Adventures in Ethics
Posted June 25, 2020 by Sarah Callanan
We’ve completed the first week of the of the Summer 2020 term everyone! As you know, classes at SLIS are online for this term due to the pandemic. I’m not going to lie; I came very close to forgetting it was the first week of classes last week. If I hadn’t received an email from my professor announcing it was the first day of class last Monday, I would have completely forgotten.
I’m taking LIS 475: Organizational and Information Ethics this summer, and as is usual for Simmons summer classes, it is only seven weeks long, but is the same amount of work as a normal semester-long course. This means we cover two weeks-worth of material a week. If you’ve read my past posts about summer classes, you know my feelings about this. Summer classes have a lot of content in a very short amount of time. I’m not wild about the rushed feeling, but this summer, like last summer, there is no “locked” content, so I can see everything ahead of time. In summer classes, you have to be at the top of your game, but me almost forgetting that school was starting last week kind of put me off to a rough start.
What we’re learning about this semester is “the ethical implications of decisions made within various organizational contexts regarding issues such as property ownership, strategy formulation, the utilization of computer technology, employee relations, accountability, conflicts of interest, as well as other topics relevant to today’s managers.” Last week we had an introduction to the concept of ethics and ethical frameworks and this week we’re talking about ethics, organizational culture, and management. This class is a nice follow-up to the class I took last summer, LIS 404: Principles of Management. Also, this is the first class I’ve had at Simmons that doesn’t just have strictly SLIS students in the class—a good number of my classmates are in the Master of Science in Public Policy (MPP) program. It’s really interesting to not just get a strictly library perspective on things in the forums!
On a fun note: I started re-watching The Good Place, which has an underlying theme of ethics throughout the series, and I’ve been very excited because I’ve been able to point out some of the ethical frameworks and concepts that we’ve been learning about in class! Yay for knowledge retention and reinforcement!
If you want to learn more this course, or any of the courses offered at SLIS, click here!