Ethics in Science and Technology
Year:2010 | Volume:5 | Issue:1-2|Papers Count:14

Background: Construction, application, complexity and ever-increasing importance of models of operations research (OR) raises many ethical questions about ethical standards, proper relationship between the model builders and users and the model builders’ professional responsibility to the results of the model. Operations research is a profession that its practitioners have a significant effect on society. Therefore, establishment of an ethical basis and a shared culture between OR practitioners is required.Methods: In this article while dealing with the place of ethical codes in modeling, we try to present some techniques to cope with ethical pitfalls which OR practitioners may confront in their work with regard to relationships between decision-makers, OR practitioners, decision-making problem, decision support tools, model and society. Moreover, we present the ethical challenges of OR practitioners.Results: The present study offers suitable responses to questions which are based on existing relationships in the basic model of moral relationships between the elements involved in the process of modeling.Conclusion: Codification of a code of ethics and a shared culture between Modeling practitioners and following the tenets of good practice of OR is the first step in ethical performance. Moreover, OR practitioners need a better training in ethics to deal with ethical challenges. Such training could lead OR practitioners to establish their own ethical values and give them a basis to develop them further in the course of their commitments.

Background: The main purpose of this paper is to evaluate the necessity of including the accounting ethics course in accounting curriculum. Although a part of ethical principles of accounting profession is included in auditing course, it seems, according to its importance, that this subject is very sensitive and needs more attention. Therefore it should be presented as a new course (3 credits) in accounting curriculum.Methods: This research has been done in 2 steps. At first, the necessity of including accounting ethics course in the curriculum of BS of accounting in Iran was examined. Then, a survey was conducted to determine whether accounting ethics is included in the curriculum of 150 top-world universities or not. Finally, a sample course design was presented.Results: Our findings confirm the necessity of including the accounting ethics course in curriculum of BS courses in accounting.Conclusions: Because of importance of public confidence for accounting profession, and based on the opinion of accounting experts and teachers, it is recommended that the accounting ethics course should be added to accounting curriculum in BS courses.

Background: Since nearly all law context is either ethical directly or ethics related in their goal, apt and supporting use of each one might be practically helpful. Therapeutic affairs are not exceptional in this figure. The proper recognition of ethics and law relation and to be familiar with the grounds of each may be gainful in the right conducting of people’s expectations and our practical programming. In this article we have tried within the knowledge of foundations of ethics and law explain the warranty of medical ethics by medical law.Methods: In this article based on the understanding of the foundations of ethics and law and their relationship have been tried to scrutinized different aspects of medical law and medical ethics. Also to add with introduction of the basic relation of both, their similarities and differences have been attempted to explore the guaranty of medical ethics by medical law.Conclusion: Although medical ethics and medical law are different in some aspects such as volitional doing, goal, source etc. but everyone without the other is defective and in an affirmative claim inconsequential, ineffective and invalid. In this way, applying medical law to medical ethics for the purpose of executive stabilization and security particularly in those cases unethical behaviors might lead to irretrievable injury to the folk and public health is practical and necessary. A brief look at the little available and health-specific legal ratifications in the Law of Iran -such as the embryo donation Act or the Transplantation Act confirms the government efforts in this way. This work also underlines the extention of medical ethics and its inclusion in laws and regulations; meanwhile, does not constitute the inclution inconsistent with ethical values.

Background: Deontology is one of three classic moral theories, among virtue ethics and teleology. Because of the plurality of deontological theories, there isn't any unique definition of deontology which was accepted by all of the philosophers. Most commentators characterize deontology as the class of non-teleological theories. Deontological theories deny what teleological theories affirm. It is widely agreed that a theory is teleological if it justifies the right, moral duty, or obligation, on the grounds that it promotes what is good. But deontologists reject it. Against the common thought, it seems that the rate of deontology isn't only to maximize the good. There are some definitions of deontology which is not comprehensive in my opinion: a committed to principle of justice, non-teleological, nonoptimizing, rule center and absolutist theory or a theory which respect to the persons and values.Methods: In this paper, I dealt with definitions of Deontology with descriptive-analytic method and after the analysis and critique of them, attempted to reach a comprehensive definition of Deontology.Conclusion: Finally I concluded that Rawls’s definition of deontology is a good one. In his definition, “teleological” are only those theories which are committed to both following claims: (1) The good is defined independently from the right; (2) The right is defined as that which maximizes the good. Deontological theories, therefore, either do not specify the good independently from the right, or do not conceive of the right as that which maximizes the good. But Rawls’s definition is negative. It should be added to it, that deontological theories claim that the rightness or wrongness of actions depends on considerations other than maximizes the good, such as essence of action, generalization principle, divine command, social contract, human rights and personal will.

