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The boundaries between the for-profit sector and traditional nonprofit library focused information professions are blurring. As these information professions grow, more of their future leaders will be graduates from business management programs as opposed to library and information programs. There is a general perception that for-profit employers demand leaders who are analytical and achievement oriented. As a result, business schools have been criticized for focusing their curricula on transaction-based economics with less focus on preparing leaders to do what is right. So, how do we better prepare business graduates to face ethical dilemmas as they move forward to build and support information organizations of the future? This chapter reports the results of a study which explored the viewpoints of American thought leaders about ethics in the context of business programs. A total of 32 subjects from the corporate and higher education settings were interviewed. Results of the study revealed five major themes related to how educators can better prepare our next generation of leaders. Those themes were: (1) insights related to the student; (2) insights pertaining to the goal of business ethics education and curricula; (3) specific cases and experiences to include in ethics course(s); (4) explicit student learning outcomes; and (5) the specific role, skill, and ability of professors teaching ethics courses. While this chapter deals primarily with the academic scope of ethics, the study also explored personal views about ethics by the interviewees. Understanding how foundational ethical beliefs and awareness develop then informs the broader discussion of ethics.

How do students comment on ethical principles, which principles are important for their awareness of librarianship, how do they understand the relevance of human rights for their future work?

The case study presents the results of a lecture on information rights and ethics with 50 Master students in library and information sciences (LIS) at the University of Lille (France) in 2014–2015. Students were asked to comment on the core principles of the International Federation of Library Association (IFLA) Code of Ethics.

The students see the library as a privileged space of access to information, where the librarian takes on the function of a guardian of this specific individual freedom—a highly political role and task. This opinion is part of a general commitment to open access and free flowing resources on Internet. They emphasize the social responsibility toward the society as a whole but most of all toward the individual patron as a real person, member of a cultural community, a social class or an ethnic group. With regard to Human Rights, the students interpret the IFLA Code mainly as a code of civil, political, and critical responsibility to endorse the universal right of freedom of expression. They see a major conflict between ethics and policy. The findings are followed by some recommendations for further development of LIS education, including internship, transversality, focus on conflicts and the students’ cognitive dissonance and teaching of social skills, in terms of work-based solidarity and collective choices.

The chapter is qualitative research based on empirical data from a French LIS Master program.

While technical environment starts from western culture which is mainly based on Christianity, the associated ethical concern of the operation of technology can be varied depending on the sociotechnical environment and/or organizational culture. Ethical standards – irrespective of religions – can be used to govern the appropriate behaviors of employees in technical environment. Religions, on the other hand can also act as an apparatus of good ethical motivation that can guide individuals in society/environment. Different religions might use different apparatus(s) to define the good code of ethics. This chapter shows similarities in the ethical teaching dictated by different holy books (mainly Islam, Judaism, and Christianity). The reason is to generalize that religion, as an apparatus of ethics, can be a factor toward ethical behavior supporting the man-made code of ethics in organizations which can also lead to support the definition of the proposed framework ethical behaviors.

Comparison between verses from holy books shows similarities in ethical dimension between religions (mainly Islam and Christianity). After showing the similarities, this chapter proposes a framework of ethical behaviors (FEB) to measure employees’ ethical standards in specific organization where technical environment like cloud computing was used as an example in this chapter.

Verses from both holy books (Quran and Bible–inclusive of the old testament) shows similarities in ethical standards. This similarity considered as a component toward the proposed framework for ethical behaviors in organizations where religion can be an important factor in multi-national, multi-cultural type of organizations. The proposed FEB can be used to identify possible environmental factors acting as moderators while religion and family values acting as mediators toward behaving ethically within technical environment.

The proposed framework can be used as a guide to identify ethical versus unethical employees where a mechanism to measure is proposed. Religious standard concluded out of the similarity section was used as a component of this framework.

The added value of utilizing good religious-based ethical standards is that employees/IT professionals will have an internal drive (on the top of corporate ethical standards) toward ethical behavior in such environment.

The purpose of this paper is fourfold: first, to provide the first systematic study on the ethics of blockchain, mapping its main socio-technical challenges in technology and applications; second, to identify ethical issues of blockchain; third, to propose a conceptual framework of blockchain ethics study; fourth, to discuss ethical issues for stakeholders.

The paper employs literature research, research agenda and framework development.

Ethics of blockchain and its applications is essential for technology adoption. There is a void of research on blockchain ethics. The authors propose a first theoretical framework of blockchain ethics. Research agenda is proposed for future search. Finally, the authors recommend measures for stakeholders to facilitate the ethical adequacy of blockchain implementations and future Information Systems (IS) research directions. This research raises timely awareness and stimulates further debate on the ethics of blockchain in the IS community.

First, this work provides timely systematic research on blockchain ethics. Second, the authors propose the first research framework of blockchain ethics. Third, the authors identify key research questions of blockchain ethics. Fourth, this study contributes to the understanding of blockchain technology and its societal impacts.

This paper aims to argue that traditional ethical theories used in disaster response may be inadequate and particularly strained by the emergence of new technologies and social media, particularly with regard to privacy. The paper suggests incorporation of care ethics into the disaster ethics nexus to better include the perspectives of disaster affected communities.

This paper presents a theoretical examination of privacy and care ethics in the context of social media/digitally enhanced disaster response.

The paper proposes an ethics of care can fruitfully by used by public and private agents in disaster management. Its relational ontology restores the priority of fostering good relationships between stakeholders, thus giving central importance to values such as transparency and trust and the situated knowledge of disaster-affected communities.

