Ethics of Information Management

This book provides ways of thinking about information and the new responsibilities engendered by its acquisition, processing, storing, dissemination and use. It offers a set of concepts, methods, arguments and illustrations designed to sharpen the reader’s ethical focus.

Organized into three sections, the first provides a conceptual background for the book as a whole. The second part focuses on fundamental concepts about ethics and includes descriptions of the process of ethical thinking and a range of theories and principles that can be used in ethical situations. In the final part, the concepts of information and the need for ethics and ethical thinking are applied to the various levels of the social system to which they pertain – individual and professional, organizational and societal or systemic.

Author Biography

Richard O. Mason is Carr P. Collins Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Edwin L. Cox School of Business, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX. He served as the Director of The Maguire Center for Ethics and Public Responsibility at SMU from 1998 to 2005. Mason’s main fields of interest are information systems, ethics and management. He is the author of numerous academic articles and books. In 2001, the Association of Information Systems awarded him the Leo Award AIS Fellow for lifelong contribution to the information systems field. In 1992, he was made a Foreign Fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences in the Informatics and Cybernetics Section.