Background: Review of a journal article not only is a scientific action but also is an ethical behavior. Referees by accepting, rejecting or suggesting modifications to manuscripts, have a key role in reviewing process if scientific journals.This article focuses on the behavior of referees and norms of reviewing as subjects of research. So, we examine common norms related to reviewing process of articles, including recourses and criteria for referee selection, and responsibilities of referees as well as common defects and shortcomings of the reviewing reports of Iranian scientific journals.Methods: The research has followed a descriptive approach to investigate different aspects of reviewing process of Iranian scientific journals. According to its assumptions about the main variables in the situation of inquiry, it is an exploratory research. As a matter of analyses, it has followed quantitative survey method. We used a closed form questionnaire for data gathering from 245 Iranian scientific journals published under authority of Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology.Results: Findings of this research show that Iranian scientific journals use "editorial board" and "existing list of referees of journal" to select their referees more than other resources."Being well-known at subject scope of journal", "having a good back-log of quality review reports ", and "having experience as referee for scientific journals" are three most important criteria for selecting referees. According to our findings, the performance of young referees in "having order and punctuality", "being careful when reviewing manuscripts" and "giving useful comments for improving articles" are better than older referees.Conclusion: Iranian scientific journals would rather to use internal referees than external referees. Finally, we found that the most important deficiency in the behavior of Iranian referees is that they are reluctant in doing their job and its takes a long time to receive a referee report.

Background: Librarians are experts who collect and disseminate information. It is accepted that only having some needed skills to deal with information is not enough, but it necessitates humanistic high features and ethical conducts. Therefore, the aim of the present research was to study the viewpoint of librarians who are members of Iranian Library and Information Science Association in relation to professional codes of ethics.Methods: This applied research was done using descriptive survey method. The statistical population of this research included 1873 librarians who are members of Iranian Library and Information Science Association and their provincial branches (10 ones). To collect the data, a researcher-made questionnaire was used. The questionnaire was designed on the basis of some components and indices available in the related literature and librarians’ ethical codes of conduct.Results: According to research findings, in order of priority, components “being responsible towards self”, “the responsibility towards colleagues”, “the responsibility towards the profession”, “the responsibility towards users”, “the responsibility towards organization”, “the responsibility towards society”, and “the responsibility towards experts of other professions” were suggested to compile codes of professional ethics for Iranian librarians.Conclusions: Ultimately, final code of ethics intended by librarians who are members of Iranian Library and Information Science Associations in the form of seven components and thirty two principles was provided.

Background: As long time ago, ethic was considered in education of science and knowledge.In reality, we can say, the humanity and ethical principles are essential in science and education along with perseverance and effort. On the basis of this view, the purpose of research was to investigation the role of educational justice and ethic on scientific commitment and cheating among college students.Methods: This research is a correlation study. Research statistical population, were the total of students of psychology and educational sciences from Esfahan universities, from them 396 students were selected with the use of convenience sampling. Research instruments, were researcher made, including educational ethic questionnaire (with 8 items), educational justice questionnaire (including two subscales of justice and injustice with 28 items) and educational commitment and cheating (with 16 items). Data was analyzed with the use of Pearson’s correlation coefficient and mediation regression analysis.Results: Results revealed that there is positive significant relation between educational justices with educational ethic, but there are negative significant relations between educational ethic with educational injustice and cheating. Also there is negative significant relation between educational justices with cheating. The evidence of mediation regression analysis showed that, educational ethic plays a mediated role in relation between educational injustices with cheating.Conclusion: The findings of this research showed that in exist of educational ethic; the effect of educational injustice on cheating among students has been weakened. The weakened role of educational ethic on cheating is the subject which must be considered seriously.

Background: Ethic management has been considered due to increase unmoral behaviors in workplaces. There are several reasons which organizations are faced with them, e.g irresponsibility, lack of ethical beliefs, lack of organizational commitment, and so on.However, managers are powerful paradigms in any organization and their behavior can cause ethical performance enhancement, to increase effectiveness, productivity and employees’ job satisfaction. The main aim of this study is find out relationship between managers’ ethical behavior and employees’ job satisfaction in Kerman Islamic Azad Universities.Methods: This was descriptive study and used correlation method. The statistical population include of Azad Universities' managers and employees in Kerman province. To collect the data, it was used 2 questionnaires: ethical behavior and job satisfaction. It was used SPSS software to analyze data inclusive Coefficient of Correlation test (Pearson) and Regression Analysis test.Results: The findings of this study indicate that there was a positive relationship between managers’ ethical behavior and employees’ job satisfaction. Also there was relationship between managers’ responsibility, aggressive, justice and trusteeship and employees’ job satisfaction.Conclusion: It could be concluded that to perform managers’ ethical behaviors in workplace be caused to decrease stress and increase job satisfaction and effectiveness. Therefore, it is suggested to dominant ethical behaviors in workplace.

