Ethics in Publishing ConferenceGeorge Washington UniversityWashington, DC

Ethics and the Publishing Start-up

June 15, 2015John W. Warren

In any start-up, there are many questions

• What is your organization’s vision/mission?• What are the foundations of the business in terms of

leadership/partners/funders?• How important is the pursuit of profit vs. social good?• What opportunities are there for growth and

innovation?• What contribution(s) do you want to make to the

world?• What is the ideal composition and characteristics of

your staff?• What kind of leader are you/do you want to become?

Particular questions are relevant to a publishing start-up

• What is the role and makeup of the advisory or editorial board?

• Open access versus commercial sales?• What kind of books do you want to publish?• What kind of books do you not want to publish?• What other products?

• For all these questions, what weight should you give to personal relationships/preferences?

• How much weight to the preferences of others?• How much purely objective aspects?

In business, money is either very important, or it

is everything

What is very important in scholarly publishing?

Start by asking, what is important to your

stakeholders and audience

Flickr user: The Open University

Identify your stakeholders and their concerns, expectations, and

interests

Press

Marketing/Sales

Sales

Reps

International

Distributors

Retailers/Vendors

Publicity

channels

Stakeholders include management, key peers, allies, customers &

suppliers

LEVEL OF INTEREST

Low High

POWER

HighKeep Satisfied (Medium effort)

Manage Closely (Maximum

Effort)

LowMonitor

(Minimum Effort)

Keep informed (Medium effort)

Power/Interest Grid for Stakeholder Prioritization

Possible strategic priorities of a university press

• Contribute to overall mission/strengths of the University

• Reinforce reputation of press in order to attract highly respected scholars and subject experts

• Increase sales revenue• Impact research, pedagogy, and/or public

debate • Collaborate with University

departments/centers• Increase digital dissemination, innovation• Contribution to the bottom line, increase

surplus• Engage with communities in core academic

and professional fields

What can ethics teach us about business, profit, and start-ups?

• Philosophical / normative ethics: moral philosophy, guides individuals and organizations on how they should behave, ‘what ought to be,’ matter of individual choice, deontology

• Empirical / descriptive ethics: management and business, explains and predicts individuals actual behavior, predictive, ‘what is,’ influence on behavior is both internal and external, corporate social responsibility

Social responsibility means the liability of an organization for the consequences of its actions

Flickr user: Eric Constantineau

Ethical climates vary—participation and innovation increase social responsibility

Participatory• Team spirit is judged by employees to be important • People have a strong responsibility vis-à-vis the community• Strong relations of trust among employees

Innovative• Innovative people are encouraged• Openness for new social developments is essential• Personal creativity of employees is valued

Instrumental• Monitoring costs is an important responsibility of staff• Performance of employees is judged according to their contribution to

society• Much attention is paid to an efficient organization of work

Regulatory• People in the organization clearly respect hierarchical relations• Personnel follow strict legal stipulations and procedures• Powers in the organization are clearly circumscribed

Don’t be afraid of your dark side—embracing the whole self (“Teddy effect”) has benefits to organizations and society

Flickr user: Jasperdo

Deviance can be a problem but there is also a positive side of

standing above the

crowd Flickr user: Paulo Brandao

“Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong? Are laws to be enforced simply because they were made? or declared by any number of men to be good, if they are not good? Is there any necessity for a man's being a tool to perform a deed of which his better nature disapproves?”— Henry David Thoreau, “ A Plea for Captain John Brown”

Deviant drawbacks and merits

Typology of Deviant Behavior

Under-conformity Conformity Over-conformity

Positive evaluation of

deviant behavior

Positive Under-conformity

(resistance to oppressive

authority, e.g. Robin Hood)

Positive Conformity

(innovation, creativity,

questioning group-think)

Positive Over-conformity

(heroes, Mother Theresa)

Negative evaluation of

deviant behavior

Negative Under-conformity

(e.g. theft, abuse of position and

power)

Negative Conformity

(passive aggressive,

pursuit of own agenda)

Negative Over-conformity

(e.g. group think, obsequiousness, compliance with

evil)

In Star Trek: Into Darkness,

Kirk demonstrates an evolution of

deviant behavior, from

negative to positive

Flickr user: George Kelly

Stories connect to readers and can impart ethics and purposeful direction to

organizations

Flickr user: Jeremy Hall

The hero develops character in a

journey through five stages—anticipation,

dream, frustration, nightmare, and

miraculous escape—overcoming a

monster that threatens not just the individual but entire community

Flickr user: Suus Wansink

Rags and riches initials wretchedness and the call; some success;

all goes wrong, dark figures; independence

and final ordeal; fulfillment

Flickr user: Martin Goldberg

Without the call the journey would not be a quest

Flickr user: Patrice-photographiste

Voyage out of normal, everyday

environments into a strange new world

and return

Flickr user: Don McCullough

In comedy, things are not what they seem until a moment of “recognition” when something hidden is

revealed and the “chaos of misunderstanding” resolved.

