AUTHOR
Marc Demarest

ABSTRACT
The racit knowledge held in the heads and the unconscious or silent aspects of knowledge worker practice belong to the knowledge worker, to the guild of knowledge workers and to the firm. The firm has a legitimate interest in rendering the tacit explicit, in externalising guild knowledge, in breaking open the mysteries. The knowledge worker’s response depends on the firm’s transactional style — the quid pro quo — on its market position, and on the historical labour-management relationship within the firm.

It is clear that existing legal infrastucture, encapsulated in the employment agreements white collar workers sign on employment by information-intensive firms, are unequal to:

• the task of protecting the knowledge worker from unethical, invasive attempts to protect what the firm sees as its intellectual property, and
• the task of protecting the firm from the unwitting of deliberate hemorrhaging of proprietary itellectual property.

Aside from pronouncements that “information wants to be free,” we javen’t done a very good job to date of specifying what kinds of policies and procedures firms need to adopt to both perform theirfudiciary and legal duties in managing their itellectual assets, and nurture, rather than routinize, their knowledge worker communities.

This paper sets out to do that, with a view to balancing the legitimate claims of the human subject with the real legal and financial responsibilities of the commercial firm.

Biographical Information

Marc Demarest is the chief knowledge officer (CKO) at Sequent Computer Systems, Inc. in Beaverton, Oregon. He prepared a paper on knowledge worker guild practice and firm strategy for ETHICOMP95. This paper represents a continuation of the line of argumentation developed in that paper

AUTHOR
Carlos Eslava and Jaime Nubiola

ABSTRACT

The substantial losses resulting from free copy of software are leading to increasingly aggressive campaigns against it from software producers. The aim of our paper is to examine the value and nature of software and the responsibilities that developers assume. We defend the substitution of the present sale of products by a service in which responsibility is really taken for the quality of the software. If a guarantee of service between the developer and the customer is established, users would become aware of the real difference between buying software and copying it.

AUTHOR
Anne Leeming

ABSTRACT

The penetration of information technology has reached every corner of most working lives. A world without IT is inconceivable. It is a good time, therefore, to examine the nature of employment in the industry. Its character has been formed by a history of rapid technical change and more recently, global changes in the nature of business. Interpersonal and managerial competence and the gender of its employees are top of its agenda for development. A dominant characteristic of the IT community is its maleness. This accords with the picture of women’s employment painted at the UN conference on the Status and Employment of Women held in Beijing in September 1995. The recommendations of the conference’s final document, the Global Platform for Action, are designed to be the foundation of government policies around the world. As these new policies are expected to affect the way the business community regards its staff the implication is that the IT community needs to rethink how it might attract more women to work as IT professionals and to rise to the top of their organisations. This paper describes the current role of women in the IT industry. It reviews the recommendations of the Beijing conference and discusses their impact on the IT community.

AUTHOR
Jacqueline Sewell

ABSTRACT

Two characteristics define modern society (modernity) according to writers such as Boyne and Rattansi (1990). They are, the progressive union of scientific objectivity; and politico-economic rationality. Other writers such as Bell (1974) claimed that: “the basic structure of emerging post industrial society would be a service economy dominated by a technical professional class “.

Within this post industrial society, it is argued, the dominant political structure has little impact on the logical nature of technology. Thus one of the consequences of the application of new technology within organisations would be the disappearance of old irrational labour relations and working practices in favour of a more efficient and effective labour process.

Much of the literature surrounding the debate on the effect of the application of technology on the labour process, has tended to focus on the impact of technical change on the skill of workers. Studies have concentrated on the issue of deskilling /enskilling; and whether the labour relations that follow are a result of an independent variable such as the technology itself or whether they are a result of direct political choice by management.

Writers such as Liff (1990) and Edvardsson(1990) have developed the debate further by focusing specifically on the impact of technology on gender relations in organisations and the skill level of female workers. They have noted that alongside the expansion of the female workforce in the service sector there has been a re-definition of what constitutes a skill. Thus the women who now possess these necessary ‘skills’ for the new technological organisation still find themselves by and large classified as unskilled.

The main argument of this paper is that despite the promise of modernity pre-modern sexual labour divisions remain steadfast in modern organisations, with women still largely occupying the lowest occupational levels.

AUTHOR
John Betts, Lesley Rackley and Julian Webb

ABSTRACT

Licensing of Software Engineers appears to be on its way in North America and the idea could follow to Europe in the not too distant future. This paper will look at other professions and examines the form their licensing takes with a view to making recommendations for the Software Engineer.

Recent discussions about the licensing of Software engineers has focused on the professional training of new entrants to the field. We discuss licensing from the point of view of the practising professional. Since those within the industry who must take the decisions regarding the form licensing could take are themselves practising professionals, we also discuss the importance of an all encompassing form of licensing.

This paper will look at ways of making the work of the Software Engineer more visible in order that the quality of the work can be critically examined.

Further questions to be discussed will include the need to monitor performance due to the rapidly changing software engineering environment and the need to consider, at all levels, who needs to be licensed.

AUTHOR
Lesley Rackley, Julian Webb and John Betts

ABSTRACT

In this paper we examine the relationship between computing clients, users of computer systems and the wider community of ‘stakeholders’ and consider the responsibilities of the computing professional towards each of these three groups when a conflict of interest arises. Initially we consider the contributions that both professional codes of practice and ethical theory have to offer this debate. We find that the interests of all three parties must be protected and hence, although a set of principles can be established from these sources, they do not enable us to define the role responsibilities of the computing professional when a clash of loyalties occurs. The fiduciary model of responsibility is then considered. On this basis we suggest that the primary responsibility of computing professionals is to discharge their duty of expertise to the client to the best of their ability, in this case by recommending strategies to address the conflicting interests. We then propose a set of guidelines for professionals facing a dilemma of this sort which incorporates the principles previously outlined. Finally we conclude that although we have an ethical and moral responsibility to the society of which we are part, computing professionals should not be expected to assume responsibility for all the decisions of their clients.