Este artículo presenta una caracterización del proceso de autogestión laboral ocurrido en la Argentina en el período 1990-2006, apuntando especialmente sobre el universo de las Empresas Recuperadas por sus Trabajadores. En esta dirección, se argumenta sobre una serie de dimensiones analíticas que singularizan a este proceso con referencia a otras experiencias autogestionarias ocurridas antecedentemente. Esta singularidad descansa específicamente en que estas experiencias pueden ser estudiadas como procesos de recolectivización laboral, cuya emergencia y desarrollo se ubica en un escenario atravesado por (...) un profundo proceso de descolectivización social, económica y política. Las dimensiones destacadas y analizadas para aludir al proceso de recolectivización suponen la exposición de argumentos en torno a los siguientes elementos interpretativos: la reconstrucción de un espacio y una experiencia colectiva de trabajo que recuperó parte de la historia asalariada de los trabajadores, la reconfiguración de vínculos de sociabilidad al interior del espacio productivo, la relación con organizaciones sociales y gremiales que representaron los intereses de los trabajadores de estas empresas recuperadas. (shrink)

Organisational restructuring involving cost-cutting, downsizing, and the acquisition and divestment of different functions is an increasingly normalised aspect of employment in both the private and public sectors. This article takes up the question of the effects of restructuring on workers through a study based on in-depth, semi-structured interviews of long-term workers in Finland’s state-owned postal service, using the concept of dignity as an analytical lens. The article distinguishes between everyday, organisational, and social dignity, using this distinction to capture (...) how workers strove to sustain dignity in a process of organisational restructuring that generated dignity threats related to occupational devaluation. The study shows how dignity in postal work has been dependent on a particular historical configuration of public service work involving the employer organisation, employment relations, and occupational values. Cost-driven restructuring has destabilised this configuration, producing a stark separation between dignity in everyday work and the organisational indignities of restructuring in postal workers’ experiences. Feeling unable to affect organisational changes in their work, postal workers have been left to sustain dignity through everyday relationality, and by drawing intra-organisational boundaries to temporary workers and upper managers based on an occupational hierarchy of commitment and competence. The study highlights the significance of organisational support for dignity at work, particularly in relation to the dignity threats generated by prolonged processes of restructuring. (shrink)

This article contributes to the limited literatures on small- and medium-size enterprises and corporate social responsibility. Using an institutional theoretical framework, we analyzed fieldwork interviews with twenty SMEs and perspectives of 165 SME managers and workers in textiles, garment, and footwear industries, the most important wage-earning sector in Vietnam. Having understood in the context of a developing “market economy with socialist orientation”, we find that socially responsible practices and expectations developed long before the arrival of CSR as a western (...) concept and an MNC agenda. While identifying and contributing ideas concerning forms of “informal” CSR practices—influenced by social and cultural expectations—to the CSR/sme literature, we are conscious of the mixed effects of these practices and the ongoing nuanced negotiations between workers and managers in these SMEs. In our research, we found that it takes both domestic and international stakeholders to improve labor conditions in Vietnam under the banner of CSR. (shrink)

This article traces the trajectory of theory and praxis aroundnocivitàor noxiousness – i.e., health damage and environmental degradation – drawn by the workerist group rooted in the petrochemical complex of Porto Marghera, Venice. While Porto Maghera was an important setting for the early activism of influential theorists such as the post-workerist Antonio Negri and the autonomist feminist Mariarosa Dalla Costa, the theories produced by the workers themselves have been largely forgotten. Yet, this experience was remarkable because it involved (...) class='Hi'>workers employed by polluting industries denouncing in words and actions the environmental degradation caused by their companies from as early as 1968, when the workerists had a determining influence in the local factories. The Porto Marghera struggles against noxiousness contradict the widespread belief that what is today known as working-class environmentalism did not have much significance in the labour unrest of Italy’s Long 1968. The Porto Marghera group’s original contribution was based on the thesis of the inherent noxiousness of capitalist work and an antagonistic-transformative approach to capitalist technology. This led to the proposal of a counterpower able to determine “what, how, and how much to produce” on the basis of common needs encompassing the environment, pointing to the utopian prospect of struggling for a different, anti-capitalist technology, compatible with the sustainable reproduction of life on the planet. (shrink)

This paper relates the origin, the principles and the evolution of the financial participation in HBK-Spaarbank. This participation in the capital is concretized by the cooperative company Personnel Cooperative HBK. Founded in 1979, this cooperative company which represents all workers of HBK-Spaarbank has now become a very significant shareholder. At present it owns 22.50% of the capital of the savings bank.

