7.2 Developing ethics codes and statements of values  (Page 5/11)

A success story

• Three years later at the same university, another faculty group set out to construct a code of ethics in order to respond to accreditation requirements. They began with the idea of constructing a stakeholder code.
• First, they identified the stakeholders of the college's activities, that is, groups or individuals who had a vital interest in that community's actions, decisions and policies.
• Second, they identified the goods held by each of these stakeholders which could be vitally impacted by the actions of the college. For example, education represented the key good held by students that could be vitally impacted by the activities and decisions of the College.
• Working from each stakeholder relation and the good that characterized that relation, members of the college began crafting code provisions. Some set forth faculty duties such as keeping regular office hours, grading fairly, and keeping up to date in teaching and research. Others emphasized student duties such as working responsibly and effectively in work teams, adhering to standards of academic honesty, and attending classes regularly.

Because stakeholder codes embody a community's values, the individuals in charge of drafting the code decided that a more direct approach would be to identify the embodied values and refine them into a Statement of Values. This formal statement could later be developed in different directions including a more detailed compliance code.

Turning their efforts toward preparing a Statement of Value Process, the Business Administration community went through the following steps:

1. They discussed a flawed document, the Pirate Credo. This brought about three positive results: participants came to see how codes embody values, that codes serve different functions, and that codes clarify relations between the insiders and outsiders of a community.
2. Participants examined "bona fide" codes of ethics such as academic codes, codes of honor, corporate codes, and professional codes. Since codes embody values, they developed lists of the values these codes embodied.
3. The sample provisions crafted in the earlier stakeholder code effort were presented so that participants could identify the values these embodied. Previous efforts in developing a stakeholder code could be benchmarked against the codes studied in the previous step. Convergences and divergences were noted and used to further characterize the college's community in terms of its similarities and differences with other communities.
4. In this step, faculty members were asked to reduce the values list to a manageable number of five to seven. This led to the most contentious part of the process. Participants disagreed on the conception of value, the meaning of particular values like justice, and on whether rights could be treated as values.
5. To resolve this disagreement, discussion leaders proposed using ballots to allow participants to vote on values. This process was more than a simple up or down vote. Participants also ranked the values under consideration.
6. After the top five values were identified, efforts were made, in describing each of the remaining values, to find places to include at least components of the values left out. For example, while confidentiality was not included in the final value list, it was reintegrated as a component of the more general value of respect. Thus, the final values list could be made more comprehensive and more acceptable to the faculty community by reintegrating some values as parts of other, more general values. Another way of picking up values left behind in the voting process was to combine values that shared significant content. Values that did not make it into the final list were still noted with the provision that they could be integrated into subsequent drafts of the Statement of Values.
7. A committee was formed to take each value through a value template. After describing the value, they formulated a principle summarizing the ethical obligations it entailed, crafted sample provisions applying the value, and posed different challenges the value presented to help guide a process of continuous improvement.
8. The committee presented its results to the faculty who approved this first draft Statement of Values
9. The faculty then developed a schedule whereby the Statement of Values would be revisited, expanded, revised, and improved.