M.J. Verkerk

From responsible management to responsible organizations; the democratic principle for managing organizational ethics

An increasing number of organizations have adopted formal ethics programs. Almost all of these programs are institutionalized at a corporate level and based on communication with representatives and on hierarchical regulations. Sociotechnical theory suggests the use of a participative approach for managing ethics in an organization. In this approach, employees and other stakeholders are directly involved in setting the norms, or specifying the corporate norms in their own area of responsibility (the democratic principle). In this way, the internalization of organizational values is included in the process of organizing ethics.

Critical study : in search of an integrative vision for technology

In April 2006, I was invited to present a discussion paper at a conference of the Centre for Philosophy, Technology and Social Systems (CPTS). The Centre is one of the few initiatives where reformational philosophers and engineers meet to discuss issues of Science, Technology and Society. The main actors in this network are Sytse Strijbos (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands) and Andrew Basden (University of Salford, United Kingdom). Recently, the results of this longstanding cooperation between the members of this Centre were presented in a solid work entitled In Search of an Integrative Vision for Technology: Interdisciplinary Studies in Information Systems (2006) (S. Strijbos and A. Basden (eds), Springer, New York). In this book an integrative vision has been developed from a Dooyeweerdian perspective. Therefore, it is worthwhile to introduce this group and its main lines of thought. In this critical study I introduce the CPTS (section 1), highlight some main ideas of this study (section 2), discuss the use of the Dooyeweerdian ontology (section 3), enrich the idea of human practices (section 4), explore directional perspectives in relation to society and organisations (section 5), and draw some conclusions (section 6).