Spinello, Richard A.

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Spinello, Richard A.

PERSONAL:

Education: Boston College, B.A. and M.B.A; Fordham University, M.A. and Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Office of Public Affairs, Boston College, 14 Mayflower Rd., Chestnut Hill, MA 02467. E-mail—richard.spinello@bc.edu.

CAREER:

Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, associate dean for eleven years, associate research professor at Carroll School of Management, 1999—. Also worked as a programmer, consultant, and marketing manager in the software industry.

WRITINGS:

Ethical Aspects of Information Technology, Prentice Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1995.

(As Richard Spinello; with Thomas Koulopoulos and Wayne Toms) Corporate Instinct: Building a Knowing Enterprise for the Twenty-first Century, Van Nostrand Reinhold (New York, NY), 1997.

Regulating Cyberspace: The Policies and Technologies of Control, Quorum Books (Westport, CT), 2002.

Case Studies in Information Technology Ethics and Policy, 2nd edition, Prentice Hall (Upper Saddle River, NJ), 2003.

(Editor, with Herman T. Tavani) Readings in Cyberethics, 2nd edition, Jones amp; Bartlett Publishers (Sudbury, MA), 2004.

(With others) Intellectual Property Rights in a Networked World: Theory and Practice, Information Science Publishing (Hershey, PA), 2005.

CyberEthics: Morality and Law in Cyberspace, 3rd edition, Jones & Bartlett Publishers (Sudbury, MA), 2006.

The Genius of John Paul II: The Great Pope's Moral Wisdom, Sheed & Ward (Lanham, MD), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Richard A. Spinello, an associate research professor at Boston College's Carroll School of Management, writes extensively about computer and information technology, intellectual property, business ethics, management, and the Internet. "The boom in communications technology has created, or at least exacerbated, some complicated ethical issues in the workplace," Spinello told Sean Smith in the Boston College Chronicle, noting that privacy and productivity issues have altered the relationship between employers and their employees.

In Corporate Instinct: Building a Knowing Enterprise for the Twenty-first Century, Spinello and coauthors Thomas Koulopoulos and Wayne Toms examine "how a company's organizational structure can facilitate, or impede, development of corporate instinct," Smith observed. Corporate instinct is defined as a company's awareness of and ability to transfer knowledge to action. "In organizations, people usually have an intuitive sense of how things get done; they may have trouble articulating it, but they know something is there," Spinello remarked to Smith. "This ‘tacit knowledge’ is the key to corporate instinct: How do you turn it into explicit knowledge?"

Spinello is also the author of The Genius of John Paul II: The Great Pope's Moral Wisdom. In the work, Spinello defends the moral writings of the late pope, including encyclicals such as Veritatis splendor, against critics. The author asserts "that these writings are both faithful to the Catholic tradition and philosophically coherent," wrote Library Journal contributor L. Kriz.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Boston College Chronicle, April 9, 1998, Sean Smith, "It Really Is a Jungle Out There," review of Corporate Instinct: Building a Knowing Enterprise for the Twenty-first Century; September 30, 1999, Sean Smith, "Communications Technology."

Library Journal, February 1, 2007, L. Kriz, review of The Genius of John Paul II: The Great Pope's Moral Wisdom, p. 77.