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The purpose of this paper is to recognise and provide an approach to estimate the value of an institution that produces a public good to the wealth of a nation. Specifically, the authors value utilitarian justice.

The paper employs the classical economic theories of crime and shadow pricing to estimate the total economic value and shadow prices or social productivity of police and higher court deterrence. These measures are estimated using the definitions provided by Dasgupta and by re-engineering key deterrence elasticity estimates gleaned from Australian econometric studies.

The empirical findings suggest a relatively high social value for police and higher court deterrence. Notwithstanding, addressing socio-economic disadvantage is likely to prevent more subsequent offences than directing more resources to the operation of the criminal justice system.

The key limitations involve the sensitivity of the estimates to error. Further work is required on all the estimates in the model and in particular the social costs of the serious offences. The next step is to estimate the opportunity cost of supplying police and court deterrence. The cost estimate can then be combined with the estimates of social benefits to estimate a benefit-cost ratio. The model in broad terms demonstrates a way forward to estimating the economic value of and the social productivity of the criminal justice system. The provision of retributive justice is also ignored in this contribution. This requires a separate analysis.

The social implications are that there appears a way to both justify and evaluate the criminal justice system and this methodology may be applied to the operation of other public services.

The originality of this paper lies in suggesting a method to solve the valuation problem for the jointly produced public goods of the higher courts and police.

If IS educators are to provide their students with an understanding of the overall context in which they will develop professional careers, they must have good information about graduates’ employment destinations and their workforce experiences. That information is difficult to obtain from standard data collections. This paper explores the early job experiences of IS graduates using survey and interview data. While the graduates have a strong IS professional orientation and experience friendly work environments, their expectations of access to interesting work, career advice and opportunities for advancement appear to outstrip their experience in the workplace.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on society's relationship with technology and particularly our increasing dependence on electronic technology – so‐called eDependency. The paper argues that technology is not neutral and we must engage with the moral issues that arise from our relationship with it.

Society's relationship with technology is examined through the lens of Socrates' consideration of the technology of writing. It identifies “technophilia” as a major theme in society and “neo‐Luddism” as the Socrates‐like examination of the benefits of technology.

While rejecting both technology determinism and technology presentism the paper argues technology is not neutral and does afford social change within a particular social ecology. The authors suggest that ultimately the use of all technology, including the technology underpinning eDependency, leads to important moral questions which deserve considered debate. The paper concludes by arguing that the Information Systems (IS) discipline should take the mantle of King Thamus and that the study of these issues should become a key concern for the discipline.

In an age of technophilia, this paper calls considered debate on the moral issues that arise from our relationship with technology, how it is appropriated, to whose benefit, and how we change it and will be changed by it.