This article examines and analyzes Semco, a company that changed the way it viewed and treated its workers for the better. It is the contention of Semco’s CEO, that at most large corporations “everyone is part of a gigantic, impersonal machine, and it is impossible to feel motivated when you feel you are just another cog. Human nature demands recognition. Without it, people lose their sense of purpose and become dissatisfied, restless, and unproductive” (Semler, 1993, p. 109). At Semco, (...) employees were no longer just faceless drones acting as machines would. By putting more power and decision making in the hands of their employees, the company became very successful, as it was more efficient and flexible. Workers also reaped the rewards of significantly increased control and decision-making power. This improved their lives financially and personally, as they were better able to deal with stress. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 41, no. 3. © 2015 by Kathryn Kein 671 Kathryn Kein Recovering Our Sense of Humor: New Directions in Feminist Humor Studies At the 2014 annual meeting of the American Studies Association (ASA), the Humor Studies Caucus held a panel titled “Female Comedians and the Critical Power of Laughter.” After listening to presentations on Gilda Radner, Lily Tomlin, and Black women comedians’ 1960s comedy albums, one audience (...) member asked the panel if the classic theories of humor—Freud’s theory of the joke, Bergson’s thoughts on laughter (all conceived of in relation to the work of men)—applied when analyzing female comedic performers. One panelist immediately responded that she found none of those theories useful to her work on female comedians, and that instead she used queer theory to aid her analysis. This exchange at ASA points to many of the questions that scholars of humor and feminism are currently facing as they work to address a dearth of scholarship dealing with women, feminism, and comedy. The nods in agreement around the room spoke to the notion that scholarship on the topic of women in comedy is not merely filling in gaps, but breaking new ground. With a few notable exceptions, scholars have been relatively silent on topics involving women and/in comedy.1 The meager 1. See Susanne Lavin, Women and Comedy in Solo Performance: Phyllis Diller, Lily Tomlin, and Roseanne (New York: Routledge, 2004); June Sochen, ed., Women’s Comic Visions (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1991); John Limon, “Skirting, Kidding: Ellen Degeneres and Paula Poundstone,” in 672 Kathryn Kein scholarly space devoted to feminism and humor is likely shaped by the fraught relationship women and feminism have had with humor in our cultural imagination. Women have long battled a perception that they, as a sex, are biologically not funny. Men have always vastly outnumbered women on stand-up stages and in comedy writers’ rooms. Former Saturday Night Live writer Anne Beatts recalled that star John Belushi, being of the “chicks-aren’t-funny” school, often requested that the women writers be fired.2 In her bestselling Bossypants, Tina Fey recalls that the gender imbalance of the sketch comedy teams at Chicago’s Second City were due to the fact that directors believed “the audience doesn’t want to see a scene between two women.”3 In his 2007 piece in Vanity Fair brashly titled “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” Christopher Hitchens went so far as to call women and humor “antithetical.”4 In particular, feminist women have been painted as humorless and unable to take a joke. In The Promise of Happiness, Sarah Ahmed, defining her figure of the feminist killjoy, observes that “feminists are typically represented as grumpy his Stand-Up Comedy in Theory, or, Abjection in America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 2. For further accounts of women comedy writers’ and performers’ experiences, see Yael Kohen, We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy: A Very Oral History (New York: Sarah Crichton Books, 2012). 3. Tina Fey, Bossypants (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2011), 87. 4. Christopher Hitchens, “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” Vanity Fair 557 (2007): 54 Books Discussed in This Essay All Joking Aside: American Humor and Its Discontents. By Rebecca Krefting. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pretty/Funny: Women Comedians and Body Politics. By Linda Mizejewski. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014. The Queer Cultural Work of Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner. By Jennifer Reed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Kathryn Kein 673 and humorless.”5 In a variation of the age-old joke, when a jokester asks, “How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?” the respondent doesn’t say “How many?” but instead deadpans, “That’s not funny.” In different ways, the three books reviewed in this essay take up the conversation at ASA and tackle these same questions: How do we analyze humor produced by (and for?) women when our understanding of humor is decidedly male? What omissions have the gendered assumptions about humor caused in scholarship on feminism? How does humor work to address these assumptions? And how does the backdrop of these assumptions influence the comedy... (shrink)

In recent years, anthropologists have built a rich body of ethnography on the experience of addiction, including important cultural critiques of treatment systems. Yet little has been written from the perspective of those who work in the everyday to help others recover from substance abuse. In this article, I reflect on my labor as a clinical social worker providing therapy for homeless women and men who struggle with addiction. Building on the eloquence of those who seek to recover, recovery poets, (...) I demonstrate how the work of a team of frontline workers operates in a particular intersubjective realm that creates different conditions for understanding addiction and recovery than does anthropological fieldwork. By detailing the labor of recovery as I performed it using different evidence-based therapies to permit the emergence of a new consciousness, I aim to bring to center stage the complex labor of frontline workers so that their working conditions will be taken into account more often in anthropological work on addiction and treatment. (shrink)

