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Electronic business is based on using computers and networks in all aspects of business. This new business concept is developing its own culture, which faces many ethical dilemmas. One is the role of the chief information officer (CIO). As a leader of information technology application in the organisation, the CIO's ethical behaviour influences the ethics of the electronic business culture in the organisation. In electronic business both the chief executive officer (CEO) and the CIO are responsible for the organisational culture. That is, the CIO has capabilities for reasoning, forming values and making information decisions that contributes to creating corporate core values. From an employee's perspective the CIO is treated as the employer. But being employed by the organisation in a similar way to the rest of the employees, the CIO can also be treated as an employee of the organisation. This duality in the role of CIO causes ethical dilemmas that may be solved through establishing ethical codes that are based on existing global ethical codes. Explores the nature of ethical dilemmas related to e‐business and proposes possible solutions, drawing on information from case studies of two Australian companies.

Discusses the organizational culture appropriate to new forms of “employability” as being characterized by its success in challenging and empowering its staff, motivating them, and even satisfying their needs for belongingness in today’s downsizing environment. These characteristics strongly reflect Roger Harrison’s descriptions of person and task cultures in organizations. Reflecting elements of both and, at the same time, increasingly incorporating “Generation X‐ers”, an organization which develops an employability culture is more likely a fifth alternative to Harrison’s classification scheme. Discusses the changing nature of work and why an employability culture is inevitable. However, such a culture presents dilemmas to the organization. One of the most predominant dilemmas is how the organization reconciles individual needs for career ownership with its own, which is to align its members’ efforts towards organizational goals. A solution is put forward by way of suggesting that employers and employees engage in adult‐adult interactions around a framework of negotiation.

Just because it’s often the case that people learn from their mistakes, it doesn’t mean you want to carry on making them as part of your learning process. It’s much the same thing with dilemmas – defined in the dictionaries as problems that seem incapable of a solution or situations necessitating two equally undesirable alternatives. Just because you can learn from them doesn’t mean you welcome them.

The purpose of this paper is to present the proposition that culture in international management has been dominated by a “Western dualism to measuring culture” (Caprar et al., 2015, p. 1024), which has resulted in severe problems and persistent limitations. The suggestion is that cultural research can be more productively conceived as a paradox involving a duality between two contrasting yet co-determined spheres or domains.

The paper provides an outline of culture as a paradox and an outline of a research approach to address the dualities of culture.

A cultural duality is described, which involves a paradoxical “yin-yang” relationship between two contrasting yet mutually constituted aspects of the collective mind. One domain, which involves conscious cognitive elements has dominated research characterized by positivism and empirical cross-cultural explorations of phenomenological cultural values. The second, more recondite domain, involves unconscious and embodied cultural phenomena, which are more tacit and hidden in indirect expression through communicative interaction, exchanges of symbolic representations and embodied behaviour in context.

A methodological duality of qualitative and quantitative mixing in order to provide a bi-focal understanding of both tacit and explicit aspects of culture is proposed as a research agenda.

The suggestion is that these cultural shadows have been relatively neglected thus far in cross-cultural management research. This means that in order to better comprehend culture as paradox, an equalization of approaches sensitive to both sides of the duality is prescient. In pursuit of this idea, a complementary qualitative analysis directed at more nebulous cultural phenomena is proposed in order to provide a balanced analysis of culture as paradox.

Knowledge sharing culture and performance climate are organizational interventions used by organizations to influence and shape employees’ attitudes and behavior toward knowledge sharing. While each strategy directly influences employees to respond accordingly, the interplay between the incongruent objectives of these two strategies could lead to social dilemmas in knowledge sharing. This study aims to understand social dilemmas in knowledge sharing due to the interaction between knowledge sharing culture and performance climate.

An experimental study using the vignette technique was performed on 240 working adults. ANOVA was conducted to examine the interplay effect between knowledge sharing culture and performance climate on knowledge sharing intention.

Results showed that performance climate moderates the effect of knowledge sharing culture on employees’ knowledge sharing intention. The findings highlight the importance of having goal congruence between knowledge sharing culture and performance climate to minimize the social dilemmas in knowledge sharing.

This study develops a moderation model based on the theory of social dilemma to investigate the interaction between knowledge sharing culture and performance climate and enhance the theoretical validity and exactness of the knowledge sharing literature. The findings from this study provide theoretical insights and practical implications for social dilemmas in knowledge sharing, as well as the foundation for continuous research into knowledge sharing and people management practices that may have a strong influence on employees’ knowledge sharing behavior, attitude and performance.

During the evaluation of European Capital of Culture (ECoC) Aarhus 2017, the evaluation organisation rethinkIMPACTS 2017 formulated a set of “dilemmas” capturing the main challenges arising during the design of the ECoC evaluation. This functioned as a framework for the evaluation process. This paper aims to present and discuss the relevance of the “Evaluation Dilemmas Model” as subsequently applied to the Galway 2020 ECoC programme evaluation.

The paper takes an empirical approach including auto-ethnography and interview data to document and map the dilemmas involved in undertaking an evaluation in two different European cities. Evolved via a process of practice-based research, the article addresses the development of and the arguments for the dilemmas model and considers its potential for wider applicability in the evaluation of large-scale cultural projects.

The authors conclude that the “Evaluation Dilemmas Model” is a valuable heuristic for considering the endogenous and exogenous issues in cultural evaluation.