Background: Outsourcing is the most important approach for organizational development projects. This approach is very common in information technology development projects. The goal of this research is finding and prioritizing discordant instances with professional ethics in initiation, implementation and after implementation stages of organization enterprise information technology planning projects.Methods: The method of this research is mixed. Because of low number research in this field, three organizations that had enterprise architecture project experience choose for finding discordant instances with professional ethics in consultant firms. Then we created a questionnaire with our findings and sent it to thirty-five IT experts that had enterprise architecture project experiences. Twenty-one of them completed the questionnaire. Finally, Items prioritized according to average of responses.Results: We found twenty professional ethics pathology items in initiation, implementation and after implementation stages of enterprise architecture planning programs. Questionnaires analysis indicated high percentage of agreement with professional ethics discordant by IT consultant firms especially in initiation and after implementation stages.Conclusion: The main base of consultant firm’s behaviors is economic revenue instead of solving customer problems. The most amoral behaviors are in situations that result in decrease in cost or increase in income and contain economical result for consultants. Consulting firms prefer short-time benefits of projects to long term benefits of customer relationship and well known in industry.

Background: There is no doubt, today ethics in economic, business and industry is a basic topic. Among functional business areas, marketing and sales have been the most criticized functions in ethical frame. After-sales staffs are not under direct continuous supervision; rather, they are under constant pressure to reduce costs and are faced with additional temptations offered by the myriad opportunities for unethical behavior that the position invites. Various individual and organizational factors can influence the staff decisions to behave ethically or unethically. In this research, these factors investigate as determinants of individual and business ethical behavior of Iran khodro & Saipa servicemen. Individual factors are age, education and ethical values. Organizational factors are reward and punishment system, organizational ethical climate and turnover.Methods: In terms of nature, the research method is descriptive and correlative. Data was collected through questionnaire that includes 19 questions. To answer the research questions, 165 servicemen of Irankhodro and Saipa agencies were included in the survey and determinants of ethical behavior were tested using these samples.Results: Result suggests that ethical value, reward and punishment system, organizational ethical climate and turnover are important determinants of ethical behavior. However, education and age are not significantly related to ethical behavior.Conclusion: Due to the result of research it seems necessary that organizational managers should emphasize on individual and organizational factors and try to improve individual & business ethical behaviors and use process to enhance and reinforce it.

Background: Nowadays organizations are operating in a highly competitive global environment. Therefore, managers use different mechanisms such as downsizing of organizations, automation of works for promoting productivity of their organizations.Although these mechanisms are useful but one of the most important factors is committed and qualitative human Resources. During recent years Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) has been considered an effective factor in gaining employees commitment to the organization and relatively considerable researches have been focused on identifying effective factors for nurturing these behaviors. As a result, common factors such as contextual variables (group norms, organizational structure and culture) were identified for development of OCB. In this article, impact of employees’ impression of organizational justice on OCB in the National Iranian Oil Products Refining & Distribution Co was studied.Methods: in terms of purpose, the research method is applied and in terms of data collection, is descriptive- survey. In this article, organizational justice, including four dimensions (distributive, procedural, interactional and informational justice) and their impact on nurturing OCB, from employees' point of view, was investigated. Data were collected from employees of foregoing corporation and hypotheses were investigated by binominal test.Results: The results showed that employees’ impression of organizational justice including foregoing four dimensions, have impact on OCB. In ranking these dimensions interactional justice is first, distributive justice is second, informational justice is third and procedural justice is the last.Conclusion: Based on these results, it can be concluded that OCB can be influenced by employees’ impression of organizational justice.

Background: Research evidences showed that hindrance to ethical values is the leader's characteristic with the high effectiveness. These leaders through fair behaviors with their personnel's encourage them to improve their performance and tendency toward innovation and creativity. With this regard, this research was administered with the aim of studying the relationship between moral based leadership with intrinsic motivation for innovation and creativity at work.Methods: This research was a correlational research, which statistical population were the personnel of Haier factory. From this statistical population, 322 persons for participating to research were selected using stratified sampling. Research instruments were: ethical based leadership questionnaire with 6 items, intrinsic motivation for innovation with 5 items and involvement to creativity at work with 9 items. Data was analyzed with the use of Pearson's correlation coefficient, structural equation modeling and mediation regression analysis.Results: Findings showed that there are positive significant relations between moral based leadership with intrinsic motivation for innovation and involvement to creativity at work. The results of structural equation modeling and mediation regression analysis showed that intrinsic motivation played the role of complete mediator variable in relation between moral based leadership with involvement to creativity at work.Conclusion: The results of this research showed that in first place, moral based leadership affect intrinsic motivation for innovation and then intrinsic motivation for innovation through sequential process affect creativity at work.