The U.S. doctrine of employment-at-will, modified legislatively for protected groups, is being less harshly applied to managerial personnel. Comparable compensation is not otherwise available in the U.S. to workers displaced by technology. Nine pairs of arguments are presented to show how fundamentally management and labor disagree about a company's responsibility for its former employees. These arguments, born of years of labor-management debate, are kaleidoscopic claims about which side has what power. Ultimately, however, not even both together can solve without (...) creative public intervention the emerging problem of massive technological unemployment — the other side of the corporate dream of profit without payrolls. (Originally published as "Displaced Workers: Whose Responsibility?" in Social Policy and Conflict Resolution, eds. T. Attig, D. Callen, and R.G. Frey, Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green Studies in Applied Philosophy VI, 1984.). (shrink)

This paper aims to identify computerized management information systems resources and their relationship to the development of performance in the Electricity Distribution Company in Gaza. This research used two dimensions. The first dimension is computerized management information systems and the second dimension the Development of Performance. The control sample was (063). (360) questioners were distributed and (306) were retrieved back with a percentage of (85%). Several statistical tools were used for data analysis and hypotheses testing, including reliability correlation using Cronbach’s (...) alpha, “ANOVA”, Simple Linear Regression and Step Wise Regression. The overall findings of the current study suggested the presence of a statistically significant relationship between resources (physical, software, and human and organizational) for the computerized management information systems and the development of performance in the Electricity Distribution Company in Gaza. The study recommended the following: The need to strengthen the company's management interest in the potential of computerized management information systems and using them in the computerization of all the company's activities. And the need to involve workers and users in the design of computerized management information systems and assessment and development process. And strengthen the relationship between users and information systems personnel in the department responsible for the system. And it is essential that the company is developing the infrastructure for information technology in general, and computerized management information systems, in particular for the development of performance. And increase interest in providing resources (physical, software, and human and organizational) for the computerized management information systems. The current study is unique by the virtue of its nature, scope and way of implied investigation, as it is the first study at Electricity Distribution Company in Gaza resources explores the status of Computerized management information systems and their relationship to the development of performance in the Electricity Distribution Company in Gaza increasing interest in Computerized management information systems through continuity, keeping pace with technological means and modern techniques. (shrink)

The radical changes deriving from the COVID-19 emergency have heavily upset some of the most familiar routines of daily work life. Abruptly, many workers have been forced to face the difficulties that come with switching to remote working. Basing on the theoretical framework proposed by the Job Demands-Resources model, the purpose of this paper was to explore the effect of work overload, on behavioral stress, meant as an outcome linked to the health impairment process. Furthermore, the aim of the (...) study was to explore the mediating role of job crafting, considered as a second-order construct consisting of two dimensions in the abovementioned relation. Participants were 530 workers experiencing remote working or work-from-home during the first COVID-19 lockdown in Italy. Hypotheses were explored by using three different latent variables, measured reflexively through indicators on a 5-point scale, extracted from validated questionnaires. Data analysis was performed through Structural Equation Modeling; to test the mediation, bootstrap validation was computed. Results showed that the mediation of job crafting was partial. More specifically, the direct effect between work overload and behavioral stress was positive; moreover, the indirect, negative effect through the mediation of job crafting was also significant. Therefore, results showed that job crafting can play a crucial role as a protective factor supporting the activation and adjustment of suitable resources; these resources can be useful to deal with the negative effects of work overload, particularly under the condition of heavy remote working and use of technologies, on individual outcomes. Starting from the current global scenario of the pandemic that has not yet ceased its effects, the study suggested decisive theoretical and practical implications. Accordingly, findings extended the current trends in occupational health psychology research, with special reference to the mainstream topic “work and COVID-19” in the Italian context. Finally, results can give suggestions to companies engaged in managing change, recommending that they build a collaborative workplace at the individual and collective level to implement job crafting interventions and enrich the personal and organizational resources of workers, which is useful cope with the current demands. (shrink)

This paper aims to identify computerized management information systems resources and their relationship to the development of performance in the Electricity Distribution Company in Gaza. This research used two dimensions. The first dimension is computerized management information systems and the second dimension the Development of Performance. The control sample was (063). (360) questioners were distributed and (306) were retrieved back with a percentage of (85%). Several statistical tools were used for data analysis and hypotheses testing, including reliability correlation using Cronbach’s (...) alpha, “ANOVA”, Simple Linear Regression and Step Wise Regression. The overall findings of the current study suggested the presence of a statistically significant relationship between resources (physical, software, and human and organizational) for the computerized management information systems and the development of performance in the Electricity Distribution Company in Gaza. The study recommended the following: The need to strengthen the company's management interest in the potential of computerized management information systems and using them in the computerization of all the company's activities. And the need to involve workers and users in the design of computerized management information systems and assessment and development process. And strengthen the relationship between users and information systems personnel in the department responsible for the system. And it is essential that the company is developing the infrastructure for information technology in general, and computerized management information systems, in particular for the development of performance. And increase interest in providing resources (physical, software, and human and organizational) for the computerized management information systems. The current study is unique by the virtue of its nature, scope and way of implied investigation, as it is the first study at Electricity Distribution Company in Gaza resources explores the status of Computerized management information systems and their relationship to the development of performance in the Electricity Distribution Company in Gaza increasing interest in Computerized management information systems through continuity, keeping pace with technological means and modern techniques. (shrink)

