Ubuntu Philosophy as a Humanistic–Existential Framework for the Fight Against the COVID-19 Pandemic

Ubuntu has been identified by several scholars as a philosophy that provides a framework to fight health disasters such as COVID-19. Ubuntu refers to the African worldview of seeing oneself through others. It refers to the pattern of interconnectedness between people in the form of a philosophy or worldview. Ubuntu explores concerns about cosmic and global context of life. This article stipulates that Ubuntu can provide ways to deal with challenges that emerge with the COVID-19 pandemic. Ubuntu fosters the integrated components of humanity as it appreciates the biological, psychosocial, spiritual, and environmental aspects of life. The article explores several themes such as self-awareness and societal responsibility, holism, spirituality, health promotion, food security, social justice and human rights, generosity, sharing, and teamwork. Others have advanced that Ubuntu is a philosophy to adopt in the fight against epidemics, and we seek to broaden the debate by exploring Ubuntu axiological and ontological humanistic–existential themes. Finally, the article calls for the adoption of Ubuntu philosophy in psychological and social work interventions in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

Agency perspective in Islamic political treatises: implications for contemporary management research

PurposeClassical assumptions of agency theory (AT) fall short of providing satisfactory answers to modern management and organizational knowledge (MOK) problems, and there is a need for extending the scope of the field. This article aims to compare modern AT assumptions with the agency perspective of Islamic historical political treatises (namely, siyasetnamas) and point out how AT can be furthered.Design/methodology/approachThis article applies content analysis method to find out agency perspectives in Islamic political treatises and then compare them with those of the basic AT assumptions to find out similarities and differences between them in explaining agency problems.FindingsThe agency perspective in siyasetnamas are based on the following assumptions which could contribute to the development of AT with their emphasis on (1) responsibilities beyond contracts, (2) entrustment rather than ownership, (3) shared societal responsibility rather than conflicting individual interests, (4) importance of self-control for both principals and agents and (5) trust discourse which emphasizes inner virtues rather than control discourse.Originality/valueAgency perspectives cannot be considered independent of cultural imprints. By introducing siyasetnamas' agency perspective, this article makes an effort to suggest implications for how to further modern MOK based overwhelmingly on individualistic cultural assumptions to rediscuss agency problems from the viewpoint of specifically the emerging markets in which collectivist culture plays an important role in social and economic life. In this respect, siyasetnamas' agency perspective based on the notion of entrustment seems, arguably, to be a better fit to the contextual realities and managerial practices of emerging markets.

Focus of societal responsibility in the vision and mission statements of the United States pharmacy schools/ colleges

Objective: To assess the prevalence of societal responsibility languages and themes on education, research, and professional service in pharmacy programmes’ vision and mission statements. Methods: The authors collected the vision and mission statements of 142 pharmacy programmes by visiting each programme’s website. The statements were compiled and uploaded in NVivo 12. Deductive qualitative analysis and a topic extraction method with embedded principal component analysis (WordStat 8) were used to identify thematic dimensions of the statements. The number of programmes citing the respective themes were recorded. A Chi-square test was used to statistically analyse the prevalence of themes between the programme categories. Results: Education, research, professional practice, and societal service emerged as prominent themes. The prevalence of research, professional practice, and leadership themes was significantly higher in the vision statements of public programmes than private programmes. In the mission statements, the citation of a research theme was significantly higher in public programmes than private programmes. The citations of serving the diverse population and underserved population were very limited in the vision (6% and 5%) and mission statements (11% and 6%). Topic analysis conformed to the identified prominent themes and lack of societal responsibility theme in the mission statements. Conclusions: The prominent themes included education, research, and professional service to society at large. There is a distinctive lack of citations of societal responsibility towards underserved populations in the vision and mission statements.

OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE FOR SYSTEMS ENGINEERING (OESE): STATE OF ART

Operational Excellence (EO) is increasingly present in scientific and managerial news. Increasing competition, increasingly uncertain events, demands customers and society increasingly pressing, the evolution of systems towards cyber physics systems, push organizations to adapt their engineering methodologies. Excellence operational (EO) is one of the answers proposed by the scientific literature to make engineering organizations more flexible, more responsive, more efficient and therefore more competitive. In this article, we share a state of the art of operational excellence (EO) in system engineering (IS) through its most modern methodologies: the Lean Six Sigma (LSS), Theory of Constraints (TOC) and Agility (A) with an operational approach including social and societal responsibility via the Quality-Cost-Delay-Security-Environment (QCDSE). We finish by sharing four assumptions that will serve as a basis, in our future contribution, to propose a synergy solution to implement an Operational Excellence approach in systems engineering organizations.

SUICIDE PREVENTION IS A COMMUNITY’S RESPONSIBILITY: EVALUATING THE IMPLEMENTATION OF A SUICIDE PREVENTION TRAINING IN A FACULTY OF APPLIED SCIENCE & ENGINEERING

Suicide prevention is a societal responsibility which Engineering Faculties can address by implementing community-wide interventions to educate staff, faculty and students on how to recognize, respond and connect people in need. COVID-19 has necessitated a reimagining of the way suicide prevention programs are delivered and this paper will highlight the implementation and program evaluation of a new online asynchronous suicide prevention training program at a university’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering which proved to be effective.

Four Responsibility Gaps with Artificial Intelligence: Why they Matter and How to Address them

The notion of “responsibility gap” with artificial intelligence (AI) was originally introduced in the philosophical debate to indicate the concern that “learning automata” may make more difficult or impossible to attribute moral culpability to persons for untoward events. Building on literature in moral and legal philosophy, and ethics of technology, the paper proposes a broader and more comprehensive analysis of the responsibility gap. The responsibility gap, it is argued, is not one problem but a set of at least four interconnected problems – gaps in culpability, moral and public accountability, active responsibility—caused by different sources, some technical, other organisational, legal, ethical, and societal. Responsibility gaps may also happen with non-learning systems. The paper clarifies which aspect of AI may cause which gap in which form of responsibility, and why each of these gaps matter. It proposes a critical review of partial and non-satisfactory attempts to address the responsibility gap: those which present it as a new and intractable problem (“fatalism”), those which dismiss it as a false problem (“deflationism”), and those which reduce it to only one of its dimensions or sources and/or present it as a problem that can be solved by simply introducing new technical and/or legal tools (“solutionism”). The paper also outlines a more comprehensive approach to address the responsibility gaps with AI in their entirety, based on the idea of designing socio-technical systems for “meaningful human control", that is systems aligned with the relevant human reasons and capacities.