The same person can make different moral judgments about the same activity in their professional role and in their personal life. For example, people may follow a different moral code when making purchases at work compared with in their private lives. This potential difference has largely remained unexamined. This study explores differences in felt moral responsibility in workplace and private purchasing settings, regarding the impacts of purchasing decisions on supply chain workers, and explores the influence of personal values and ethical work climate. The case of a high-profile university in the United Kingdom is studied, which has made strong commitments to socially responsible public procurement. Based on a survey of 318 university staff who make purchases at work, stronger moral values related to harm/care are associated with higher felt responsibility in personal purchasing than in workplace purchasing, whereas less strong harm/care values are associated with higher felt responsibility in workplace purchasing than personal purchasing. In relation to ethical work climate, detailed awareness of organizational ethical procurement commitments is found to be associated with higher felt responsibility in workplace purchasing and is also found to increase the discrepancy between workplace and personal felt responsibility, increasing felt responsibility in the workplace but not in personal purchasing. These findings demonstrate the influence of individual and contextual factors on felt responsibility across different roles. Recommendations are made for further empirical research on felt responsibility across roles and additional internal communication on social responsibility for devolved public procurement contexts.
A tension is apparent in the literature on the role of designers in making products more sustainable. On the one hand, there is a discourse of individual designer responsibility and many methods and tools are prescribed to encourage and help designers make more sustainable design decisions. Advocacy organisations focusing on sustainable and circular design have in recent years focused on inspiring designers to make more sustainable products. On the other hand, science and technology studies literature highlights the multi-stakeholder network character of design, where designers lack the power to make design decisions. This study examines how designers' roles are portrayed in reflective verbal accounts collected using two methods -sixteen semi-structured video call interviews with sustainability-focused designers, and video recordings of seven sustainable design conference panel discussions. Selected extracts are analysed using discursive psychology, to identify how actions are accomplished through talk. We see many designers working to overcome the ambiguity of seeking to be a responsible designer while not being able to make final design decisions, by claiming an extension of their role as 'pushing' and persuading for sustainability, to influence key design decisions. Talk of 'pushing' for sustainability is common across interviews and in talk at public design conferences, and in both general talk and talk of specific projects, suggesting the framing is significant to the designers' roles. The sustainable design community could consider how to support designers who report their roles as already 'pushing' to achieve more sustainable products, reflecting a sustainability champions concept that is established in other fields.
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