This article concerns the ongoing neo-logicist program in the philosophy of mathematics. The enterprise began life, in something close to its present form, with Crispin Wright’s seminal [1983]. It was bolstered when Bob Hale [1987] joined the fray on Wright’s behalf and it continues through many extensions, objections, and replies to objections . The overall plan is to develop branches of established mathematics using abstraction principles in the form: Formula where a and b are variables of a given type , (...) Σ is a higher-order operator denoting a function from items of the given type to objects in the range of the first-order variables, and E is an equivalence relation over items of the given type. In what follows, I will sometimes omit the initial quantifiers.Frege [1884, 1893] himself employed three abstraction principles. One of them, used for illustration, comes from geometry: "The direction of l1 is identical to the direction of l2 if and only if l1 is parallel to l2."Call this the direction principle. The second was dubbed N= in [Wright, 1983] and is now called Hume’s principle: Formula where F≈G is an abbreviation of the second-order statement that there is a one-to-one relation mapping the F’s onto the G’s. In words, states that the number of F is identical to the number of G if and only if F is equinumerous with G. Unlike the direction-principle, the relevant variables, F, G here are second-order. Georg Cantor …. (shrink)

The Social Marginalization...In the “enterprise restructuring” process begun in the late 1990s, China’s medium and small-scale state-owned enterprises rapidly converted themselves, through massive sell-offs, mergers and the forming of share-holding cooperatives, into private enterprises, while the larger-scale SOEs strove to reinvent themselves as “modern enterprise systems” through the issuance of shares, by company mergers and sell-offs, or via declarations of bankruptcy. During this process, SOE workers who had retained their jobs and also those who had been “laid off” in (...) the restructuring staged frequent and repeated collective protest actions. Using primary data, this paper seeks to portray the profound social marginalization of workers that has occurred during the SOE restructuring process, and it identifies this factor as being the primary cause of the increase in workers’ collective protests in China in recent years. In the author’s view, the rights to which Chinese workers are entitled under the country’s labor laws have been steadily eroded and diminished by the impact of enterprise restructuring. In a clear case of “closing the stable door after the horse has bolted,” the central government began issuing instructions to safeguard workers’ rights only when the restructuring process had been underway for several years. The wholesale loss of their rights has triggered intense indignation on the part of the workers, and the groundswell of collective protest actions around the country nowadays represents a heart-felt cry for help by an increasingly socially marginalized constituency of many millions. (shrink)

Globally, the population is ageing, which has serious consequences for businesses. The prosperity of companies is crucially dependent on the ability to effectively manage their employees, including older workers. Best practice in age management is defined as those measures that combat age barriers and/or promote age diversity. These measures may entail specific initiatives aimed at particular dimensions of age management; they may also include more general employment or human resources policies that help to create an environment in which (...) individual employees can achieve their potential without being disadvantaged by their age. Promoting early retirement is generally not encouraged. Companies now have to encourage longer working lives. Much needs to be done to ensure that work remains a positive experience for workers throughout their career trajectories, and it does not damage their health. It has been found by studies that health is significantly related to retirement timing, influences work performance, and health-related organisational policies can positively influence employee retention. The major contemporary challenges to health at work are those associated with the way work, and work organisations are designed and managed. This is especially true for older workers. A comprehensive and effective approach towards age management can be very beneficial for them. How should companies implement age management? Some possible ways are set out in this policy brief below, which focuses on best practices in age management regarding ergonomic aspects and health interventions for older workers at an organisational level. The intention is to discuss the current situation and to illustrate some organisational techniques in selected countries. This policy brief can serve as an inspiration for, among others, companies and policymakers. Recommendations for successful practice are included. In total, this policy brief covers 8 COST member countries to give a glimpse of the current situation of best practice in age management and show how companies in various states deal with ergonomic aspects, health interventions and the ageing of their labour force. (shrink)

With the promotion of the Internet of Things technology, more and more industries have begun to combine with the Internet of Things technology. After joining the WTO, China’s market economy has continued to deepen. During this period, the e-commerce industry has developed rapidly, which has promoted the rise of the express delivery industry. While the rise of the industry provides jobs for employees, it also brings enormous pressure to employees. Due to the occupational stress of various stressors in the express (...) delivery industry, a series of psychological problems have been caused. “Occupational stress” is also called occupational stress, which refers to the physiological and psychological stress caused by the imbalance between objective needs and personal adaptability in a certain occupational environment. The purpose of this paper is to conduct a correlation study on the psychological health of express delivery workers’ occupational stress in the information logistics environment. It is expected to explore the relationship between occupational stress and mental health of couriers in the context of informatization, so as to provide employees with a better working environment and reduce personal stress. Logistics informatization means that logistics enterprises use modern information technology to collect, classify, transmit, summarize, identify, track, and query all or part of the information generated in the logistics process, so as to realize the control of the flow of goods. This paper analyzed the inventory of express companies, and reasonably analyzed the profit composition of the inventory link, then used a more reasonable time series seasonal coefficient method to predict the amount of incoming shipments. This paper used a combination of theoretical and empirical methods to discuss the psychological health and occupational stress of express delivery workers and to explore the relationship between the two. The experiment results of this paper showed that in the interpersonal sensitivity analysis, the coefficient of occupational stress is 0.052, and the degree of occupational stress is proportional to interpersonal sensitivity. The higher the occupational stress, the higher the interpersonal sensitivity index. The coefficient of occupational stress is-0.31. Occupational stress is inversely proportional to age. The older the age, the lower the interpersonal sensitivity index. (shrink)