Flickr user: takomabibelot

Tragedy reminds us that not everything has a win-win

resolution

Flickr user: Aftab Uzzaman

Hope and love and the process of growth are

central to stories of rebirthFlickr user: Stew Dean

“Mr. Miller demonstrates that great action filmmaking is not only a

matter of physics but of ethics as well. There is cause and effect;

there are choices and consequences.”

A.O. Scott, Review of Mad Max: Fury Road, in The New York Times, May 15, 2015

The quest is to challenge what it means to be a scholarly publisher

• Challenge the status quo and conventional wisdom; generate new ideas, new ways of doing things

• Focus on partnerships—on and off campus—that add mutual value

• Think of digital possibilities from project genesis—not as an afterthought

• Integrate social media throughout the press to engage core audience(s)

• Make workflow more efficient• Pursue analytics, such as aggregate, anonymous

performance data, to improve texts

Experiment with new forms of peer review and participatory content creation

Move beyond the book to collaborative, social learning

Create the right environment

• Foster a culture of meaning and learning• Ensure that everyone’s voice is heard and

everyone makes a contribution • Instill a culture of high expectations—for

people and content• Experiment with intent and don’t be afraid

to make mistakes• Be environmentally sensitive • Intuition plus analysis: don’t overanalyze

or put too much faith into analysis alone

• "Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still. Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good—be good for something." — Henry David Thoreau, Letters to a Spiritual Seeker

Three Quick Questions

Would you publish The Al-Qaeda Reader?

• Doubleday’s Al-Qaeda Reader, edited by Raymond Ibrahim, includes material written by al-Qaeda’s second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden predating 9/11/01 terror attacks

• Doubleday: “We firmly believe we are doing a great service to America… we knew there would be many responses, but the overriding issue is to get these writes to a wide audience.”

• Houghton-Mifflin, publisher of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, puts the profits in a fund dispersed to organizations that combat ideas put forth in the book

Would you retract On the Run?

• On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, by sociologist Alice Goffman—heralded for its timely subject matter and 6 years of immersive fieldwork

• Glowing reviews in the New Yorker in the New York Times; TED Talk viewed more than 800,000 times

• Critiques have debated facts, methods, but also privileged white outsider’s studying of minority community

• Accusation that author included in a footnote details showing she may have broken state law when driving a planned getaway car; although no assault took place in the end there are ethical concerns

Would you collect or oppose

collection of student

“engagement” with their e-

texts and provide to

professors?

Discussion/Questions

Please contact me with any questions:

John W. Warren703.993.3636jwarre13@gmu.edujohnwwarren@gmail.com

@john_w_warrenJohnwwarren.com

Sources and further reading (1)Branin, Joseph, et al., “A Statement of Ethics for Editors of Library and

Information Science Journals,” Library &Information Science Editors, July 2009, Revised September 2010: http://www.lis-editors.org/ethics/index.shtml

Bouckaert, Luk and Jan Vandenhove, “Business Ethics and the Management of Non-Profit Institutions,” Journal of Business Ethics, 17: 1073-1081, 1998

Furneaux, Jonathan and Craig Furneaux, “Into Darkness: Deviance in Star Trek” pgs 112-115; in Michael Schwartz and Howard Harris, eds, The Contribution of Fiction to Organizational Ethics, Emerald Publishing, 2014

Guillibeau, Chris, The Art of Non-Conformity: Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want, and Change the World, Perigee Books, 2010

Illes, Katalin and Howard Harris, “How Stories Can Be Used in Organisations Seeking to Teach the Virtues” pgs 112-115; in Michael Schwartz and Howard Harris, eds, The Contribution of Fiction to Organizational Ethics, Emerald Publishing, 2014

Sources and further reading (2)Kashdan, Todd B. and Robert Biswas-Diener, The Upside of Your Dark

Side: Why Being Your Whole Self—Not Just Your “Good Self”—Drives Success and Fulfillment, Hudson Street Press, 2014

Liston-Heyes, Catherine and Gordon Liu, “A study of non-profit organisations in cause-related marketing: Stakeholder concerns and safeguarding strategies,” European Journal of Marketing, Vol 47, No. 11/12, 2013

Schuessler, Jennifer, “Heralded Book on Crime Disputed,” New York Times, June 6, 2015

Streitfeld, David, “Teacher Knows if You’ve Done the E-Reading,” New York Times, April 8, 2013

Thiel, Peter with Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, Crown Business, New York, 2014