published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Philosophy / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / Philosophy / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

<p> The following study discusses servant leadership in relation to the larger topic of global leadership. It derives composite definitions for each from the literature and offers a philosophical foundation for servant leadership in order to prepare for a discussion of the problem of lack of construct consensus in current servant leadership empirical research. An exhaustive literature review supplied a quantitative, cross-cultural study with established measures of reliability and validity. The current research replicated this study as it provided an instrument with a small number of constructs offering simplification for servant leadership construct consensus. Two changes were made, however, in methodology. First, respondents were tested from a newly introduced, multiple-leader model of leadership rather than the single-leader model in the original study. Secondly, culture was assigned to control variable status and a numerical value recorded for both countries. The data was then analyzed using measures consistent with the original study in order to compare results between the original single-leader and the new multiple-leader models as well as multiple-regression to see if culture can be predicted through a combined database of all respondents from both countries. The multiple-leader model provided more consistent construct evaluation across the specific high and low power-distance countries studied with generally equivalent or reduced standard deviations than the single-leader model. Culture cannot be predicted from the constructs as recorded. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to verify a lack of correlation between constructs in contrast to standard statistical program outputs.</p>

<p> This guide was created to serve as a tool for crisis communications to assist in crafting ethical responses to crises using social media as the primary communications channel. The guide combines Stakeholder Theory (Freeman, 1984)&mdash;a management theory that focuses on the importance of different groups of people, not just shareholders&mdash;with Situational Crisis Communication (Coombs, 2007). The guide also adheres to two of Kant&rsquo;s Categorical Imperatives as the ethical basis and marker. To create the guide, the author relied on archival, or documentary, research to provide the background information and theory to inform the creation of the guide. The guide is broken up into four parts&mdash;an overview of crisis communication, pre-crisis planning, active crisis communication, and post-crisis communication/reputation rebuilding. The guide is meant to be used as a tool, and is not an exhaustive how-to for handling a crisis.</p>

<p>In this dissertation, I attempt to answer the question of how people can come to behave in accordance with their moral standards. To answer this question, I argue for and then apply a naturalistic approach to ethical philosophy that includes an attempt to construct both an empirically adequate account of human psychology and an account of moral cultivation that accords with that account of our psychology. I then present a part of that picture of human psychology, focused on what I call "impediments to virtue", which are the elements of human psychology that make it difficult for us to behave in ways that consistently accord with our moral standards; this picture also serves to show why we need moral cultivation methods and helps to clarify what we need them to do for us. I then argue in favor of an interpretation of the Analects of Confucius on which it is primarily focused on discussions of a method of moral cultivation, and I lay out a detailed account of what that method is and how it works. Turning once again to literature in empirical psychology, I present an argument that we have good reason to think that the Confucian method of moral cultivation as presented in the Analects will be effective in the ways intended. I then discuss the relative strengths of the Confucian method over other methods of moral cultivation that exist in the philosophical literature, including Aristotle's method of cultivating virtue in the Nichomachean Ethics, Mark Alfano's factitious virtue theory, and biotechnological moral enhancement.</p> / Dissertation

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The digital divide refers to inequalities in access to information technology. Those people who do not have access to information technology are at a significant economic and social disadvantage. As with any other policy decision, in order to evaluate policies for dealing with the digital divide, we need to know exactly what our goal should be. Since the principal value of access to information technology is that it leads to knowledge, work in epistemology can help us to clarify our goal in the context of the digital divide. In this paper, I argue that epistemic value theory can help us to determine which distribution of knowledge to aim for. Epistemic value theory cannot specify a particular distribution to aim for, but it can significantly narrow down the range of possibilities. Additionally, I indicate how the exercise of applying epistemic value theory to the case of the digital divide furthers work in epistemology.

While librarians are concerned about copyright and intellectual property, the extent of their compliance with ethical guidelines and copyright laws is unclear. This study examines, through content analysis, librariesâ approaches toward copyright concerns in three countries (Israel, Russia, and the United States), and suggests a model of library response to social responsibility issues.

While librarians are concerned about copyright and intellectual property, the extent of their compliance with ethical guidelines and copyright laws is unclear. This study examines, through content analysis, librariesâ approaches toward copyright concerns in three countries (Israel, Russia, and the United States), and suggests a model of library response to social responsibility issues.