Previous research on the impacts of global trade on Mexican companies showed that the family remained the basic institutional model. Since then, however, Mexico's economy has become the most open economy in Latin America with a rising percentage university-educated workers. As a middle-income country unable to provide the cheapest labor in the world, Mexico may yet benefit from globalization by entering the global knowledge economy. In semi-structured interviews with eight university-educated knowledge workers from Cuernavaca, Mexico, this exploratory (...) study looked for evidence of change and adaptation. The interviews raised questions about factors that may prolong or curtail the future pervasiveness of patriarchal business practices. It was hypothesized that merit-based hiring and promotion have become highly valued, while the social responsibility of nepotism is being questioned. The article presents several additional hypotheses about the changes that may be taking place in Mexican business practices. (shrink)

In view of the aging and dejuvenation of the working population and the expected shortages in employees’ skills in the future, it is of utmost importance to focus on older workers’ employability in order to prolong their working life until, or even beyond, their official retirement age. The primary aim of the current study was to examine the relationship between older workers’ employability (self-)perceptions and their intention to continue working until their official retirement age. In addition, we studied (...) the role of potential antecedents of their perceived employability at three different levels: training and education in current expertise area as well as in an adjacent expertise area (individual level factor), learning value of the job (job level factor), and organizational career management practices (organizational level factor). Data were collected by means of e-questionnaires that were distributed among two groups of Dutch older (45-plus) white collar workers. The samples consisted of 223 employees of an insurance company, and 325 university workers, respectively. Our research model was tested separately in each sample using Structural Equation Modeling. We controlled for effects of respondents’ (self-)perceived health and (self-)perceived financial situation. Similar results were found for both samples. First, the relationship of perceived employability with the intention to continue working until one’s retirement age was positive, whereas the relationship between a perceived good financial situation with the intention to continue working until one’s retirement age was negative. Secondly, as regards the potential antecedents, results showed that the learning value of the job was positively related to perceived employability. In addition, an employee’s perception of good health is a relevant correlate of perceived employability. So, whereas perceived employability contributes to the intention to continue working until one’s retirement age, a good financial situation is a push factor to retire early. In order to promote the labor participation of older workers, this study indicates that organizations should focus on the learning possibilities that are inherent to one’s job rather than on providing additional training or career management. Further research is needed to test the generalizability of our results to other samples. (shrink)

