Normative Perspectives for Ethical and Socially Responsible Marketing

This article presents a normative set of recommendations for elevating the practice of marketing ethics. The approach is grounded in seven essential perspectives involving multiple aspirational dimensions implicit in ethical marketing. More important, each basic perspective (BP), while singularly useful, is also integrated with the other observations as well as grounded in the extant ethics literature. This combination of BPs, adhering to the tenets of normative theory postulation, generates a connective, holistic approach that addresses some of the major factors marketing managers should consider if they desire to conduct their marketing campaigns with the highest levels of ethics and social responsibility

Global Justice and Climate Change: Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Practice

Climate change is one of the most significant problems facing humanity today. As scientific evidence continues to accumulate, it is becoming increasingly apparent that climate change requires an urgent global response. Without such a response, rising sea levels, severe weather patterns, and the spread of deadly diseases threaten the lives of both present and future generations. And yet, action on climate change has been characterized by lack of progress and break downs in communication. It is widely assumed that the global response to climate change has so far been inadequate. Alarmed by this lack of progress, the thesis aims to explore exactly why we should consider current global climate change action as inadequate, and what normative principles must underwrite a more just global response to climate change. More specifically, the thesis will conduct a global justice based assessment of multilateral and networked climate change governance. This normative assessment of current practice is not only urgently needed in order to clarify the inadequacies of the climate change response, but also serves the purpose of bridging the gap between political theorists who concern themselves with the ethical dimensions of climate change, and scholars who focus on climate change governance practice. The thesis aims to illustrate that climate justice theorists can provide normative insights into current practice, which can inform the field of climate change governance and ultimately contribute to assessing how the response to climate change can become more just. In this way, the thesis provides a starting point for a discussion between two fields, which have traditionally been concerned with complementary, yet separate, research agendas. The thesis demonstrates that the bridging of these two fields can underwrite future thinking about a more just global response to climate change

Developing teacher-researchers: a practice-based Masters of Education

Teachers’ work can increasingly be described as knowledge work conducted in a rapidly changing globalised, digital environment. In order to support contemporary teachers’ work, professional learning needs to be grounded in the contexts and identities of teachers, while engaging them in theoretical discourse. Such an approach challenges traditional approaches to the offering of a Masters in Education by distance learning. This presentation reports on a university-educational authority partnership designed to enable practising teachers to gain Masters qualifications through practice-based ethnographic data collection and research. The context of this partnership is a new professional learning program being offered by Deakin University, Australia and the Catholic Education Office Melbourne. Teachers plan and conduct projects in which they identify an issue to be addressed at their school; research the issue identified; develop and implement an intervention to address the issue; and report on the intervention. Teachers have the option of gaining credit towards a Masters of Education by submitting their work for formal assessment. The participants in this mixed methods study are teachers who are undertaking the post-graduate units embedded in a professional learning program. Teachers are invited to undertake anonymous online pre- and post- surveys with both qualitative and quantitative data collected. Data is also collected through teacher interviews and collection of classroom artefacts including planning documents and work samples. Initial findings illustrate that a practice-based approach to Masters studies engages teachers as creators rather than reproducers of knowledge. The use of a range of print and new digital media both within the design and operation of an online learning environment and pedagogies for effective adult professional learning enable flexible and creative pedagogical responses and knowledge creation by teachers

Co-engineering participatory water management processes: theory and insights from Australian and Bulgarian interventions

Broad-scale, multi-governance level, participatory water management processes intended to aid collective decision making and learning are rarely initiated, designed, implemented, and managed by one person. These processes mostly emerge from some form of collective planning and organization activities because of the stakes, time, and budgets involved in their implementation. Despite the potential importance of these collective processes for managing complex water-related social-ecological systems, little research focusing on the project teams that design and organize participatory water management processes has ever been undertaken. We have begun to fill this gap by introducing and outlining the concept of a co-engineering process and examining how it impacts the processes and outcomes of participatory water management. We used a hybrid form of intervention research in two broad-scale, multi-governance level, participatory water management processes in Australia and Bulgaria to build insights into these coengineering processes. We examined how divergent objectives and conflict in the project teams were negotiated, and the impacts of this co-engineering on the participatory water management processes. These investigations showed: (1) that language barriers may aid, rather than hinder, the process of stakeholder appropriation, collective learning and skills transferal related to the design and implementation of participatory water management processes; and (2) that diversity in co-engineering groups, if managed positively through collaborative work and integrative negotiations, can present opportunities and not just challenges for achieving a range of desired outcomes for participatory water management processes. A number of areas for future research on co-engineering participatory water management processes are also highlighted

Transforming the Urban Educator: The Power of Reflection and Its Effect on Teacher Perception, Essential Teaching Dispositions, and Teacher Leadership

