Ethics

The Tact of Social Media Monitoring

Focuses on opportunities for network conversation analysis to elicit valuable information about the social context of brand mentions. The challenge for marketers lies in how to use this information in a way that preserves trust with customers.

Tweet Ethics: Trust and Transparency in a Web 2.0 World

Don’t we all want to get the conversation going in a positive direction when it comes to representing the companies and clients we work for? And while there have, of course, always been incidents of deception in journalism and PR, somehow the advent of the Internet and social media has made this a much bigger issue. As PR representatives and journalists for individuals and companies learn more about the benefits of Twitter and other forms of social media, questions are arising about how—and how not—to present information.

Intellectual Property Responsibilities of Content Developers

As a technical writer, I develop content for the applications I'm supporting. Often that includes designing content, images, and multi-media to provide the best user experience possible. As content developers, however, we have a responsibility (both legal and moral) to ensure that the content we are using is being used properly and legally.

Ethics and Information

This article gives a detailed encyclopedic overview of the many areas and concepts that fall within the domain of information ethics. Thus, it offers brief synoptic remarks on, for example, privacy and peer review, rather than in-depth discussions of these topics, many of which have generated thousands of studies, articles, and monographic treatments.

Anti-Employer Blogging: An Overview of Legal and Ethical Issues

Anti-employer blogs, those which criticize companies or their employees, are posing significant legal and ethical challenges for corporations. The important legal issue is the conflict between the employee's legal duty of loyalty to the employer and the employee's right to free speech. Although U.S. and state law describes what an employee may or may not say in a blog, corporations should encourage employees to contribute to the process of creating clear, reasonable policies that will help prevent expensive court cases. The important ethical issue concerning anti-employer blogs is whether an employee incurs an ethical duty of loyalty. In this article, I conclude that there is no such ethical duty. The legal duty of loyalty, explained in a company-written policy statement that employees must endorse as a condition of employment, offers the best means of protecting the legal and ethical rights of both employers and employees.

Examining Editor-Author Ethics: Real-World Scenarios from Interviews with Three Journal Editors

Those who submit manuscripts to academic journals may benefit from a better understanding of how editors weigh ethics in their interactions with authors. In an attempt to ascertain and to understand editors' ethics, we interviewed 3 current academic journal editors of technical and/or business communication journals. We asked them about the ethical dilemmas they encountered while working with authors, whether the editors formally or informally followed a "code of ethics," and if they felt obligated to maintain any ethical codes in particular. In this article, we discuss the ethical dimensions of editorial practices using specific ethical scenarios provided by these three editors. We then analyze these scenarios using traditional ethical models in our field but also in terms of a less-known but powerful model of ethical analysis originally proposed by the philosopher C. S. Peirce. We argue that Peirce's "community of inquiry" ethics model best describes these journal editors' ethics when working with authors.

The Banality of Rhetoric? Assessing Steven Katz's "The Ethic of Expediency" Against Current Scholarship on the Holocaust

Since 1992, Steven Katz's "The Ethic of Expediency" on the rhetoric of technical communication during the Holocaust has become a reference point for discussions of ethics. But how does his thesis compare to current understandings of the Holocaust? As this article describes, Katz was in step with the trend two decades ago to universalize the lessons of the genocide but his thesis presents key problems for Holocaust scholars today. Against his assertion that pure technological expediency was the ethos of Nazi Germany, current scholarship emphasizes the role of ideology. Does that invalidate his thesis? Katz's analysis of rhetoric and his universalizing application to the Holocaust are two claims that may be considered separately. Yet even if one does not agree that "expediency" is inherent in Western rhetoric, Katz has raised awareness that phronesis is socially constructed so that rhetoric can be unethically employed. Thus, rather than remain an uncritically accepted heuristic for technical communicators, "The Ethic of Expediency" can be a starting point for ongoing exploration into the ethical and rhetorical dimensions of the genre.

Editorial Ethics: The Role of the Editor Before Peer Review

Editors who work with authors before a manuscript is sent for review face certain challenges. Since we’re often the first to see a manuscript, we sometimes encounter problems we must help solve before they come back to bite the author. These problems fall into a variety of categories, of which I see three repeatedly in my work. In this article, I’ll discuss the nature of these problems, provide examples from my own career as a science editor, and suggest how similar problems might arise in other types of editing.

Writing for the Robot: How Employer Search Tools Have Influenced Résumé Rhetoric and Ethics

To date, business communication scholars and textbook writers have encouraged résumé rhetoric that accommodates technology, for example, recommending keyword-enhancing techniques to attract the attention of searchbots: customized search engines that allow companies to automatically scan résumés for relevant keywords. However, few scholars have discussed the ethical implications of adjusting résumé keywords for the sole purpose of increasing searchbot hits. As the résumé genre has evolved over the past century, strategies of résumé “padding” have likewise evolved, at each stage violating one of four maxims of the Cooperative Principle. Direct factual misrepresentation violates the maxim of quality and is of course discouraged, but résumé writers have turned in succession to violations of manner (formatting tricks) and then more recently to violations of quantity and/or relevance with deceptive keywording techniques. The authors conclude by suggesting several techniques to business communication instructors that may encourage students to create more ethically sound résumés.

Ethical or Unethical Persuasion? The Rhetoric of Offers to Participate in Clinical Trials

Based on a sample of 22 oncology encounters, this article presents a discourse analysis of positive, neutral, or negative valence in the presentation of three elements of informed consent—purpose, benefits, and risks—in offers to participate in clinical trials. It is found that physicians regularly present these key elements of consent with a positive valence, perhaps blurring the distinction between clinical care and clinical research in trial offers. The authors argue that the rhetoric of trial offers constructs and reflects the complex relationships of two competing ethical frameworks—contemporary bioethics and professional medical ethics—both aimed at governing the discourse of trial offers. The authors consider the status of ethical or unethical persuasion within each framework, proposing what is called the best-option principle as the ethical principle governing trial offers within professional medical ethics.

