Showing papers on "Professional ethics published in 1976"

Professional Ethics and Beyond: Values in Planning

Abstract: Professionalization of planning and the credentialing processes that will accompany it add importance to a review of the role of professional ethics in planning. Existing ethical standards are often inherently contradictory, guild oriented, and inconsistent with the public image the profession attempts to maintain. The more publicly oriented prescriptions are not designed to be enforced. Generally they are a weak guide to ethical conduct for practicing planners. Planning theories suggest ethical standards going beyond professional prescriptions. A historical or structural approach would further suggest that professionally derived standards will be inherently system maintaining and that efforts to inject more progressive and enforceable guidelines into professional codes are likely to meet major resistance within the profession.

Overview: Ethical issues in contemporary psychiatry.

Abstract: The authors survey the ethical problems confronting psychiatry today. They state that with rare exceptions psychiatric intervention can be morally justified only with the potential patient's informed consent. Within this framework, they discuss the fact that today nonpsychiatrists, particularly ethicists, lawyers, legislators, and social scientists, as well as psychiatrists are concerned about medical ethics, specifically regarding the right to be treated, the right not to be treated, the civil rights of psychiatric patients, the ethics of behavior control, the problem of conflicts of interest in therapeutic goals, privacy and confidentiality, the ethics of human experimentation, policy decisions, and psychiatry's relationship to the changing moral value structure of U.S. society.

The Moral Codes of Executives: A Watergate-inspired Look at Barnard's Theory of Executive Responsibility

Abstract: Chester Barnard's treatment of the functions of the executive climaxes in his largely neglected consideration of executive morality. A high priority needs to be given to the study of executive morality, in efforts to better understand executive behavior. Barnard provides a promising point of departure.

The social control of organizations in the health care area.

Abstract: Available data suggest that the influence and autonomy of health care professionals have been declining. Of course, professional impact remains higher in health care than perhaps any other economic sphere, but the locus of much health care decision making has been shifting from independent professionals to employed personnel of large-scale government, hospital, insurance, and research organizations. The question therefore arises as to what shall replace this previous reliance upon individual professional ethics to assure the society that its newly powerful health care organizations are functioning in a desirable manner. In other words, what are to be the preferred mechanisms for socially controlling health care organizations. This paper traces three dominant belief patterns about how the characteristics of health care organizations and their environments produce desired control. It proposes that belief patterns have emphasized (1) the non-profit motives of many health care organizations; (2) the system of interrelationships that surround health care organizations; and (3) the vast differences among health care consumers. Choices from among these models continue to depend less upon knowledge of organizational functioning than upon political dispositions and social fancy.

Information services to industry: the role of the technological university library

Abstract: The TUL serves as an information centre, but is in fact a network node which is part of a shared pool. In spite of the decentralization of bibliographic data files the file‐managing documentation centre is still important in maintaining the efficient utilization of available resources. Changes in the management of Scientific and Technical Information Systems and Services may be counter‐productive if policy and planning move away from the broad view; e.g. cost‐effectiveness in the narrow sense cannot always be the condition for financial support. Professional ethics, especially in the distribution of responsibilities for selection and the use of available information, should receive more attention. Vital issues are research on needs for new services and education of both user and custodian in the exploitation of available information resources. This involves an active appreciation of the ethical content, its meaning and implications for professional conduct.

Ethics for engineers: A code and its support

Abstract: A code of professional ethics for engineers should be. regarded as a positive factor that defines, encourages, and supports ethical behavior, rather than as a negative factor that outlaws and punishes the unethical.