To establish the grounds for successful cultural change, within a large urban middle school, members of a school elected Teacher Leadership Team (TLT) engaged in the collaborative sharing and analysis of personal cultural perceptions and essential teaching dispositions. Through the TLT inquiry support team, and their participation in perception interviews and personal narrative reflections, teacher leaders identified and prioritized the successes, challenges, and essential dispositions that are needed to begin the cultural change of Redwood Middle School. Through the implementation of a distributive leadership model, an increase in staff collaboration and support has already begun to plant the seed of positive change. This study proposes the further development of a school-wide distributive leadership model to guide and support the journey of cultural change. This collaborative ethnographic case study honors the educator as researcher, and it is through the sharing of perceptions and narratives that significant insight is gained to begin the process of a true school transformation

The bioethical and human rights challenges surrounding the HIV testing of women in South Africa and other sub-Saharan African countries

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, in fulfilment for the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Johannesburg, 2015The purpose of this thesis is to explore the current HIV testing protocols, especially provider-initiated counselling and testing, otherwise known as ‘routine testing,’ under implementation in sub-Saharan African countries and examine whether and how they transgress bioethical and philosophical principles and the human rights of women in the current context of the highly stigmatised HIV epidemic. The research method employed is mainly a literature review partly based on my 20 years of experience working on HIV testing programmes and programmatic evaluations in sub-Saharan African countries, from which earlier background papers and this thesis topic grew. Included in this primarily moral examination are the historical philosophical and present bioethical principles of autonomy, beneficence, justice, and non-maleficence, the philosophical right to self-preservation, and relevant human rights principles and recent examples of human rights infringements related to the HV testing, in particular, the routine testing of women in sub-Saharan African countries. A conclusion is reached that where HIV testing is practiced in sub-Saharan African countries, and anywhere for that matter, without alignment with the bioethical principles of respect for autonomy, justice, beneficence, and non-maleficence, and without protecting the human rights of individuals testing for HIV, including the provision of pre- and post-test counselling, implementing the informed consent process, maintaining the confidentiality of test results, and making referrals to other services available to all individuals who test negative or positive, as well as making antiretroviral therapy (ART) available to anyone who tests HIV-positive, such testing is unethical. Thus I posit that without the aforementioned conditions, the routine testing for HIV of all individuals presenting to a clinic for healthcare—and the routine testing of all pregnant women for HIV—amidst the highly stigmatised HIV epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa is unethical

A Study of Six Nations Public Library: Rights and Access to Information

Contemporary Indigenous public libraries play a critical role in providing access to information in Indigenous communities. My research focuses on the relationship between rights and access to information for individuals and communities within the context of Indigenous public libraries. I use a qualitative case study methodology of the Six Nations Public Library (SNPL) in Ohsweken, Ontario, Canada. Interviews were conducted with SNPL patrons and library management and with off-reserve participants from government and library associations. I analyse four themes, library governance, rights, library value and access to information, which are outcomes of the SNPL case study findings. This analysis reveals that access to information at SNPL is embedded in a complex inter-relationship of governance that limits funding, recognition and support for this library. This research also demonstrates that access to information is an Indigenous cultural right through international human rights, including the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. However, a key finding is that Canadian human rights and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 1982, do not support the full access to information at Six Nations Public Library and requires more discussion. In addition, while access to information for this library is an Indigenous cultural right, this is not recognized by the federal government in Canada because it is not included in the mandate of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) (as it was previously known) charged with administering the controversial Indian Act, 1876, and funding social and economic development on reserves. While the case study shows that Six Nations Public Library promotes culture, literacy, well-being, social justice and Indigenous cultural rights, without access to resources including through federal funding Indigenous librarians struggle to meet the information needs of their communities. I use the key findings from this case study to evaluate an adapted capability approach framework based on the human rights and poverty work of Amartya Sen and Polly Vizard. This framework incorporates substantive freedoms, and meta-rights and their obligations and the degree to which they support access to information as a basic human need. This dissertation contributes to scholarship by demonstrating that Library and Information Science discourse is limited regarding the relationship between rights and access to information at Indigenous public libraries

Co-engineering Participatory Water Management Processes: Theory and Insights from Australian and Bulgarian Interventions

Broad-scale, multi-governance level, participatory water management processes intended to aid collective decision making and learning are rarely initiated, designed, implemented, and managed by one person. These processes mostly emerge from some form of collective planning and organization activities because of the stakes, time, and budgets involved in their implementation. Despite the potential importance of these collective processes for managing complex water-related social-ecological systems, little research focusing on the project teams that design and organize participatory water management processes has ever been undertaken. We have begun to fill this gap by introducing and outlining the concept of a co-engineering process and examining how it impacts the processes and outcomes of participatory water management. We used a hybrid form of intervention research in two broad-scale, multi-governance level, participatory water management processes in Australia and Bulgaria to build insights into these coengineering processes. We examined how divergent objectives and conflict in the project teams were negotiated, and the impacts of this co-engineering on the participatory water management processes. These investigations showed: (1) that language barriers may aid, rather than hinder, the process of stakeholder appropriation, collective learning and skills transferal related to the design and implementation of participatory water management processes; and (2) that diversity in co-engineering groups, if managed positively through collaborative work and integrative negotiations, can present opportunities and not just challenges for achieving a range of desired outcomes for participatory water management processes. A number of areas for future research on co-engineering participatory water management processes are also highlighted