The development of information technology (IT) caused a positive result on company productivities. A company tend to employ more experienced information technology workers using attractive compensation. Thus, causing a high level of turnover in IT workforce. This high level of turnover is a disadvantage for the company, because the company loses their skilled workers and have to find other workers to discharge the position. This research attempt to understand turnover behavior using the theory of planned behavior from (...) attitude toward behavior, subjective norm and perceived behavioral control. The objective of this research is to know the effect of attitude toward turnover, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control to turnover intention. Data collection were done using quantitative method by 4 types of instrument; attitude toward behavior, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control and turnover intention. Data were collected from 155 information technology workers in Jakarta and analyzed using multiple regression. The result showed that attitude toward turnover intention, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control have significant effect to turnover intention. All the predictors accounted 38,8% of variance in turnover intention. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:129 Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race BY GENEVIEVE CARPIO Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2019 REVIEWED BY JARED FRIESEN In Collisions at the Crossroads: How Place and Mobility Make Race, Professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies Genevieve Carpio systematically uncovers several of the insidious forms that power takes in order to construct racial inequality. Settlement, mobility, and immobility have served to draw distinctions (...) between Latino/a, Indigenous, Asian, African Americans and white populations in the inland Southern California region. Carpio produced abundant evidence to bolster these statements through interdisciplinary methodological practices, such as “reinterpreting and recovering history” through archival research, analysis of oral history projects, and the examination of both photographic records and the built environment (14). Collisions at the Crossroads begins with a recent example of how mobility and the social construction of place, or “place making” were used to exclude Latino/a residents from participating in the celebration of the Route 66 heritage of the area. In an effort to protect the authenticity of the event, organizers of the Rendezvous festival implemented a ban on lowriders, thus sanitizing the event of Mexican cruising culture that has been a part of the complex multiracial history of the region. This moment is only one of the latest in the history of inland Southern California reaching back to the arrival of white migrants in the form of the Riverside colony to a region composed of Indigenous and Mexican Book Reviews ENVIRONMENT, SPACE, PLACE / VOLUME 13 / ISSUE 2 / 2021 130 American communities. The book lays bare how “the concept of mobility particularly applies to the everyday channels of movement in a community, especially for Indigenous people and people of color” (3–­4). Mobility is conceptualized as physical movement, the shared meaning of the physical movement, and the policies that enable or constrict movement.Throughthisanalyticlens,Carpio tracesthe “Anglo Fantasy Past” to illuminate how white populations created history that places them at the center and either erases non-­white populations or reduces themtoperpetualoutsiders.Thishistoryincludeswhitesettlement,the rise of the citrus industry, and the role of religion. For example, Indigenous people were immobilized in off-­ reservation boarding schools for AmericanIndianchildren,andcapitalist-­orientedpolicieswereenacted such as the Geary Act (1892) in order to control the mobility of Chinese immigrants. The latter is an excellent example of how race continually shaped the experiences of nonwhite migrants. Mobility is encouraged when a source of low cost labor is needed, but then controlled or even criminalized in order to maintain a racialized hierarchy. Throughout the book, Carpio reinforces the precarious situation of mobilityforpeopleofcolor.“Workersweresupposedtomoveinparticu­ lar ways, at specific times, in and to predetermined spaces” (66). This was deftly accomplished in a way that expresses the subtle processes through which power is used, indeed in ways that appear normative and even natural. Without globalized labor migration, the rise of industries such as large-­ scale citrus agriculture would not have been possible. Alternatively, deterring regional labor migration and desegregated housing were critical to maintaining the white supremacist status quo. Collisions at the Crossroads connects readers to the current turmoil and fear around immigration and racism by looking back at the exploita­ tive incentivizing and coercion of Mexican migrant workers. Mexican immigrants are attracted to work in agricultural communities, then their mobility is pathologized to limit movement through public policy. Ultimately, Mexican immigrants are constructed as “birds of passage” who prefer not to be rooted to a place. Geographer Doreen Massey refers to these processes as “differentiated mobility”: “some people are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving-­end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it.”1 Book Reviews 131 This racialization of labor created a low-­ cost workforce that was immobilized by the threat of arrest but later seen as preferable to Puerto Rican or Filipino migrants who had rights to permanent settlement. The claim was that because Mexicans preferred to migrate to worksites, they should therefore return to Mexico in the ebbs of citrus production in the inland Southern California region. Mexican migrants were considered a natural option for filling the workforce needs of the local citrus industry while... (shrink)

Over the last 20+ years, multinational corporations have been confronted with accusations of abuse of market power and unfair and unethical business conduct especially as it relates to their overseas operations and supply chain management. These accusations include, among others, worker exploitation in terms of unfairly low wages, excessive work hours, and unsafe work environment; pollution and contamination of air, ground water and land resources; and, undermining the ability of natural government to protect the well-being of their citizens. MNCs have (...) responded to these accusations by creating voluntary codes of conduct which commit them to specific standards for addressing these issues. These codes are created at both the industry-wide and the individual company level. Unfortunately, these codes have generated little credibility and public trust because their compliance claims cannot be independently verified, and they lack transparency and full public disclosure. In this article, we present a case study of the voluntary code of conduct by Mattel, Inc., the world’s largest toy company. The code, called the Global Manufacturing Principles, confronts the general criticism leveled against voluntary codes of conduct by creating detailed standards of compliance, independent external monitoring of the company’s compliance with its code of conduct, and making full, and uncensored public disclosure of the audit findings and company’s response in terms of remedial action. We present a detailed account of how Mattel’s voluntary code of conduct was created, implemented, and ultimately abandoned over 9 years. We provide an evaluative analysis of the company’s GMP compliance throughout its life span, which suggests a bell-shaped curve, where early top management commitments were met with pockets of resistance from operational groups, who were concerned about balancing GMP compliance efforts with traditional performance criteria. The early stage response from Mattel’s top management was quick and supported with the requisite resources. As a result, the compliance process accelerated, becoming increasingly more robust and effective. The success of code compliance and increased transparency in public disclosure energized field managers with a sense of professional satisfaction and publicly recognized accomplishments. The decline in GMP compliance was equally steep. When all the easily attainable targets had been reached at the company-operated plants, addressing vendor plants’ compliance presented a new set of challenges, which taxed corporate resources and management commitment. It would seem that value-based and ethics-oriented considerations, i.e., doing the right thing for the right reason, were no longer the driving force for Mattel’s management. Mattel did not see any economic benefit from its proactive stance, when competitors did not seem to suffer adverse consequences for not following suit. The final contributing factor to the code’s abandonment was a widely publicized series of product recalls which absorbed top management’s attention. (shrink)