Embracing Left and Right: Image Repair and Crisis Communication in a Polarized Ideological Milieu

The author explores how a tobacco firm in crisis engaged in crisis communication and image repair work in a highly polarized ideological milieu. Through an analysis of the tobacco firm's public statements produced in the aftermath of a 1997 lawsuit, the author demonstrates how the firm dealt with its milieu by exploiting and embracing both of the ambient ideological poles. By embracing these poles, the firm turned critique and opposition into discursive resources for its crisis communication. The author argues that political-ideological framing of organizational communication and discursive appropriation of critique and opposition serve as critical foci for organizational communication scholarship.

Looking for a New Job - Discreetly

Most people change jobs more than they change mates. But no matter how many times you do it, looking for a new position can be tricky.

Fictitious Documentation

When it comes to truth, my approach is to be candid and honest in formats that live on the web, which I can update on the fly. But when I’m printing hundreds of copies of a guide, which I know will be pinned up on walls, filed in desk drawers, and laminated for long-term reference, I often lie and don’t mention the bugs, hoping that developers will soon fix them and convert my fiction into truth.

Literacy 2.0: Plagiarism in the Internet Age

In an age when students gravitate to online sources for research—and when tremendous amounts of both reputable and questionable information are available online—many have come to regard the Internet itself as a culprit in students' plagiarism. Some teachers go so far as to forbid students from researching online, in the mistaken assumption that if students are working from hard-copy sources only, the problem will disappear. We believe that an approach far different from either warnings and punishment or attempts to curtail online research is warranted.

How to Comply With Moral and Ethical Standards in Technical Documentation

Technical writing has a number of moral and ethical standards that a professional technical writer needs to comply with. Violate them at your own peril, by risking the sudden demise of your career. Here are some of these issues.

Compliance and Ethics Cause Need for Policies and Procedures Communicatioin

Increasing competition, generational differences, widespread social awareness, and customer demand for higher quality products and services make it necessary to ensure that the right protections are in place. Other reasons for the increased attention include the numerous reports of corporate scandals and corruption, along with ensuing legislative regulations in today’s global economy. This article describes some of the specific causes.

Tips for Presenting Ethics Practices

Because the nature of ethics information is highly abstract and related to integrity, it is based upon judgment and therefore subject to varying interpretations by employees. To increase common understanding and consistent interpretations, the use of language, choice of words, sentence formation, and presentation style are important.

Documentation Honesty and Poor User Interfaces — An Ethical Dilemma?

We’ve all run in to situations where we have to document poor user interfaces. As much as we complain and suggest improvements, the project manager decides to go ahead with the interface as is because redesigning it is too costly. When I run into these situations, rather than insult the interface in straightforward talk in the documentation, I euphemize the language (against my better desires) in order to maintain the consistency of the company voice. It just doesn’t sound right to be so frank.

Ethical and Legal Aspects of Human Subjects Research on the Internet

Many IRBs recognize their unfamiliarity with the nature of Internet research and their lack of technical expertise needed to review related research protocols. To both protect human subjects and promote innovative and scientifically sound research, it is important to consider the ethical, legal, and technical issues associated with this burgeoning area of research.

Usability Testing: Revisiting Informed Consent Procedures for Testing Internet Sites

This paper explores issues of professional, ethical conduct in usability testing centering around the concept of 'informed consent'. Previous work on informed consent has been in homogeneous geographic locations. With Internet sites being developed at a prodigious rate, these procedures need to be revisited for their applicability to heterogeneous locations, in terms of culture, business practice, language and legal requirements. Some previously valued principles might now be considered discretionary, that is their applicability has situational specificity. Other principles are mandatory.

Online Experiments: Ethically Fair or Foul?

Online experiments may be helping researchers gather more data faster than ever before, but those advantages are coming with greater ethical challenges--threats to participant confidentiality, questions over whether the participants really understand what they're getting into and the possibility that less scrupulous researchers could steal your ideas.

The Ethics of Computers that Persuade

Ethics is an important perspective from which to view computers as persuasive technologies. Adopting an ethical perspective on this domain is vital because the topic of computers and the topic of persuasion both raise important issues about ethics and values.

Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct

Commitment to ethical professional conduct is expected of every member (voting members, associate members, and student members) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). This Code, consisting of 24 imperatives formulated as statements of personal responsibility, identifies the elements of such a commitment. It contains many, but not all, issues professionals are likely to face.

UPA Code of Professional Conduct

The Code of Professional Conduct of the Usability Professionals' Association expresses the profession's recognition of its responsibilities to the public, clients, employers, and colleagues. The Code guides members in the performance of their professional responsibilities and express the basic tenets of ethical and professional conduct.

Ethics Case: The Engineered Résumé

A proposal specialist must decide whether to pursue more information about a new coworker whom she has reason to suspect was dishonest during the hiring process.

Improving Our Ethical Choices: Managing the Imp of the Perverse

Psychologists and ethics researchers say we can take simple steps to align our Want and Should Selves over the three phases of decision making and help keep the Imp of the Perverse in check.

Designing Ethical Experiences: Understanding Juicy Rationalizations

Designers rationalize their choices just as much as everyone else. But we also play a unique role in shaping the human world by creating the expressive and functional tools many people use in their daily lives. Our decisions about what is and is not ethical directly impact the lives of a tremendous number of people we will never know. Better understanding of the choices we make as designers can help us create more ethical user experiences for ourselves and for everyone.

The Open Market of Cut and Paste: Cure the Disease, not the Symptoms

Beyond its revolutionary timesaving approach, "cut and paste" has metamorphosed into a fancy synonym for organized knowledge piracy, and on a bigger canvas as a psychological disorder that needs to be checked.

Promoting Ethical Practices within Institutions of Higher Education

The public is continually bombarded with cases of wrongful practices in the work environment. As a result, the public has lost confidence in the ability of corporations and institutions of higher education to train individuals to behave in an ethical manner. Ethical practices in corporate America have resulted in institutions of higher education revisiting their ethical practices, which includes creating a learning environment where students develop the necessary skills to become ethical leaders and citizens. Many colleges and universities have adopted codes of ethics that emphasize core ethical principles and standards for their employees.

The New Atlantis

The New Atlantis is an effort to clarify the nation’s moral and political understanding of all areas of technology—from stem cells to hydrogen cells to weapons of mass destruction.

