Human Rights & Corporate Accountability

The centre has secured seedcorn funding form the Adam Smith Research Foundation to host an interdisciplinary seminar on corporate accountability and human rights.

The placing of human rights at the centre of business ethics has emerged only in the present decade strongly sustained by the United Nations Global Compact programme. At the centre of a sociological and economical investigation of human rights as a guideline for global business ethics is the question of how to reconcile central values of human rights like human dignity and individual rights with economic profit maximizing values. Whereas the relationship between both has traditionally been regarded as fundamentally opposed, more recent research has pointed out an economic self-interest of business in sustainability and a socially stable environment. Corporate responses to the human rights agenda have been hampered by the difficulties they face in:

Defining their responsibilities for human rights: How should and do they decide which human rights claims to accept.
Establishing the boundaries of their responsibilities for human rights issues, for example their responsibilities in relation to their supply chain, and host governments.
Assessing risks, setting targets, and measuring and reporting impacts, and finding an appropriate balance between quantitative and qualitative dimensions.
Responding at the corporate level to an immense variety of local, context dependent human rights claims.

The seminar will provide the basis for study of these and other issues relating to corporate accountability and human rights.

The Professions, Public Interest & Deliberative Democracy

The Centre has just been awarded a prestigious Kelvin/Smith fellowship to study the relationship between the professions and democracy. This is an ambitious project that aims to both study and affect two very important current social trends: firstly, the increasing uncertainty surrounding the role of the professions within society; and secondly, the shift towards more deliberative forms of democracy. Over the past few decades a number of spectacular professional debacles have occurred at precisely the same time as a major social and cultural shift in our attitude towards expert professionals. The outcome has been a crisis in professional trust and a sense of disorientation amongst professional bodies in relation to their precise function in society. At the same time, however, new information technologies have increased the possibility of, and therefore calls for, greater deliberative democracy. At present, each of these developments have tended to be viewed in isolation from the other. This project attempts to combine both themes together in a major new research agenda focusing on the professions, the public interest and deliberative democracy.

New Professionalism? The Renewal of Ethics & Professionalism in A Cross Cultural Professional Organisation.

There seems to be an increasing realisation that Bristol, Alder Hey, Shipman and Enron, for example, were symbolic of broader social, cultural and technological shifts in relation to, for example, access to information, attitudes towards authority, and the level of ethical complexity in work-life dilemmas. They are indications that society has changed and with it the traditional values that used to provide the professions with both their meaning and legitimation. Many professional bodies are actively grappling with a range of ethical challenges relating to new technological developments, the new rights discourse, shifting policy agendas, conflicting regulatory and value systems, structural and funding issues and professional culture and governance. Yet while many have introduced new strategic programmes and aspirational mission statements aimed at re-establish their credibility and legitimacy, there remains a sense of uncertainty as to whether the task is simply a matter of re-establishing a relationship of trust within this new ethically complex environment or more fundamentally re-conceptualising it and making it work within a different cultural context, a context where the normative function of professional bodies is being construed not just in terms of the utility to be gained from knowing who we can trust to apply expert knowledge, but more fundamentally in terms of broader notions of accountability, justice and civil society. This project will study how one international professional organisation is responding to this new cultural and ethical climate.

Ethics CPD for Pharmacists

The Centre is currently working a leading edge e-learning developer to provide a suit of ethics and law modules aimed at the Pharmacy Profession. The project is funded by a SHEFC Knowledge Transfer grant from the University of Glasgow.

The Glasgow Science Centre - Science in the Doc

The Centre worked with Glasgow Science Centre on their new set of exhibitions on ethics and science called Science in the Doc

UK Charity Ethical Investment: Policy, Practice and Disclosure