate how genetic algorithms can be applied in interactive stories to profile users’ ethical stance.
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