Distortion and the Politics of Pain Relief: A Habermasian Analysis of Medicine in the Media

This article invokes Habermas's ideal speech situation to analyze the controversy surrounding a recent study of pain relief for women in labor. Using Habermas's concepts, the authors argue that distortion of scientific and medical information originated in the New England Journal of Medicine article that first reported the study's results. Thus, their analysis aims to complicate the assumption that such distortion starts only with public reporting and to expose the ways that scientific or medical research from the beginning can be reported to either facilitate or preclude public debate and understanding of complex issues.

The Ethics of Technical Publishing: Trust Yourself

A researcher needs grit and self-trust to do this kind of work in the first place. Letting someone other than a ghostwriter or a reviewer do it for you will be self-defeating. An unethical deal here will corrupt you, the project, and your employer. You must finish the job in a straightforward accountable manner.

Mirror, Mirror

A few months ago, I read with interest an article that indicated that executives are influenced more by the court of public opinion as a catalyst for making positive behavior changes than they are by even a court of law. So what contribution do we make to this discussion, as public relations and media relations practitioners? Do we shove our heads in the sand and say, "It's not up to us to influence the ethical behavior of our internal and external clients"?

Building Your Personal Brand Online

It probably wouldn’t surprise you to know that we are operating in a distrustful world, and that both companies and individual executives are subject to suspicion. In 2005, a worldwide Gallup poll found that 40 percent of people believe that company leaders are “largely dishonest,” and a 2006 Watson Wyatt study says that only 56 percent of company employees believe their top management acts with honesty and integrity. These are worrisome figures, given that senior executives worry a great deal about their companies’ reputations but may spend little time on their own.

Interpreting Ethics as a Daily Mandate

There is much discussion in today’s corporate environment about accountability and responsibility. This rich debate has led me to consider at length the subject of applied or “operationalized” ethics. As lead counselors of senior management, and as the primary liaison to the public, we are in a position of great influence. Our behavior must be credible for our organizations to foster a positive image and reputation.

Strengthening the Ethics and Visual Rhetoric of Sales Letters

This article provides details about a comprehensive assignment for teaching sales letters in a business communication course. During the past 5 years, this assignment has evolved, moving beyond one that focused almost exclusively on strategies for making the letter persuasive, and therefore effective, to an expanded form that devotes time and attention to the ethics and visual rhetoric of the letter. In addition to composing a sales letter, each student is required to write a detailed, thoughtful analysis of the ethics and visual appeal of his or her letter.

Waiver Culture: The Unintended Consequence of Ethics Compliance

The passage of the U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002) spawned a series of compliance and ethics programs--the revised Principles of Federal Prosecution of Business Organizations known as the Thompson Memo (Thompson, 2003), the revised Federal Sentencing Guidelines that included the Effective Compliance and Ethics Program and the corporate 'culpability score' (U.S. Sentencing Commission, 2004), and another revision of the Principles of Federal Prosecution of Business Organizations now known as the McNulty Memo (McNulty, 2006). These programs were meant to shift business toward an 'organizational culture that encourages ethical conduct and a commitment to compliance with the law' (U.S. Sentencing Commission, 2007). These developments spurred human resource departments and legal counsel to draft new workplace policies to embrace, implement, and monitor compliance programs. Consequently, there was a dramatic increase in the number of businesses with some kind of ethics training: from 44% in pre-guideline 1987 up to 92% in post-guideline 2005 (Berenbeim, 2006). Because compliance with the McNulty Memo and Federal Sentencing Guidelines can substantially reduce an organization's sentence of improper conduct or cause the government not to prosecute (Berenbeim, 2006), an organization under investigation could turn to its newly minted compliance programs and its cooperation as a shield. But these federal guidelines lacked a clear definition of an organization's 'cooperation' and whether a lack of cooperation could be viewed as obstruction of justice and thereby increase punishment of that organization.

Designing Ethical Experiences: Social Media and the Conflicted Future

Questions of ethics and conflict can seem far removed from the daily work of user experience (UX) designers who are trying to develop insights into people's needs, understand their outlooks, and design with empathy for their concerns [2]. In fact, the converse is true: When conflicts between businesses and customers--or any groups of stakeholders--remain unresolved, UX practitioners frequently find themselves facing ethical dilemmas, searching for design compromises that satisfy competing camps. This dynamic is the essential pattern by which conflicts in goals and perspectives become ethical concerns for UX designers. Unchecked, it can lead to the creation of unethical experiences that are hostile to users--the very people most designers work hard to benefit--and damaging to the reputations and brand identities of the businesses responsible.

A Study of Beliefs and Behaviors Regarding Digital Technology

This study analyzed individual perceptions of various situations involving actions likely to be considered unethical by most people. It explored perceptions of the acceptability of parallel technology-based and non-technology-based vignettes, self-rated behavior regarding the survey scenarios and consistency between self-rated behavior and the level of acceptance of the vignettes. The responses from 453 participants were analyzed by age, gender, ethnicity and amount of weekly access to computers at home.The participants were more accepting of the technology-based survey items and were also more likely to engage in those behaviors than the non-technology items; however, the participant responses indicated a low level of acceptance for the scenarios and only a minimal likelihood that they would participate in them. Additional findings across the comparison groups are reported and discussed.

Personal Values and Professional Ethics

We consider the effects of personal values systems on codes of ethics and how community and professional standards of behavior may reinforce professional codes. We suggest that a professional code of ethics is strengthened and reinforced as it more closely follows this rich history.

Electronic Image Manipulation - Technological Advances and Ethical Considerations

Electronic imaging has enabled the desktop publisher to capture and manipulate images to produce documents that are both attractive and cost-effective. In addition to making basic corrections such as balancing colors and improving highlight and shadow detail, the desktop publisher can retouch photographs and other artwork to repair damaged areas, eliminate distracting elements, or alter composition. However, the ease of manipulation has, in some cases, overshadowed the many ethical issues that desktop publishers need to consider. Integrity of the image, ownership of artwork, and copyright laws are some of the issues that desktop publishers must confront.

Ethics in Technical Communication: A Consensus?

Ethics within Technical Communication, as found in the literature, is discussed to determine whether a meaningful code of ethics exists or can exist within STC. Authorities are cited to support a tentative conclusion to this question.