Recent research on the role of ethics in the organizational culture literature found practically the whole literature reduced to a debate between ethical rationalism and ethical relativism. The role of the past in the form of tradition to maintain and improve moral reflection is completely missing. To address this gap in the literature on the level of practice, the concepts of moral memory and moral tradition are applied to data on 22 companies that have long-standing moral practices. In this (...) way, the practice of moral traditions can be explored with recent conceptual advances and a list of best practices delineated. Moral memory is the recollection of and attachment to the succession of past events and experiences that maintains moral tradition. Moral tradition is the continuing transmission and reception of related moral themes through multiple generations of employees. It is found that companies that maintain moral traditions tend to develop “family” cultures with considerable compassion for workers as persons who have non-economic needs and rights. These companies also temper the role of leadership, insisting that leaders are responsible for and are evaluated by the company’s moral traditions. Finally, moral traditions are essential mechanisms through which companies paradoxically both stimulate and limit competitive behavior. (shrink)

According to the Economic Survey of India, 2012–2013, the real estate sector contributed 5.9 % of the India’s total Gross Domestic Product in the Financial Year 2011–2012, while remaining the second largest employment generator after agriculture in India. The urban population in India is projected to touch 600 million by 2030, from 377 million in 2011, thereby fuelling a housing shortage of around 26 million. However, the perception of Construction industry, like other sectors of the economy, is that of creating (...) “human habitat in a manner generally focussed on profitability without consideration of its long-term impacts.” Under such circumstances, Tata Housing Development Company Limited, a closely held Public Limited Company under 99.86 % subsidiary of Tata Sons, is the first Indian real estate company to have reported the triple bottom-line Global Reporting Initiative G4 Sustainability Reporting Guidelines in its Sustainability Report FY 2013–2014. THDCL aims to volunteer its resources to the extent it can reasonably afford, to sustain the environment and to improve the quality of life of the people of the area in which it operates. This Situational Case Study, targeted towards management students and practitioners, and social and developmental workers in the areas of Corporate Governance, Strategic Management, Business Environment, Business Policy and Community Welfare, aims to identify the community engagement model of THDCL; analyse it in terms of its implementation and impact; and initiate discussion about the role of strategic partnerships under Corporate Social Responsibility in an emerging economy. This work may be used for developmental related workshops/training programmes for students and working professionals of innovation, CSR, sustainability, social and developmental sectors and shared, among others, in various Chambers of Commerce and Academic forums on the same. It is, however, not intended to serve as an endorsement, source of data or illustration of effective or ineffective management. Certain names and information could have been disguised for confidentiality. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 242—252. Introduction The following two works were produced by visual artist Jonas Staal and writer Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei during a visit as artists in residence at The Bag Factory, Johannesburg, South Africa during the summer of 2010. Both works were produced in situ and comprised in both cases a public intervention conceived by Staal and a textual work conceived by Van Gerven Oei. It was their aim, in both cases, to produce complementary works that could (...) be read “through each other,” in which the movement of artistic construction would be imitated by textual deconstruction and vice versa. Both works deal with the way in which capital, apartheid, and monumentality are interwoven in South-African society. The Missing Link addresses a monument for democracy, erected on the premises of a private corporation running both an amusement park and the Apartheid Museum franchise. The textual intervention accompanying this public intervention investigates the limits of the inclusiveness of the anti-discrimination section in the South-African constitution, itself a monumental work of democracy. The Monument for the Distribution of Wealth deals with the history and eventual dissolution of a monumental square, commemorating the Soweto Uprising, in one of the poorest townships of Johannesburg. The history accompanying this public dismemberment of memory is equally fragmented, which is expressed by the many voices recounting uncertain and perhaps even irrelevant “facts” about the genius loci, the way in which the memorial space has actually entered into the memory of the inhabitants surrounding it. Next to their individual practices, Staal and Van Gerven Oei have worked together on a number of projects ever since 2007, including several art residencies. Their work involves an investigation of the different interfaces between art, politics, and public space in media ranging from theater and public interventions, to video installations and (co-authored) textual works. The Missing Link Missing Link (1) Missing Link (2) Missing Link (3) Intervention on the monument entitled The Seven Pillars of the Constitution , part of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Seven Pillars represent the constitutional values propagated in South Africa since the abolition of the apartheid regime. The monument and museum were built by the Gold Reef Resorts corporation, which is also responsible for the theme park and casino next to it. By placing the word “capitalism” on the wall surrounding the museum, the capitalist system and the constant social divisions that it implies are interpreted as sophistic continuations of apartheid politics. Through the capitalist system, apartheid is still operational within South African society. Whereas during the apartheid regime, the separation clearly ran along race divisions, in the current, “democratic” system, the same actual separation is sustained without it being an explicit element of the foundations of the country, i.e. the constitution. This intervention foregrounds the constant role of capitalism is both periods. At the same time the intervention acknowledges that contemporary Western artisthood is a mirror of the privileges that are offered by the capitalist system, and the type of artist that it produces. The