This paper presents theoretical research and is limited by the availability of empirical data. There is opportunity for future research to evaluate the impact of a conscious adoption of an ethics of care by disaster management agents.

An ethos of care ethics needs to be mainstreamed into disaster management organisations and digital initiatives.

This paper argues that power asymmetry in disaster response renders the public vulnerable to abuse, and that the adoption of care ethics can support disaster management agents in recognising this power imbalance and wielding power responsibly.

This paper examines the applicability of an alternative ethical framework to novel circumstances.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the impact of Chinese culture on the information ethics perception gaps between Chinese and American students.

Using a qualitative approach, this study utilizes Kohlberg’s Cognitive Moral Development model and an open-ended questionnaire to measure and analyze the gaps among information ethics perceptions of students from Taiwan, Mainland China, Hong Kong, and the USA, and to assess the extent to which the gaps are influenced by Chinese culture.

Students’ perceptions of intellectual property, information accuracy, privacy, and accessibility (PAPA) are deeply influenced by national culture. Sub-cultures have significant impact on the perceptions. Political systems, history, and legal environment may also play a role in the differences of PAPA perceptions among the three Chinese societies. The study also revealed that accuracy and intellectual property are the most deficient areas of moral developments in both Chinese and American samples.

The sample sizes from Hong Kong and the USA were relatively small due to resource and time constraints. In addition, the subjects from Hong Kong and the USA were a little bit older than the subjects from Taiwan and Mainland China due to the fact that universities in HK and USA tend to have more non-traditional students than in universities in Mainland China and Taiwan. Second, the questionnaire is a limited means of studying moral reasoning because the results are likely to reflect espoused theory rather than theory-in-use.

The educational implication of this study calls for a renewed approach to educate students on the importance of information ethics for the sake of sustained economic development.

The novelty of this research lies in its interpretation of students’ PAPA perceptions and fresh insights from a Chinese guanxi perspective.

As the LIS field is being restructured world‐wide, a survey of key institutions and relevant literature confirms that ethics and its information age derivative “infoethics” are becoming important components of LIS research and teaching. LIS scholars and educators need to train students in value‐based skills appropriate for many information age challenges. In Europe LIS research and teaching will in addition need to adapt to the converging forces of the Bologna Agreement’s “European Higher Education Area”.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the differences and similarities between computer ethics, internet ethics and cyberethics as reflected in the contents of the published literature as well as the search trends on Google.

The paper opted for an informetrics approach, and more specifically content analysis, to investigate the inter-relationships between computer ethics, internet ethics and cyberethics. The data sources for this study included Google Trends, Google Scholar and the Web of Science citation indexes. Different search queries were used, depending on the structure of each data source, to extract the relevant data sets.

Using different methods and techniques to analyse the data, the paper provides an alternative means of investigating relationships among concepts. The findings indicate that there is still no clear distinction between the concepts in terms of subject and title terms used to describe the published literature on the three concepts, as well as the research areas where the three concepts are applied. Going by the current trend, the paper envisages that cyberethics may, in the future, become a broader term to include computer ethics and internet ethics.

The data sources that were selected for the study might have not been comprehensive in the coverage of the published literature on the three concepts and therefore there is need for further research, which will expand the scope of the data sources.

The paper’s findings may apply in the practice of indexing and abstracting as well as thesaurus construction as far as the three terms are concerned.

The paper offers an alternative technique that can be used to investigate relationships among concepts. The value of the paper could include curriculum development of programmes dealing with ethical issues that arise when developing and using computers and related technologies.

Communication ethics, this paper argues, is a discipline ready for application to communication management and is particularly relevant as we enter an “age of information”. With a moral foundation firmly set in the social and human sciences, communication ethics offers managers a means to face unpredictable futures with greater certainty and purpose. This paper outlines an approach in which all decision making and its communication are understood as having an ethical grounding. Such an application empowers managers to act with integrity across the spectrum of their varied communication roles: through management and internal communications, public affairs and marketing; in advertising, media and publishing, and in the use of information technology. Positioned independently from the professional bodies of communication, an interdisciplinary ethics offers practitioners skills and moral frameworks that can be shared across professions and used to compare and evaluate their practice. This paper concludes by presenting a model of communication ethics that individual managers can use to prescribe a more sensitive and dynamic human‐ethical environment.

The purpose of this paper is to explore an emerging ethical theory for the Digital Age – Flourishing Ethics – which will likely be applicable in many different cultures worldwide, addressing not only human concerns but also activities, decisions and consequences of robots, cyborgs, artificially intelligent agents and other new digital technologies.

In the past, a number of influential ethical theories in Western philosophy have focused upon choice and autonomy, or pleasure and pain or fairness and justice. These are important ethical concepts, but we consider “flourishing” to be a broader “umbrella concept” under which all of the above ideas can be included, plus additional ethical ideas from cultures in other regions of the world (for example, Buddhist, Muslim, Confucianist cultures and others). Before explaining the applied approach, this study discusses relevant ideas of four example thinkers who emphasize flourishing in their ethics writings: Aristotle, Norbert Wiener, James Moor and Simon Rogerson.

Flourishing Ethics is not a single ethical theory. It is “an approach,” a “family” of similar ethical theories which can be successfully applied to humans in many different cultures, as well as to non-human agents arising from new digital technologies.

This appears to be the first extended analysis of the emerging flourishing ethics “family” of theories.