Authorship and Responsibility: The Problem of Special Knowledge

The ethical questions that technical communicators face frequently present themselves obliquely, arising because the communicators depend heavily upon the special knowledge of other people who provide necessary information. The special knowledge that communicators lack and others possess may come from highly technical education, privileged access to information sources, or socially constructed access to information. Proponents of need-to-know policies may argue that limiting communicators' knowledge absolves them of responsibility for the information's veracity and effects; however, more ethically rigorous considerations of the issue consider communicators' authorial roles, their right to know, and their responsibility to their audiences.

A Slippery Slope: Using Value Analysis to Resolve Ethical Conflicts in Technical Communication

Increasingly, technical communicators are confronting ethical issues in the workplace. Conflicts arise that appear to defy black-and-white solutions. To render every verdict as 'gray,' however, begs the question. Clear direction in the face of thorny ethical dilemmas requires objective value analysis, to logically reduce such dilemmas to clearly defined value conflicts. Once these conflicts are understood, the proper ethical path can more readily be discerned. This paper addresses the need for specific, real-world ethical guidelines for technical communicators. It also explores the possibility of developing a value analysis model to establish such guidelines. A typical model is applied to four representative ethical conflicts.

After Enron: Integrating Ethics into the Professional Communication Curriculum

Recent scandals in the business community have alerted professional writing teachers to the importance of highlighting ethics in the curriculum. From former experiences in teaching courses emphasizing ethics, the authors have adapted the curriculum to include a limited discussion of ethical approaches and terms and assigned group writing projects that consider the effects of business on the broader community. As a result of the integration of this ethical component into the entire course, students learn major ethical approaches; gain a vocabulary of ethical terms they can apply in the business world; interrogate the larger questions of business and its interactions with the local, national, and international community; and engage in the kind of dialectical discussions that require critical thinking.

Ethics, Critical Thinking, and Professional Communication Pedagogy

Critical thinking pedagogy offers a supportive environment for teaching ethics in the professional communication classroom. Four important aspects of critical thinking which particularly encourage ethical thought and behavior are identifying and questioning assumptions, seeking a multiplicity of voices and alternatives on a subject, making connections, and fostering active involvement. Focusing on these behaviors allows an ongoing incorporation of ethics into many different aspects of the classroom.

Teaching Ethics Isn't Enough: The Challenge of Being Ethical Teachers

Rather than acting on less examined beliefs, I am personally comfortable acting on ethics that have been burnished by repeated polishing from my colleagues, community, and profession. Let us use our professional conferences and journals to further that conversation.

An Interest-ing Dilemma

A Web developer experiences uncertainty upon being asked to develop a site for a questionable start-up company.

Mentoring the Next Generation: Ethics and Professionalism for Engineers

Freshman engineering students are bombarded with classes in chemistry, physics, math and other highly technical and demanding courses. This intense schedule leaves little time for learning other important subjects critical to future engineers such as ethics and professionalism. The College of Engineering and the Writing Program at the University of California Santa Barbara offer a unique sequence of courses that meet general education requirements while also addressing the development of ethics and professionalism in future engineers by using a combination of case studies, practical applications and readings.

Code of Ethics for Professional Communicators

The IABC Code of Ethics is based on three different yet interrelated principles of professional communication that apply throughout the world. These principles assume that just societies are governed by a profound respect for human rights and the rule of law; that ethics, the criteria for determining what is right and wrong, can be agreed upon by members of an organization; and, that understanding matters of taste requires sensitivity to cultural norms.

Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings

Users rarely look at display advertisements on websites. Of the four design elements that do attract a few ad fixations, one is unethical and reduces the value of advertising networks.

The Browser War: An Ethical Analysis of the Struggle between Microsoft and the U.S. Department of Justice

The ongoing antitrust battle between the U.S. Department of Justice and Microsoft Corporation presents technical communicators with two ethical questions: 1) Is it right, good, or fair for Microsoft to give away its Internet Explorer browser? 2) If Microsoft gains monopoly control over the PC browser market, will this be good for us? This article examines these questions using traditional rights-based ethical theory (Kant), utilitarianism, and John Rawls principles of justice, concluding that it is neither good nor fair for a company having a near-monopoly over a market to sell products below fair market value, nor is it good that one company stands to gain monopoly control over the PC browser market. When the discussion turned to Netscape, one Intel executive, who asked not to be identified, recalled Martiz [Paul Martiz, Microsoft Group Vice President, Platforms & Application] saying: "We are going to cut off their air supply. Everything they re selling, we re going to give away for free" [1]. "We re giving away a pretty good browser as part of the operating system. How long can they survive selling it?"--Statement by Steve Ballmer, Microsoft President and CEO [2]. "Our business model works even if all Internet software is free," says Mr. Gates. "We are still selling operating systems." <em>Netscape</em>, in contrast, is dependent upon its Internet software for profits, he points out.--Statements by Bill Gates, Microsoft Chairman [3]. Only a monopolist could study a competitor and destroy its business by giving away products--Statement by Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems Chairman [4].

Ethics and Technical Communication: The Past Quarter Century

Ethics as a topic in technical communication has grown in interest in the past quarter century as the field itself has matured. We now understand technical communication as involved in communicating not only technical information but also values, ethics, and tacit assumptions represented in goals. It also is involved in accommodating the values and ethics of its many audiences. This understanding is linked to an awareness of the social nature of all discourse and the root interconnectedness of rhetoric and ethics. This article presents an introduction and annotated bibliography of articles from technical writing and communication journals over this period, arranged in categories of professional, academic, and systematic approaches. Ethics is broadly conceived to include not only particular theories but also systems of values and principles.

A Response To Patrick Moore's 'Questioning The Motives Of Technical Communication and Rhetoric: Steven Katz's 'Ethic Of Expediency''

In my 1992 College English article 'The Ethic of Expediency: Classical Rhetoric, Technology, and the Holocaust' [1], I looked at the implications of a Nazi memo whose sole purpose was to improve the efficiency of the gassing vans, in order to begin to try to understand and discuss the negative uses and ethical abuses to which technical communication, and deliberative rhetoric generally, could be taken by the powerful and unscrupulous. In 'Questioning the Motives of Technical Communication and Rhetoric: Steven Katz's 'Ethic of Expediency'' [2], Patrick Moore accuses me of ignoring alternate translations, citing out of context, and focusing on the negative meaning of words to make my case. The point at issue in these charges, I believe, is whether (and to what degree) Aristotle meant to base deliberative discourse on 'expediency.' I will take each of these charges up one at a time to explore them more thoroughly, discuss their interrelations, and then conclude with a few observations of my own.

