IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Spring 2013 - 34

Applying techniques from software
development to ethics reverses the
usual relation and allows ethics to
learn from other disciplines.
place when "designers assess to
what extent they have implemented
target values in a given system" [4,
pp. 344]. This section will pick up
on activities designed to verify the
success of the SOV in discovering and translating ADEM's value
commitments.
Using Values to
Teach Team Work
recent proposals to reform the
Business Administration curriculum emphasize teaching teamwork
[1], [2]. The module "Ethics of
Teamwork" shows how values help
teach skills pertinent to working in
groups. It outlines three activities
spaced throughout the semester [5].
1) Students divide into semesterlong teams. Then they choose
value goals to guide group
activity. The SOV is introduced to suggest goals. In a
preliminary self-evaluation,
groups discover and translate
the value goals they will use to
guide their work for the semester. They may "discover" justice as a goal that appeals to
the group. Then they outline
a procedure that "translates"
justice into group activities.
2) In a mid-semester audit, students
report on the obstacles they
encounter and outline responses
to these. Often obstacles -
and the re-evaluation they
prompt - lead groups to change
value goals or realization procedures. The mid-semester audit,
thus, moves students from translation to verification.
3) Student groups close out the
semester with a final group
self-evaluation. Here, they
34

review, for the last time, their
goals, procedures, and results
with emphasis on what they
have learned and plan to use
in the future. While the preliminary report emphasizes
value discovery and the midsemester audit value translation, the final report focuses
on verification.
This module approaches valuerealization in the context of group
work. At the same time, the
experience of group work gives students a yardstick to assess the SOV.
Does it leave out issues important
to group work? Do its value profiles
provide sufficient content to guide
groups in the development of valueintegration procedures? The SOV
provides a framework for assessing group work but group work
feeds back to the SOV to formulate
the basis for challenges directed to
its continuous improvement.

similar conceptual issues lurking
when they translated trust as confianza; while ethicists distinguish
trust from reliance [15], confianza
identifies the two.
Three student translations of
each value were selected to provide
the starting point for a workshop
held in 2009 involving other ADEM
stakeholder groups: staff, faculty,
and administration. There, participants refined the student translations. Again, the discussions were
rich and provocative, moving from
the mechanics of translation into
deeper conceptual issues. Translating the SOV into Spanish proved to
be a good exercise for accomplishing verification. And it laid the
foundation for other verification
activities. Adopting the Johnson
& Johnson's policy of "challenging the credo" [16], ADEM stakeholder used translation perplexities
to raise conceptual challenges to
the SOV.

Conceptual Challenges
In a workshop held April 2012,
ADEM staff challenged the SOV by
discussing three scenarios. While
they found the SOV sufficiently
comprehensive, they raised three
conceptual challenges.
1) They found the SOV abstract.
The value profiles successfully
articulate aspirations but fall
short in providing guidance for
specific situations.4 To address
this, they recommended adding specific rules to flesh out
the value profiles.
2) Staff recommended exploring
the relations between the values
profiled. When informed that
students confused values on
exams, they offered this as both

Translating the
SOV into Spanish
While ADEM is a Spanish-speaking
community, the Association to
Advance Collegiate Schools of
Business requires that materials be
made available in English. This led
to the first challenge: translating
the SOV, whose first version is in
English, into Spanish. Students from
business ethics classes prepared draft
translations. They found that translation questions quickly changed into
conceptual challenges. For example,
dictionaries recommend translating
fairness as equidad. But equidad
pushes impartiality into the background while bringing equality into
the foreground; the difference is
subtle but important. Students found

While abstractness is problematic, vagueness
may be helpful. Davis puts it this way: "The
code's language is as determinate as possible under the circumstances. It states precisely what we
can now agree on, even though it states less than
each of us wants" [3]. Thus, vagueness is not a
bad thing because it finesses non-agreement until
a community is ready to face it head on.

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

SprING 2013

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