The Ethics of Conducting E-Mail Surveys

This paper has been receiving a lot of attention lately. Visit my SSRN page to read this and other papers.

PROF. SANDEEP KRISHNAMURTHY
Sandeep Krishnamurthy, READINGS IN VIRTUAL RESEARCH ETHICS: ISSUES AND CONTROVERSIES, 2002


Abstract: The prospect of using e-mail in survey research can be very exciting to academic researchers. However, it raises many ethical concerns. While many people have started to say that obtaining consumer permission is important, there is no clarity on how to obtain and maintain permission. Some academic researchers might argue that, due to the low volume and infrequent nature of their surveys and the general positive perception of academia, their e-mail surveys do not add to the Spam problem. However, this is problematic from an ethical perspective since it changes the definition of what Spam is from any unsolicited e-mail to a subset of these e-mails which have certain predefined characteristics. There are ways to implement permission-based respondent contact if the academic community wants to. The only negative to keep in mind will be the statistical problem of self-selection and the loss of complete randomness to some degree. Regardless, the future legal landscape may force academic researcher to adopt permission as the standard.

Meet Megan Conklin

She has a wonderful blog with great links.

A Textbook Author Reports.

I am the author of a book called "E-Commerce Management: Text and Cases". The book has several E-Tasks. When my students finish these tasks, I ask them to post it on to their student page. Turns out, Google has cached many of these and they are freely available on the Web. A colleague recently reported that-

"I am really enjoying your text; however, I have my students complete the E-Tasks and an analysis for the cases in your text. As they turn in their work I see they are giving your students' pages as references for some answers without searching for the answers themselves."

The students are clearly smart. They know that if they provide references the teacher will not call it plagiarism. Yet, they are not doing the work. At the same time, they are showing their research skills in locating information. Overall, a mess. I will simply ask my students to stop posting their writeups in future classes.

Excerpts from Henry Mintzberg's talk.

I attended a talk by Henry Mintzberg yesterday. Well, it was more of a discussion.

Here are some snippets.

You cannot create a leader in the classroom.

Shareholder value comes from ignoring shareholder value.

The big picture is painted with a lot of little brush strokes. [if you are a manager who is not detail-oriented, you are disconnected]

Strategy grows like weeds in the garden and not tomatoes in a hot-house. [ideas come from everywhere]

Synthesis does not come from analysis. [and we teach our MBA students to do way too much analysis]

Managers have to be smart and thoughtful.

Two schools of success- Peterian (inspired by Tom Peters- do things well) and Porterian (inspired by Michael Porter- strategic positioning).

Leaders are created before the age 10.

Leaders are formed at the time of crisis and when challenges present themselves.

Filters in GMail

I am quite annoyed about the process to set up filters in Gmail. When I go to set up a filter, the auto-complete process is disabled. This forces me to copy and paste the e-mail leading to a waste of time. GMail techies- enable auto-complete in the filter setting process.

By the way, all of a sudden, I have 50 invitations to Gmail! Ye!