The Ethics of Special Needs: It's a Matter of Fairness

The American Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 cites 43 million Americans as having disabilities. Despite the progress the ADA represents in improving equality of opportunity for those with disabilities, much remains to be done--as evidenced by the fact that only 27.8% of working-age people with work disabilities have jobs, compared to 76.8% of those without disabilities. The statistics are even bleaker for minorities.

Ethics in the City: How Talk about Ethics Leads to an Ethical Culture

Democracy depends upon trust in public officials; yet, trust in government has been steadily falling as instances of local, state, and federal corruption fill the pages of our newspapers.

Evolution of a Disclaimer

What if a disclaimer seems to be more than just a disclaimer? Readers are invited to consider the fictitious case presented and to share their thoughts for publication in an upcoming issue of Intercom.

Google广告有害吗？

Google是一个什么样的公司？对于大多数人来说，对这个问题的回答会是“搜索”。虽然说Google确实是一个关注搜索的公司，它却并不靠搜索来生存。与之相反，和其它公司一样，由利益来决定。并且就像John Gruber所指出的，它通过出售广告来生存。这使得Google成为一家广告公司。这意义也许比你一开始猜测的要深远的多了。不过让我们不要走得太远。让我们来谈一会儿可用性。我将要向您解释Google对于广告的必要关注可以让我们学到很多可用性的内容。更严格的讲，这篇文章将描述一个困境，一个与Google对于发布商如何防止广告的建议紧密相关的困境。可用性解决了这个困境，也因此告诉我们许多如何将商务与用户体验结合起来。

Is Google Advertising Evil?

Google's necessary focus on advertising can teach us a lot about playing the usability game. Specifically, this article will characterize a dilemma that is tied to Google's advice to publishers on how to place advertisements. The dilemma is resolved through usability, which in turn will teach us a lot about how to mix business and the user experience.

Working Day: 9 to 5

A video documentary about the appropriate use of computer technologies in the workplace, which may be useful in talking about workplace ethics.

Ethics of Online Information Design

The beginning ethical issue of information design is access, which occurs in a unique context for each learner.

Digital Plagiarism: The Role of Society and Technology

Examines the application of the World Wide Web in class education and research and the ways in which the Internet has enabled cheating and given educators ways to fight plagiarism.

Ethical Implications of Intercultural Audiences

Argues that it is crucial that technical writing courses raise the awareness of the implications of intercultural communication, and specifically, how to include the translator as the target audience.

The Challenge of Plagiarism Control in Universities and Colleges

The Challenge of Plagiarism Control in Universities and Colleges discusses the complex issues involved with plagiarism such as defining the term and responding to the act of plagiarism. The paper also includes data detailing who is plagiarizing and why. Finally, the paper addresses university protocol and potential for uniformity in the tracking and response of universities and colleges. The perils of not finding a way to limit or eradicate plagiarism further endanger the authenticity of a college degree.

Predicting Intended Unethical Behavior of Business Students

What is the likelihood that our students will perform unethical behavior in the work environment? This study measures students’ intended behavior for four hypothetical unethical situations by investigating the following determinants: attitude toward the behavior (belief), subjective norm (pressure), perceived behavioral control, perceived personal outcome (benefit), and perceived social acceptance by others. Using the Fishbein model of planned behavior, belief was consistently the most powerful predictor of intent in all four situations. Perceived behavioral control, perceived personal outcome, and perceived social acceptance by others were moderately good predictors of intent. Subjective norm was the weakest predictor of intent.

Teaching Business Communication: Ethical Issues

There has been a growing awareness of unethical practices being utilized by corporate CEOs, managers, and other members of upper management for gain of income or power. Advances in information technology have contributed significantly when making the public aware of wrong doings. Emerging from these real world cases are opportunities to prepare business communication students with transferable communication skills designed to circumvent technological mishaps and/or unethical practices. This paper will discuss how an assignment focusing on ethics and information technology can be used to help students develop their code of ethics regarding professional communication and behavioral practices.

Theory Meets Practice: Using The Potter Box To Teach Business Communication Ethics

This paper introduces the Potter Box, a grounded and easy to use method of ethical decisionmaking. The rationale for this technique is seen in the current crisis in business ethics and education in ethical behavior. The Potter Box was developed by Dr. Ralph Potter, Harvard University theologian, grounded in the work of sociologist Talcott Parsons. This device has been used in assessing journalistic and public relations decisions, but can readily be used in the practice and criticism of business communication. The four portions of the Potter Box are explained in terms of eight explicit steps. A case study is presented for use in the classroom.

The Business Ethics Blog

This blog includes news and commentary about business ethics and corporate social responsibility.

Ethical Lessons Learned from Computer Science

In this article, we will address the question 'How can computer science methods help us to better understand ethics?'

Professional Ethics

An online resource for publication and discussion of ethical cases, appropriate for integrating ethics issues into the classroom.

Time to Close the Web?

The electronic privacy invasion points to the failure of site designers to provide compelling content, clear navigation, and a user experience memorable enough to entice repeat visits. Click-thru is more important than Content. We have opted to become Electronic Rapists.

The Ethics of Electronic Image Manipulation

Desktop-publishing software and hardware have become affordable, powerful, and relatively user-friendly. Consequently, with reasonable investments in time and money, communications professionals can now manipulate photographs and create visual images relatively easily in their publications. However such images may be used in ways that are, aside from legal concerns, not ethical. Technical-communications professionals need to be able to recognize manipulated images and to explore the ethical implications of creating or being asked to use such images.

The New STC Ethical Guidelines: A Practical Interpretation

Technical communicators with less than 3 years of experience face a special challenge: not only must they continue to assimilate technological change at a dizzying rate, but they must begin to effectively chart a course toward professional growth. Having established (or having faith in) their ability to survive in the profession, new and intermediate communicators must move beyond survival and begin to pursue success. This three-hour workshop is based on the premise that it's not enough to be a good writer with a strong technical background. You must possess multi-disciplinary skills to excel as a technical communicator and as a business person focused on the value you bring to your company.

