Banded Contracts, Mediating Institutions, and Corporate Governance: A Naturalist Analysis of Contractual Theories of the Firm

Fort and Noone relate business ethics to notions of transcendence found in nature and anthropology. They address the notion of contracts within corporate legal theory because contracts are used as a model both by those who advocate minimalist, agency business duties and by others who propound a broad business ethic

Technofixing the Future: Ethical Side Effects of Using AI and Big Data to meet the SDGs

While the use of smart information systems (the combination of AI and Big Data) offer great potential for meeting many of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), they also raise a number of ethical challenges in their implementation. Through the use of six empirical case studies, this paper will examine potential ethical issues relating to use of SIS to meet the challenges in six of the SDGs (2, 3, 7, 8, 11, and 12). The paper will show that often a simple “technofix”, such as through the use of SIS, is not sufficient and may exacerbate, or create new, issues for the development community using SIS

Algorithmic Food – How “Software is Eating the World”

In this paper, we explore how algorithms have empowered customers and promoted their preferences, while turning the sourcing of food from the purchase of a valuable good into a simple transaction. Focusing on the generative character of algorithms in the organizing of food, we study the changing nature of food retailing in the UK over the last 20 years. Theoretically we focus on the role that algorithms and thus technology have played in the transformation of the organizing of food and shed new light on how the latter has undergone tremendous changes. Our study enhances the current understanding of the impact big data has and will have on many organizational aspects and demonstrates that we need to have a better and more critical understanding of its consequences

SCIENCE AND GOVERNANCE IN THE NATIONAL SYSTEMS OF INNOVATION APPROACH

The aim of this article is to analyse the process of technology regulation as a sub-system in the National System of Innovation approach. Firstly, the article discusses the limits of the evolutionary approach by analysing the conflicts of interest involved in the regulation of technology. Then, by analysing with the experience of regulating biotechnology in countries of the European Union and Brazil the article discusses the practices of managing conflicts of interest through the respective regulation models. This discussion turns to the governance of science and technology as a fundamental element of operationalisation of policies for risk analysis and management.National Innovation System, power, technology, institutions, regulation, gmo

Walter J. Ong, S.J.: A retrospective

Communication Research Trends usually charts current communication research, introducing its readers to recent developments across the range of inquiry into communication. This issue, however, takes a different tack, looking back on the writings of Walter J. Ong, S.J., who died at the age of 90 in August 2003. Ong spent his scholarly career at Saint Louis University, where he served as University Professor of Humanities, the William E. Haren Professor of English, and Professor of Humanities in Psychiatry at the Saint Louis University School of Medicine. In a career that spanned 60 years, Ong published 16 books, 245 articles, and 108 reviews. In addition, he edited a number of works and gave interviews that further explored his wide-ranging interests. Readers interested in a full bibliography of Ong’s works should refer to the web site prepared by Professor Betty Youngkin at the University of Dayton, at http://homepages.udayton.edu/~youngkin/biblio.htm. From the perspective of an interest in connections among many areas of human knowledge over such a long career, he explored a whole gamut of activities by careful observations of the threads that run through western culture and by insightful analysis of what he observed. Communication forms one of those many threads in the West—perhaps the dominant one—and so it occupies a similar place in Ong’s work. The tapestry Ong weaves has, bit by bit, influenced thinking about communication as well as research. And so, Communication Research Trends looks back on the writings of Walter Ong, S.J