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To compete successfully, organizations pursue the status of the world‐class organizations (WCO). A WCO is defined as the best in its class, or as good as its best global competitor, in providing most value to the customer. WCOs must be supported by effective information systems. Presents new approaches to developing the information architecture for world‐class organizations.

Today, business organizations compete in the global marketplace. To compete successfully, organizations pursue the status of the world‐class organization (WCO). A WCO is defined as the best in its class, or as good as its best global competitor, in providing most value to the customer. The strategic pillars that enable an organization to become a WCO must be supported by effective information systems. Conventional information systems development approaches are not necessarily relevant for WCOs. Presents new approaches to developing the information for world‐class organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to propose an alternative, interdisciplinary teaching of health, health care and medical care based on three pillars: social economics, the social determinants of health (SDH) and ethics. Based on these three pillars, the global financial crisis is presented as the moment of manifestation of the SDH at individual and aggregate levels that require a critical analysis from a broader perspective that is possible with social economics and ethics.

The author designed a writing-intensive course based on four modules about definition of health, health care, medical care and determinants of health; political economy of financing and organization of medical care; policies including reform proposals; and medical ethics and moral philosophies that reflect back on the previous topics, respectively.

The course attracts students from different disciplines who found it realistic and comprehensive so that it can be related easily to other disciplines owing to its interdisciplinary design. It also helps students to improve their writing skills.

The course is taught only in US context and is still open to further development.

The theoretical pillars of the course can be adopted and experimented with in different contexts (e.g. wars, plagues, immigration, etc.) and inform the participants about the subject matters from a broader perspective.

This paper provides a successful and novel teaching experience of health and medical care by putting social economics, SDH and ethics together.

As a result of the aging of American society, health care costs have been and will continue to rise, to the extent that they are not sustainable. Obviously, this trend will continue in spite of the 2010 health care reform. As a result of this uncontrollable problem, writers such as Daniel Callahan have proposed age‐based rationing of health care while utilizing the utilitarian notions of ethics and justice. However, other writers, utilizing more egalitarian notions of justice, have opposed this. This suggests an ethical dilemma, which has to be debated in the future. The author believes professors teaching health care related courses will be instrumental in this debate, explaining why she decided to seek the opinion of a sample of 18 professors regarding this issue. The purpose of this paper is to report on the results of this research.

Qualitative methodology, specially grounded theory, was used in this study that sought to explore the views of 18 full‐time professors who teach health care policy and administration in Northeast Pennsylvania about age‐based rationing of health care. Qualitative research is very useful uncovering the views of individuals as they relate to their experiences. In the study, professors were asked 14 questions by the author, four of these being demographic. The remaining ten questions, open ended ones, sought the opinions of these professors about their support or opposition to age‐based rationing.

The author's interviews of those 18 professors and the analysis of the responses, which revealed the complexity and multidimensional nature of the issue, led to the emergence of eight different themes.

The author used a qualitative method of research, interviewing 18 professors, to uncover personal views not previously published.

The United States’ population is rapidly aging. As older people require more expensive medical and nursing attention, health-care/nursing costs keep rising, to the extent that they are not sustainable. As a result, the USA is faced with an ethical dilemma. While egalitarian ethical principles and the provisions of the American Nurses Association (ANA) code of ethics require the provision of medical/nursing care to everyone regardless of age, severity of disease and productivity, utilitarians view that as impossible. Assuming that provisions ANA’s codes of ethics are the same as ethical principles, this paper aims to discuss the debate between those two sides in detail.

The paper, viewing the rise of health-care/nursing costs as the cause of the above ethical dilemma, discusses Daniel Callahan’s utilitarian argument that, given the ever-rising health/nursing costs as a percentage of GDP, the USA will be forced to ration health care/nursing on the basis of age. The ethical arguments opposing Callahan’s arguments will also be presented.

While the debate between those two viewpoints is bond to continue, some writers have tried to find a compromise, a solution by assuming that, through efficiency, health/nursing costs can be lowered, making Callahan’s age-based rationing unnecessary.

This paper is original as it, by including nursing costs as an inseparable component of health-care costs, makes the aforementioned debate applicable to nursing care.