Success is a Many-Splendored Thing

Managers of four of the Society's professional interest committees (PICs) launch discussions of what the new STC ethics guidelines mean to the areas of professional practice their PICs represent: Marketing, Scientific Communication, International Technical Communication, and Consulting and Independent Contracting.

Ethics Online: Looking Toward the Future

As the profile of the average Internet user changes from academicians, scientists, and computer specialists and hackers to the general populace, the increased usage is beginning to show the weaknesses of the system and the vulnerabilities of its users. An ethical understanding of the issues can help to address concerns. Privacy and access are two main areas that must be explored as new codes of ethics are designed and implemented.

Ethics and the Internet

Twenty million people worldwide are using the Internet, which began as as computer network service for the United States military. By 1998, more than 100 million are projected to be using the Internet. From TuppNet (where you can e-mail in your Tupperware order) to alt,flame, where its readers will abuse you us a matter of course, the Internet offers people information on almost any topic. However a number of issues have come to the forefront of Internet discourse. In this discussion, we will address some of these issues and how they can affect technical communicators and companies using the Internet. Topics to be discussed include courtesy; bandwidth use; marketing and advertising; copyright; and privacy, confidentiality, and censorship.

Use Your Fog Lights: Ten Values for Technical Communicators

Ten values that can be applied to technical communication are honesty, legality, privacy, quality, teamwork, loyalty, fairness (avoiding conjlict of interest), cultural sensitivity, social responsibilip,professional development, and advancing the profession. This article provides an operational definition of each value and a capsule-size real-world scenario that spotlights the value in an imbroglio of ethical conflict.

Dilbert™ Goes Corporate...or How to Navigate the Thorny Thickets of Corporate America without Selling Your Soul: Featuring Lockheed Martin's Acclaimed 'The Ethics Challenge'

This unique and lively workshop is based on an ingenious board game developed by the Office of Ethics and Business Conduct for the Lockheed Martin Corporation, under a special copyright agreement with Scott Adams. It uses the famous characters in the cartoon strip, including celebrated ethicist Dogbert™, to inject a spirit of fun into the heavy debate that often swirls around the thorny ethical dilemmas we confront in the workplace. Here, teams of technical communicators will compete to see who can best balance ethical values with business realities and come out with practical, honest solutions. While the vehicle is rather lighthearted, the content is anything but. The case histories are carefully designed to cut to the moral chase. There are no right or wrong answers—only good, better, best, not so good, and Dogbert™. Yes, there's an answer key, but that, too, is controversial. What? No clear answers? Of course not. That's the whole point.

Ethics in the 20th Century and the 21st

Ten to twenty Fellows of the Society share their stories of ethical dilemmas from their collective storehouse of experience. Their experiences come from virtually every major industry, many minor industries, the military and academia. In just two minutes, each speaker will tell of his or her most poignant ethical challenge. Subjects vary from business ethics to communication ethics—see Code for Communicators.

An Ethical Gamble

Are the ethical issues affected by a vendor's status as an offshore operation? By the prospect of Internet gambling becoming illegal in the U.S. (bill pending in the U.S. House of Representatives)? By the presumption of shady morals in the gambling industry? Should one's choices be affected by his/her rocky employment history?

Hiding Humanity: Verbal and Visual Ethics in Accident Reports

Located at the critical intersection of technology and humanity, technical communicators must always try to avoid human injury and promote sensitivity to the needs of human beings. The reporting of human injuries and fatalities in accident reports, however, often strips victims of their humanity and hides the tragic human consequences of technological failures from individuals trying to devise appropriate public policy, establish effective safety regulations, and modify or abolish dangerous industrial processes—government officials, company executives, labor representatives, community activists, and ordinary citizens. Technical communicators have the rhetorical ability, the requisite editorial and graphic skills, and the moral responsibility to bring humanity to the verbal and visual display of information.

Beyond Plagiarism: Ethical Issues in the Technical Communication Classroom

Recent discussions of ethical issues that relate to technical communicators reflect the rise of interest in this topic. Although some journal articles do look at teaching ethics in the technical communication classroom, most concentrate on ethics in the workplace. Yet, for students to understand current and future ethical issues, we must heighten their awareness of potential problems before they encounter such problems in industry and business situations.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is defined in the Ohio University Student Handbook as 'presenting the ideas or writing of someone else as one's own'. It is a form of academic misconduct. Even if you change a few words of someone else's sentence, it is still plagiarism if the same idea is presented in essentially the same style. Plagiarism by students is often unintentional, but still unacceptable.

ATTW Code of Ethics

This is a working draft of the code of ethics of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing. As a work in progress, it is subject to substantial change and carries no authority from ATTW. It is meant only for inspection and comment by the ATTW Ethics Committee and general ATTW membership.

Shades of Gray: Using Value Analysis and Ten Core Values to Resolve Ethical Conflicts in Technical Communication

Ethical conflicts often defy black-and-white solutions. But gray can be slippery. This workshop demonstrates how to use value analysis to clarify ethical conflicts in technical communication. The presenters identify 10 core values that underlie technical communication and show how these values can be used to support objective analysis and resolve ethical conflicts. Participants explore ethical dilemmas 'hands-on' through small-group discussions and role-playing vignettes on selected conflict scenarios. This session follows up the 'Grayscale' workshop conducted at the 43rd STC conference-with all new scenarios!

Presenter's Code of Ethics

At many conferences we encounter speakers whose sole reason in presenting is to entice customers for their products or services. The goal is not, in itself, a bad one -- except when the speaker presents information that is biased.

International Technical Communication Programs and Global Ethics

International technical communication program developers may face globalization either with fear or exhilaration. Is globalization primarily an economic process that will bring unprecedented opportunity, prosperity, democracy, and health to everyone in the world? Or is it a process that will usurp the autonomy of national and local governments, colonize the cultural diversity of the world, lay waste to ecosystems, and gobble up the resources of the entire planet?

Ethics in Technical Communication

The key to ethical action is to behave with integrity that is based on sound core of personal values.

Replay TV

You've all heard of TiVo. Sure you have. TiVo is the hard-disk video recorder that automatically records all of your favorite shows. Then there's ReplayTV, the other leading brand. Late fall 2001, ReplayTV crossed over a line that should never have been crossed, one that threatened the future of consumer products.

