Integrating sustainability into Project Management practices: the perspective of professional institutions

This is paper is based on a work in progress research project, therefore results and conclusions are preliminary.Synopsis: ‘Sustainability’ in its broadest meaning has acquired a great importance in modern society, and consequently influences almost every aspect of social life. This paper analyses the transformation that the project management profession is undergoing towards the integration of sustainability into its core values and practices.Research design: This research uses qualitative data from a mix of semi-structured interviews and archival evidence – professional bodies of knowledge,codes of ethics, newsletters, websites, social media platforms, blogs, onlinedatabases, and international standards – with the intention of answering thefollowing research question: ‘what is the influence of professional associationswith regard to the institutionalizing of sustainability practices into projectmanagement (PM) tools and techniques?’Main findings: There are different players which influence, in different ways, thePM profession. Our analysis reveals that the nature of these actors is veryheterogeneous, and the influence of the professional world of PM on theinstitutionalization of sustainable project management is manifested in thedifferent actions carried on by the entities we highlighted above. Therefore, theshift towards SPM is the result of the combination of each actor’s individualstrategy (Muzio, Brock, & Suddaby, 2013).Research implications: The analysis of sustainable project management (SPM) isaimed at contributing to the PM academic literature, describing thetransformation of PM practices, and to the practitioner literature, engaging withPM professional associations on the way they introduce the set of new practices

Grounding knowledge and normative valuation in agent-based action and scientific commitment

Philosophical investigation in synthetic biology has focused on the knowledge-seeking questions pursued, the kind of engineering techniques used, and on the ethical impact of the products produced. However, little work has been done to investigate the processes by which these epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical forms of inquiry arise in the course of synthetic biology research. An attempt at this work relying on a particular area of synthetic biology will be the aim of this chapter. I focus on the reengineering of metabolic pathways through the manipulation and construction of small DNA-based devices and systems synthetic biology. Rather than focusing on the engineered products or ethical principles that result, I will investigate the processes by which these arise. As such, the attention will be directed to the activities of practitioners, their manipulation of tools, and the use they make of techniques to construct new metabolic devices. Using a science-in-practice approach, I investigate problems at the intersection of science, philosophy of science, and sociology of science. I consider how practitioners within this area of synthetic biology reconfigure biological understanding and ethical categories through active modelling and manipulation of known functional parts, biological pathways for use in the design of microbial machines to solve problems in medicine, technology, and the environment. We might describe this kind of problem-solving as relying on what Helen Longino referred to as “social cognition” or the type of scientific work done within what Hasok Chang calls “systems of practice”. My aim in this chapter will be to investigate the relationship that holds between systems of practice within metabolic engineering research and social cognition. I will attempt to show how knowledge and normative valuation are generated from this particular network of practitioners. In doing so, I suggest that the social nature of scientific inquiry is ineliminable to both knowledge acquisition and ethical evaluations

Responsible Autonomy

As intelligent systems are increasingly making decisions that directly affect society, perhaps the most important upcoming research direction in AI is to rethink the ethical implications of their actions. Means are needed to integrate moral, societal and legal values with technological developments in AI, both during the design process as well as part of the deliberation algorithms employed by these systems. In this paper, we describe leading ethics theories and propose alternative ways to ensure ethical behavior by artificial systems. Given that ethics are dependent on the socio-cultural context and are often only implicit in deliberation processes, methodologies are needed to elicit the values held by designers and stakeholders, and to make these explicit leading to better understanding and trust on artificial autonomous systems.Comment: IJCAI2017 (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence

Designing Robots for Care: Care Centered Value-Sensitive Design

The prospective robots in healthcare intended to be included within the conclave of the nurse-patient relationship—what I refer to as care robots—require rigorous ethical reflection to ensure their design and introduction do not impede the promotion of values and the dignity of patients at such a vulnerable and sensitive time in their lives. The ethical evaluation of care robots requires insight into the values at stake in the healthcare tradition. What’s more, given the stage of their development and lack of standards provided by the International Organization for Standardization to guide their development, ethics ought to be included into the design process of such robots. The manner in which this may be accomplished, as presented here, uses the blueprint of the Value-sensitive design approach as a means for creating a framework tailored to care contexts. Using care values as the foundational values to be integrated into a technology and using the elements in care, from the care ethics perspective, as the normative criteria, the resulting approach may be referred to as care centered value-sensitive design. The framework proposed here allows for the ethical evaluation of care robots both retrospectively and prospectively. By evaluating care robots in this way, we may ultimately ask what kind of care we, as a society, want to provide in the futur

What is Moral Application? Towards a Philosophical Theory of Applied Ethics

The aim of this paper is to offer some philosophical remarks concerning the concept of moral application in applied ethics. In doing so, I argue in favour of a philosophical approach towards applied ethics as a unitary form of moral experience. In fact every form of applied ethics, no matter how specific, moves from a problem of application and tries to fill a gap between moral theory and practice. This essential unity of applied ethics as a moral phenomenon is of great philosophical interest, since it belongs to the core problem from which moral thinking itself originates. For this reason, what applied ethics may reveal to a philosophical inquiry could provide valuable insight into the nature of moral experience itself. This is why it is important to reflect on what applied ethics is and whether the way in which application is usually framed be ts the properties of moral experience or not. In the first section I submit some preliminary remarks concerning the theoretical requirements to any philosophical approach to applied ethics. In the second section I present how application is commonly understood in the applied ethics debate by discussing the deductive and the procedural models of application. Both models, however, draw upon a technological conception of application which fails to t the structure of moral experience. Finally, I brie y sketch out the main features and the future tasks of what seems to me to be the most promising approach to the issue, i.e., the hermeneutic concept of application

A Guided Tour Of Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics

In this Introduction, we aim to introduce the reader to the basic topic of this book. As part of this, we explain why we are using two different expressions (‘conceptual engineering’ and ‘conceptual ethics’) to describe the topics in the book. We then turn to some of the central foundational issues that arise for conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics, and finally we outline various views one might have about their role in philosophy and inquiry more generally

Responsible Innovation for Decent Nonliberal Peoples: A Dilemma?