The model developed is useful for a wide range of cultural evaluation processes including – but not limited to – European Capitals of Culture.

What has not been addressed in the academic literature is the process of evaluating ECoCs; especially how evaluators often take part in an overall process that is not just about the evaluation but also planning and delivering a project that includes stakeholder management and the development of evaluation criteria, design and methods.

The purpose of this paper is to present results and analysis from a case study on ethical dilemmas faced by client-side project management employees of a large Australian University.

A single case study approach was adopted using the property services division's experience of potential ethical dilemmas that staff were exposed to as a focus for the unit of analysis. Data were triangulated by interviewing the Deputy Director of the division, a programme manager, a project manager and a client (stakeholder) with experience of dealing with the division. Each person was interviewed and the interview transcribed and analysed using grounded theory to make sense of the data.

Four potential ethical dilemmas were identified: fraud/bribery/corruption; favouritism and special treatment; occupational health and safety and duty of care; and professionalism and respect for others. Leadership, governance structure and (organisational and national) culture supported initiative and independent thinking through cause-and-effect loops and consequences and this meditated and influenced how these dilemmas were dealt with.

This was just one case study in one cultural and governance setting. Greater insights and confidence in conclusions could be gained with replication of this kind of study. This study was part of a broader study of ethics in project management (PM) that consisted of eight other cases studies by others in the wider research team, also a quantitative study has been undertaken with results to be presented in other papers/reports. The main implication is that governance and workplace culture are two key influences that moderate and mediate an individuals inherent response to an ethical dilemma.

Clients (project owners or POs) and their representatives (PORs) hold a pivotal role in ensuring that PM work takes place within an environment characterised by high ethical standards yet the authors know that all PM parties, including client-side PORs, are faced with ethical dilemmas. What do the authors mean by an “ethical dilemma” and how may POs ensure that their PORs behave ethically? This paper provides practical guidance and demonstrates how ethical dilemmas can be analysed and appropriate action taken.

Ethics in PM has profound implications for value generation through projects. Project managers need sound guidance and processes that align with society's norms and standards to be able to deliver project value so that commercial or sectarian interests do not dominate project delivery at the expense of society in general.

This paper provides a rare example of a case study of project teams facing ethical dilemmas. The PM literature has few cases such as this to draw upon to inform PM theory and practice.

Drawing on Fang’s (2012) Yin Yang theory of culture while taking up the roadmap proposed by Li (2016) for applying the epistemological system of Yin Yang balancing to complex issues in management research, in general, and to paradoxical issues, in particular, the purpose of this paper is to explore how organizations and individuals in the West can balance cultural paradoxes and manage culture dilemmas through the lens of Yin Yang wisdom.

The paper is based on a qualitative case study. Data are gathered through interviews, documents, and field observations in four subsidiaries of an Italian insurance multinational corporation and were analyzed according to the three parameters, i.e., situation, context, and time (Fang, 2012).

The findings show how the integration and learning from seemingly opposite cultures and sets of values lead the organization and individuals to balancing cultural paradox and managing cultural dilemma effectively. With regard to situation, the authors find that both organizations and customers choose the most relevant value(s) to take advantage of specific events or circumstances, and that different value orientations can coexist. As for context, the authors show that organizations can adapt their values either through suppression and/or promotion, which can foster individuals to find new balancing within the paradox. In terms of time, the authors show that the process of learning from other cultures over time can play a role in the shift of people’s and organizations’ choices of attitudes and value orientations.

The paper suggests the relevance and usefulness of adopting Yin Yang wisdom to uncover the dynamic process of cultural learning in Western scenarios.

The authors suggest a new approach to strategic decision‐making methodology: focus on understanding the dilemmas confronting your organization. For leaders, the learning produced from wrestling with dilemmas is often more important than answers to them. Big challenges tend to be complex, ongoing in nature, and highly resistant to simple “fixes”. Therefore, before the leader can provide the strategic direction to guide organizational efforts, he/she must first recognize, define and deal with the prime dilemmas of the day. Dilemmas fall into two categories: direction‐setting, and culture‐setting. Several examples of each are presented as well as three action steps: recognition, definition, and translation.

The purpose of this paper is to characterize issues related to head nurses’ decision making when managing ethical dilemmas.

The study is qualitative descriptive, in which researchers stay close to the data. The data were collected in the format of unstructured written reflections. Inductive conventional latent qualitative content analysis was applied to the data.

The issues of head nurses’ management of decision making in ethical dilemmas relate to the following aspects: taking risks in deviating from the formalities, balancing power and humaneness, maintaining the professional hierarchy, managing resistance to change, managing with limited options, and experiencing the decline of nurse’s professional and/or human dignity.

Reflections in written form were preferred to semi-structured interviews and the researchers were unable to contact the participants directly and to ask additional questions. All the reflections were produced in a language other than English.

The issues of head nurses’ management of decision making in ethical dilemmas reveal the gap between societal expectations and the opportunities to improve nursing leadership in health care organizations.

The issues of head nurses’ decision making when managing ethical dilemmas are related to contexts that reflect the attitudes of society and health care system toward nursing management.

The study adds to the understanding of issues of the management of decision making in ethical dilemmas. It is an ongoing systematic process that encourages head nurses to learn from practice and manage the quality of care by empowering themselves and nurses to take responsibility for leadership.