Computer Human Values

As computers and digital devices increasingly insert themselves into our lives, they do so on an ever increasing social level. Designers need to understand the context of use and include the whole of a user's experience into the solution when creating a computer interface.

Ethics in Action: A "No-Talk" Workshop

This workshop takes the study of ethics in technical communication to the next level—translating values into action. In recent years, the presenters have conducted numerous workshops focusing on the use of value analysis to clarify and resolve ethical dilemmas. Participants analyzed scenarios involving value conflicts in technical communication, formulated potential solutions, and dramatized the scenarios in role-playing. This approach remains valuable; indeed, it is one of the tools the STC Ethics Committee uses to help members bring our values into the workplace. The core values have not changed much since last year: honesty, legality, cultural sensitivity, and the like can hardly be expected to fluctuate from conference to conference. This workshop, however, starts where the others left off. Participants had better bring pencils along with philosophy—because this time they won’t just talk about solving thorny ethical dilemmas, they will actually solve them!

Alienation

A hypothetical example to help technical communicators think through ethical issues in the workplace (before they occur in real life).

Graphs on Steroids

A hypothetical example to help technical communicators think through ethical issues in the workplace.

Responses to "Alienation"

In the April 2003 issue, Intercom printed a hypothetical dilemma by John G. Bryan entitled 'Alienation.' A summary of this story appears in the box on this page; reader responses appear below. The responses do not reflect the views of STC's ethics committee and may have been edited for length.

Ethics and Etiquette of Internet Resources

This document tracks online materials relevant to ethics and etiquette of the use and development of networked information resources.

Ethics in Technical Communication: Copyleft and the Open Source Movement

A collection of resources about open-source software, innovation in copyright, and their implications for technical communicators.

The Ethics Triple Threat: Proprietary Information in the Technical Communications Class and Practitioners' Workshop

The use of corporate proprietary information is a major ethics issue in technical communication classrooms and practitionersâ*™ workshops. Some students and practitioners treat these settings as safe and sterile bubbles in which all present will honor confidences. Their actions cause ethical and legal dilemmas for fellow students, colleagues, and professors. Methods of preventing such dilemmas include student-employeesâ*™ following the codes of conduct established by their employers, practitionersâ*™ observing the behavioral codes set out by their professional organizations, and professorsâ*™ stressing ethical behavior in the classroom.

Handling Ethical Dilemmas on the Job

Experts in ethics will suggest approaches to ethical dilemmas in the field of technical communication and on the job with the 'Ten (+/-) Commandments of Ethics.'

The Case of Project

Cloning? Abortion? Social responsibility? Honesty? Legality? Loyalty? Trust? Privacy? You name it. 'The Case of Project Good-Bye, Dolly' immerses workshop participants in a maelstrom of value conflicts that swirl from bioethics to personal values. The presenters identify ten core values that un&rlie technical communication and show how these values can be used to support objective analysis and resolve ethical conflicts. Participants then explore ethical dilemmas 'hands-on' through small-group discussion and subsequent role-playing vignettes. This session is sure to spark lively debate.

Ethics and Rationality in Information-Enriched Decisions: A Model for Technical Communication

Although experienced decision makers depend on valid and reliable information, exactly how information plays into decisions is not always clear. Because decision making is an information function, technical communicators can make important contributions in decision-support roles. Decisions that are effective, efficient, and ethical must be rational. That is, we must be able to determine and present good reasons for our actions. Information relates to good reasoning and thereby affects the best decisions.

Sharpening the Focus: A Workshop on Ethics and Technical Communication

Increasingly, technical communicators are confronting ethical issues in the workplace. Conflicts arise that appear to defy black-and-white solutions. To render every verdict 1. Workshop Instructions. as 'gray'' however, begs the question. This workshop exposes participants to the use of value analysis to clarify ethical conflicts in technical communication. It also gives them the opportunity to explore ethical issues “hands-on” through small-group discussions and a series of roleplaying vignettes on selected conflict scenarios.

Technical Writing and Publication Ethics

A discussion of what one must and must not do in peer-reviewed publishing.

Remember Enron and Andersen!

You work for a mid-sized company that has about 700 employees. It is Wednesday afternoon. You learn from a reliable source that your company has just been bought out, but the public announcement will not be made until Friday afternoon. The company’s stock is currently selling at $15 per share. It will certainly jump to $20 within hours of the announcement. You and your spouse have been saving over the past year to buy a house, and have a sizable nest egg of nearly $20,000 in the bank. Your company already has over 20 million shares of its stock outstanding, and tens of thousands of shares are traded every day. No one is likely to notice if an employee were to buy 1000 shares. What do you do? Explain your actions and reasons in writing.

Plagiarism: A Misplaced Emphasis

Plagiarism is conventionally seen as a serious breach of scholarly ethics, being a theft of credit for ideas in a competitive intellectual marketplace. This emphasis overlooks the vast amount of institutionalized plagiarism, including ghostwriting and attribution of authorship to bureaucratic elites. There is a case for reducing the stigma for competitive plagiarism while exposing and challenging the institutionalized varieties.

A Response to the Special Issue on Ethics

Whatever one claims to have said in oneï¿s narrative, whether ethical explication or narrative self-building, is not always under the selfï¿s control. The practice of self-knowledge argued for here is more accurately self-formation, a will to power over the self. What these authors propose is a valuable and powerful act of self-making through representation. This formation of narrative self-representation connects actions with identity, forging identity from fragmented memory. It requires an attempt to tell oneï¿s story as honestly as possible, and to resist narrating oneï¿s self as one desires to be seen. In the process, these authors assert, our self learns how to see itself through the lens of retrospection.

Ethics in Technical Writing

Because the role of the modern technical writer and communicator is expanding rapidly and will continue to do so, the ethical scope of the technical writer's responsibility is comparably expanded too. The technical writer is now seen as an information developer in the formative stages of creating technical information, as a communicator in disseminating information, as an interpreter in explaining information, and as a usability expert in guiding the application of information. As a result, ethics becomes in involved in technical writing in many ways both traditional and new, obvious and non-obvious. In this course we will study the role of ethics in technical writing and communication at various levels. Ethics is the study of what is right and good, whether as abstract theories or as concrete actions, usually involving deciding a course of action in a dilemma offering several possibilities. Ethics here is understood broadly as encompassing both conventional theories of ethics and values and value systems.