It is hard to disagree with the idea of responsible innovation (henceforth, RI), as it enables policy-makers, scientists, technology developers, and the public to better understand and respond to the social, ethical, and policy challenges raised by new and emerging technologies. RI has gained prominence in policy agenda in Europe and the United States over the last few years. And, along with its rising importance in policy-making, there is also a burgeoning research literature on the topic. Given the historical context of which RI emerges, it should not be surprising that the current discourse on RI is predominantly based on liberal democratic values. Yet, the bias towards liberal democratic values will inevitably limit the discussion of RI, especially in the cases where liberal democratic values are not taken for granted. As such, there is an urgent need to return to the normative foundation of RI, and to explore the notion of ‘responsible innovation’ from nonliberal democratic perspectives. Against this background, this paper seeks to demonstrate the problematic consequences of RI solely grounded on or justified by liberal democratic values. This paper will cast the argument in the form of a dilemma to be labelled as The Decent Nonliberal Peoples’ Dilemma and use it to illustrate the problems of the Western bias

Mobile learning: a meta-ethical taxonomy

In this paper I discuss some of the ethical issues relating to the use of mobile technologies in education. I argue that the frames of reference used by educators and technologists fail to capture the nature, scope and impact of ethical issues in mobile learning. A taxonomy of ethical issues based on dominant positions in meta-ethical moral theory is proposed. Using categories from the Mobile Technologies in Lifelong Learning (MOTILL) project, I show how this taxonomy can be applied in such a way as to facilitate understanding of ethical issues in mobile learning

Seeing social enterprise through the theoretical conceptualisation of ethical capital

Objectives: Current conceptualisations of social enterprise fail to fully satisfy an understanding of the movement. A focus on the economic implies a business model where deep tensions lie. A focus on social capital offers a different frame of reference, yet both these conceptualisations fail to fully identify the phenomena that is social enterprise. The objective of this paper seeks to fill that gap. Ethical capital is offered here as the missing conceptualisation in the field of social enterprise. Prior work: Pearce (2003) describes social enterprises as part of the third system, closer to the first system (private business), than the second system (public provision), yet primarily social and secondly a business. Social Enterprises are described as trading organisations in a market (Pearce 2003). A focus and operationalisation for social enterprises to be ‘business-like’ and ‘entrepreneurial’ is well documented (Leadbeater 1997; Dees 1998; Nicholls 2006b). Approach: Yet, if as part of the third sector, social enterprises are as Dart (2004) suggests; ‘blurring the boundaries between non-profit and profit’, but what blurs? What is compromised? What exactly is lost (or gained)? What challenges are there for social enterprises? And is a managerialist ideology taking precedence over the social? This paper provides a conceptual paper that seeks to outline the arguments on the table and develop an ethical capital conceptualisation of social enterprise. Results: This paper very much aims at starting the process of intellectual debate about the notion of ethical capital in social enterprises. The conclusions of this paper outline further research questions that need to be addressed in order to fully develop this concept. Implications: The current ideology of the neo-classical economic paradigm it is argued in the paper pursues interests towards the self and towards the erosion of the moral basis of association. The outcome leaves society with a problem of low ethical virtue - the implications of this paper are that social enterprises maximise ethical virtue beyond any other form of organisation and as such hold great value beyond their missions and values. Value: This paper offers great value in the understanding of social enterprise through fresh insight into the conceptualisation. A critical perspective to the current literature is taken and discussed but though the introduction of ethical capital this paper takes our understanding of the value of the sector into another light, providing practitioners, business support agencies and academics alike with a different level of conceptualisation that has not been explored before.</p

Voluntary measures, participation and fundamental rights in the governance of research and innovation

open1noResponsible Research and Innovation (RRI) aims at being a new governance paradigm aiming at steering the innovation process in a participative manner by constructing responsibility as a shared process between innovators and societal stakeholders, rather than a remedy to its failures. In order to achieve those goals, RRI implements a collaborative and inclusive process between innovators and societal stakeholders, widely based on the idea of granting a wider participation of societal actors to the innovation process. The purpose of steering the research and innovation processes through participation of societal actors is one of the distinguishing characteristics of RRI approach, which this way aims at taking into account the increasing political implications of scientific innovation. In order to do so, RRI model promotes governance strategies focusing on actors’ responsibilisation, which make appeal to actors’ capacity of reciprocal commitment towards some common goals not mandated by the law. Whilst voluntary non-binding regulatory approaches seem to be the ‘natural’ way to implement RRI in practice, nevertheless some concern remains about the scope and the limits of the contextual agreements reached each time, in particular their capacity to grant respect to some fundamental values, which are part of the European political and legal culture, and which are at risk to become freely re-negotiable within the RRI context if we base it only on the idea of autonomy, participation and consent. On the contrary, the paper argues that, if it wants to be coherent with its premises, RRI governance model needs to be complemented with a reference to fundamental rights, in order to give normative anchor-points to the confrontations between divergent views and values accompanying the development of technological innovation.openGorgoni, GuidoGorgoni, Guid