GIG news
2006
August: Change of name
In August the Group for Research into Education, Equity and Work changed its name to the Group for Research in Integrity and Governance. The new name reflects the group's focus areas of corporate governance, integrity, applied ethics, corporate social responsibility, management systems and university governance.
June: Visit of Prof Larry Hinman
Prof Lawrence (Larry) Hinman is a leading ethicist and philosopher from the University of San Diego. His interest and writing is in the area of applied ethics, and he has recently published both academic articles and media pieces on search engines, the ethical issues involved in end-of-life decision making such as the Terri Schiavo case, and in the teaching of ethics across the curriculum both at university and school. He participated in four seminars during his visit to UniSA:
- Values and ethics across the curriculum: three current perspectives, 7 June, Magill Campus. A seminar with Dr Sue Knight and Dr Carol Collins (on the Australian values education framework), Prof Larry Hinman and Dr Howard Harris (on teaching ethics in a management degree). Prof Hinman spoke on lessons from 'The Ethics Project', a collaborative project to promote ethics throughout the school curriculum.
- Ethical issues of academic integrity, 8 June, Magill Campus. This presentation considered academic integrity from five ethical perspectives (Kantian, utilitarian, virtue ethics, feminist ethics and multicultural ethics), and also outlined the 'Three P's' of academic integrity: prevention, policing and punishment.
- Why Google matters: implications for privacy and markets, School of Commerce External Scholars Series seminar, 8 June, City West Campus. Prof Hinman discussed two factors that make the increasingly central role of search engines problematic. First, the search process and the ranking system are not transparent. Second, although users depend on search engines for finding information, the users are not the customers. It is the advertisers who pay money to the search engine companies, and this creates a tangled web of responsibility and accountability.
- Lessons from the Terri Schiavo case: ethics, end-of-life
decisions and post-coma responsiveness, presented by the Ethics
Centre of South Australia, the Hawke Research Institute for Sustainable
Societies and St Paul’s City Ministry, 9 June, Scots Centre, Adelaide.
2004
2004 was a successful year for books by GIG members:
- Ian Richards, Quandaries and quagmires: exploring journalism ethics, UNSW Press, Sydney
- Chris Provis, Ethics and organisational politics, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK
- Martin Shanahan and Gerry Treuren (eds), Globalisation: Australian regional perspectives, Wakefield Press, Kent Town, SA