The Ethics of Information Architecture

Are you aware that the practice of information architecture is riddled with powerful moral dilemmas? Do you realize that decisions about labeling and granularity can save or destroy lives? Have you been designing ethical information architectures?

Presenters Who Play In The Gray Risk Their Reputations

We all bend the rules and shade the truth in various ways. Presenters do it for all sorts of reasons: to inflate the importance of their work, to get people to like them, to make a story funnier. Tad Simons suggests there's a line in there somewhere that may not be wise to cross.

Hiding Humanity: Verbal and Visual Ethics in Accident Reports

The work of technical communicators transcends the purely technical—it has implications for real human beings. Located as they are at the critical intersection of technology and humanity, technical communicators direct traffic to avoid human injury and to promote sensitivity to the needs of human beings. When technology fails human beings, it is the ethical obligation of the technical communicator to sustain the humanity of the victims of that failure—to make those victims visible.

When the Customer Isn’t Right: A Workshop in Handling Conflicts When Clients Behave Unethically

As consultants and freelancers, we try to adhere to the theory that our clients are always right. However, clients are sometimes dead wrong. Most of us at one time or another face situations in which clients ask us to behave unethically or treat us unethically. How do we handle such situations and maintain good client relations? This workshop explores the use of a value analysis model in resolving ethical dilemmas, using representative case studies.

GRAYSCALE: A Workshop in Ethics and Technical Communication

Increasingly, technical communicators are confronting ethical issues in the workplace. Conflicts arise that appear to defy black-and-white solutions. To render every verdict as “gray,” however, begs the question. This workshop exposes participants to the use of value analysis to clarify ethical conflicts in technical communication. The presenters use a framework of 10 common values, based on the initial work of the STC Ethics Committee, to support objective analysis and resolution of such ethical conflicts. The workshop gives participants the opportunity to explore ethical dilemmas “hands-on” through small-group discussions and a series of role-playing vignettes on selected conflict scenarios.

Towards a Sense of Ethics for Technical Communication

Many articles from recent decades begin with the assumption that technical communicators do not have much power to make ethical decisions about their work. We need to start with a basic understanding of the relationships that technical communicators build with that audience in their work and identify ways in which those relationships might have ethical implications.

Following the Doctor's Orders

In this ethics case, O'Neill presents a fictional scenario in which a technical communicator is asked to modify copyrighted materials from a training program. Readers are asked to forward their opinions concerning the scenario to be published in a later issue of Intercom.

In the Company of Lawyers

In this hypothetical dilemma, a senior technical writer at a pharmaceuticals firm must choose between honoring his company's nondisclosure policy or publishing the results of a usability study that could greatly improve patient compliance with written instructions for prescription drugs, thereby saving lives.

In the Gyres

A fictional account of an in-house newsletter editor pressured to serve his bosses' interests raises important questions about the ethics of office politics.

The India Paradox

Kamath describes the complex interplay among many competing cultural forces that makes technical communication in India such a challenge.

Is a Game Always Just a Game?

Smith presents a hypothetical dilemma in which a technical writer discovers that a product she's documenting falls short of the extravagant claims published in her company's marketing materials.

Responses to 'Following the Doctor's Orders'

This article presents reader responses to a hypothetical dilemma published in the February 2000 issue of Intercom.

Responses to 'In the Company of Lawyers'

This article presents reader responses to an ethics case published in the March 2002 issue of Intercom.

Responses to 'In the Gyres'

In the September/October 2000 issue, Intercom printed a hypothetical dilemma entitled 'In the Gyres.' A summary of this story is reproduced, followed by reader responses.

Responses to 'Who's Policing the Policy Makers?'

This article features reader responses to a hypothetical dilemma printed in the April 2001 issue of Intercom.

The Samples Conundrum

Olive examines the ethical and practical problems associated with providing writing samples to potential employers and suggests possible solutions to these problems.

Spam on the 'Net: An Ethical Dilemma

Archee examines the ethical and practical problems associated with receiving and sending unsolicited e-mail.

Who's Policing the Policy Makers?

This ethics case concerns a technical writer charged with the task of introducing new company policies to employees. The writer faces a dilemma when she discovers that the workplace habits of some managers contradict the policies. Reader responses to this ethics case will appear in an upcoming issue of Intercom.

Ethical Aspects of Writer-Client Relationships

Experts in the field have defined the essential criteria of ethical behavior in a number of fields. This presentation attempts to translate those criteria to the typical working environment of full-time writers. It examines these criteria in terms of the skills, task, and responsibilities of those individuals who create the documentation and directives by which America does its work.

Ethics and the Internet

As the Internet permeates ever more domains of social and political, and even personal, life, and as its technological capabilities expand, the problem of Internet ethics will become ever more central, perhaps even more so than in 'ordinary' life. The potential for abuse grows with use, as well as with technological power.

A Peircian Approach to Professional Ethics Instruction

Registered Professional Engineers (PEs) in most states have a continuing professional development requirement that specifies that in addition to taking a certain number of short courses in their area of technical competence each year, PEs must also take a professional ethics refresher course at least once every two years. Because the PEs in these ethics courses are forced to attend and because the subject matter is often perceived as legalistic, repetitive, and unnecessary, these courses tend to elicit less-than-enthusiastic responses from participants. Furthermore, since the duration of these courses (1 or 2 hours) is so short, it is difficult to give a meaningful treatment of the very broad field of ethics and also apply it to real-world ethical situations in the time frame allotted.

Complicating Technology: Interdisciplinary Method, the Burden of Comprehension, and the Ethical Space of the Technical Communicator

There is much for technical communicators to learn from the burgeoning field of technology studies. Technical communicators, however, have an obligation to exercise patience as they enter this arena of study. Using interdisciplinary theory, this article argues that technical communication must assume the 'burden of comprehension': the responsibility of understanding the ideologies, contexts, values, and histories of those disciplines from which we borrow before we begin using their methods and research findings. Three disciplines of technology study--history, sociology, and philosophy--are examined to investigate how these disciplines approach technology. The article concludes with speculation on how technical communicators, by virtue of their entrance into this interdisciplinary arena, might refashion both their practical roles and the scope of their ethical responsibilities.