Few issues in business ethics are as polarizing as the practice of risk classification and underwriting in the insurance industry. Theorists who approach the issue from a background in economics often start from the assumption that policy-holders should be charged a rate that reflects the expected loss that they bring to the insurance scheme. Yet theorists who approach the question from a background in philosophy or civil rights law often begin with a presumption against so-called “actuarially fair” premiums and in favor of “community rating,” in which everyone is charged the same price. This paper begins by examining and rejecting the three primary arguments that have been given to show that actuarially fair premiums are unjust. It then considers the two primary arguments that have been offered by those who wish to defend the practice of risk classification. These arguments overshoot their target, by requiring a “freedom to underwrite” that is much greater than the level of freedom enjoyed in most other commercial transactions. The paper concludes by presenting a defense of a more limited right to underwrite, one that grants the legitimacy of the central principle of risk classification, but permits specific deviations from that ideal when other important social goods are at stake.

Equality of opportunity (EOp) for health is defined and advocated as the right conceptualization of equity in the allocation of health care resources. EOp is contrasted with the traditional view that equity consists in “horizontal equity,” a state in which all persons in a society with similar health needs receive similar amounts of medical resources. We argue the horizontal equity is neither sufficient nor necessary for distributive justice in this domain. The EOp view holds individuals partially responsible for the quality of lifestyle that they live, in so far as it affects their health, but compensates individuals for the effect on health of circumstances beyond their control, including the effect of circumstances on their lifestyle. EOp generally recommends a distribution of medical resources that is more egalitarian than the utilitarianism recommends, but less egalitarian than the (Rawlsian) maximin view recommends. An example is computed to illustrate the difference between opportunity equalizing and utilitarian health delivery policies.

To understand the relationship of social justice ideas to the role of a public library and its organizational members, particularly in terms of how information services are developed to meet the needs of patrons. Additionally, this research also examines the relationship between public library organizational rhetoric and the social justice ideas used by organizational members.

Uses a single case study, mixed-method approach informed by Yin (2013) with semi-structured interviews of library staff, text analysis of organizational rhetoric (mission statement and strategic plan), observation of the library’s Board of Trustees and an emic-etic content analysis method developed in Dadlani and Todd (2014, 2016a, 2016b).

Some findings include that both utilitarian and egalitarian distributions of service were used, sometimes one replacing the other based on the supply-demand of the situation. In terms of what is meant by equality, there is a utilitarian idea to the use of resources, those geographically closer are given more benefits, at the same time, the library fulfills needs based on something like an equality of capabilities approach, where the basic functionings of the community are central. Unexpectedly, a tension was observed between the ideas of the library as an unbiased and neutral information conduit and the library as a community hub that also espouses particular cultural/public values. Importantly, it was found that social justice ideas, like equality, had significantly different meanings across members of the library staff, thereby highlighting the contestable nature of social justice concepts.

This research provides a methodological example of how the extant philosophical literature on social justice concepts can be used to analyze libraries. It also provides a structured approach to understanding the role of social justice in different forms of librarianship and may be applicable in other types of information intensive organizations (government agencies, corporate information centers, for example).

Those who were responsible for the establishment of the Commonwealth Council for Educational Administration (CCEA) in the early 1960s and 1970s were clearly leaders. All had vision, were entrepreneurial and tenacious, sensitive to situational and political pressures and highly ethical in their relationships with others. Yet each displayed a unique style of leader behaviour. Thus the three key elements in their behavioural setting were the traits they possessed, the sensitivity to the environment they demonstrated and the style they adopted. Ansoff has described contemporary society as being typified by paradox, ambiguity and risk. These characteristics continue to typify the business and government environments of advanced Western nations. Are the characteristics of leader behaviour demonstrated by CCEA′s founders adequate to meet the turbulence of future societal change? The answer is “yes”. When the extensive literature on leader behaviour is analysed and the politics of scholarship are taken into account, those three key elements remain. This is reflected in Zehnder′s recent address to the Australian Institute of Directors with its highlighting of leadership as a function of intuition, ethics, entrepreneurship and vision and in the recent emphasis by several writers on “transformative leadership”.

Germany has lower posttax income inequality than the United States and hence is doing better according to a strict egalitarian fairness ideal. On the other hand, the United States is doing better than Germany according to a libertarian fairness ideal, which states that people should be held fully responsible for their income. However, most people hold intermediate (responsibility-sensitive) positions, and this paper studies fairness of the income distributions in Germany and the United States according to these positions.

We find that only if peoples’ preferences are characterized by substantial degree of individual responsibility, the United States is considered less unfair than Germany. If we hold people responsible for the unexplained variation, the United States is considered fairer than Germany for all levels of responsibility sensitiveness. If we, on the other hand, demand compensation for the unexplained variation, Germany is fairer than the United States for all levels of responsibility. The latter may be seen as the preferred approach as it follows a “benefit of the doubt” strategy. To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first cross-country fairness comparison based on responsibility-sensitive ideals.