intervention initiates a critical discourse concerning the capitalist system situated within the disaster of capitalism itself, in other words: through the desire to break with the presumption that art would be able to operate outside the capitalist system and to confirm that art—and the artist himself—is in fact modeled on this system. The public intervention by Staal was supplemented by a textual intervention by Van Gerven Oei: a proposition to alter the seventeenth amendment of the South African constitution. Even though the anti-discrimination legislation in South-Africa is one of the most stringent and inclusive in the world, one factor—wealth—remains outside its scope, thus continuing the schisms along racial lines produced during the apartheid regime: §9.3. The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language, birth, and wealth. Monument for the Distribution of Wealth Intervention concerning the June 16 Memorial Acre in Central Western Jabavu, one of the poorest townships of Johannesburg. The monument comprises a park on which different are placed recalling an important protest the black population against the former apartheid regime. In 1976, from a school adjacent to the park, they started a massive protest against the introduction of Afrikaans in the school curriculum. The police reacted violently, and shot several hundreds of students. The construction of the June 16 Memorial Acre was started in 2005, and from the start was the paragon of corruption. Coordinated by local politicians, some family members of the protest leader from 1976 gained control of the realization of the monument, outside the regulation through external institutions. The available budget of 41 million rand (at that time well over 5 million euro) was largely embezzled. In the meantime, the monument has become fully dilapidated and defaced. The park has become overgrown with weeds and covered in a layer of dirt, and the local population is slowly plundering the square to use the material for the construction and decoration of their own houses. The Monument for the Distribution of Wealth develops the dynamics already existent around the June 16 Memorial Acre. Without obtaining official permission in advance, several local inhabitants were hired to break down the monument, sort the materials, and offer it to the neighborhood. Thus, the redistribution of wealth after the fall of the apartheid regime is finally taking place, albeit from the mere remains of the capital that was once invested in the community. The words “monument” and “for free” are spray-painted on the stacks of material, both in English and Zulu, as these are locally the most common languages. Van Gerven Oei supplemented Staal’s public intervention with an account of the history of the monument based on a series of interviews. The account clarifies how the different interests within the protest 1976 are reflected in the exceeding decay of the park, and how in the end those interests were represented by the June 16 Memorial Acre. Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 1: Removing stones Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 3: Pulling down statues Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 4: Offering the material Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 5: Offering the material Monument for the Distribution of Wealth 6 The next day A Fragmentary History of the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth, Formerly Known as the June 16 Memorial Acre in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei The following text, based on interviews and online research aims to provide parts of a history of the park in front of Morris Isaacson High School in Central Western Jabavu, Soweto. The idea for the transformation of the park into a memorial site has its source in the events of June 16, 1976: the start of the the student uprising in Soweto. The development of the park was started in the early 1980s, and the actual transformation into a memorial site, the June 16 Memorial Acre, was initiated in 2005. Over the last few years, several monumental additions have been made to the park: A marble monument with three pillars was revealed on June 16, 2006. A sculpture of a book and several billboards on June 16, 2008. A sculpture of student leader Tsietsi Mashinini on June 16, 2010. The park was transformed into the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth on August 3, 2010. According to the entry “Youth Struggle” on the website South African History Online, the Bantu Education Act was introduced in 1953 . In 1954 , Dr Verwoerd, Minister of Native Affairs, stated: “What is the use of teaching the Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice? That is quite absurd.” According to the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, the Afrikaans Medium Decree was issued in 1974 , forcing all black schools to use Afrikaans and English in a 50-50 mix as languages of instruction. The Regional Director of Bantu Education (Northern Transvaal Region), J.G. Erasmus, told Circuit Inspectors and Principals of Schools that from January 1, 1975 , Afrikaans had to be used for mathematics, arithmetic, and social studies from standard five (7th grade). English would be the medium for general science and practical subjects. Indigenous languages would be used for religion instruction, music, and physical culture. According the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, on April 30, 1976 , students from the Orlando West Junior School in Soweto went on strike, refusing to go to school. Their example was followed by other schools in Soweto. A student from Morris Isaacson High School, Toboho “Tsietsi” Mashinini, proposed a meeting on June 13, 1976 to discuss further action. According to Weizmann Hamilton’s article “The Soweto Uprising 1976,” which appeared in the September 1986 edition of Inqaba Ya Basebenzi (Fortress of the Revolution), on June 13, 1976 , the South African Students’ Movement called a meeting at the Donaldson Community Center in Orlando. 300-400 Students representing 55 schools decided to hold a mass demonstration on June 16. According to Brian Mokhele, member of the Joint Community Safety Forum, Dr Edelstein was the first victim of the Soweto uprising and killed the day before the march on June 15, 1976 . Edelstein was an administrator at the pass office in Jabavu and gave golf courses to the local community. Edelstein was put in a garbage bin and pierced by pickaxes. The garbage bin was left at the very spot of the murder for many years. A few years ago, a child was beheaded at the same spot, and the basketball court next to it has been abandoned since. According to Marcus Neustetter, founder of the Trinity Session, this story is untrue. According the entry “Soweto uprising” on Wikipedia, on June 16 , Tsietsi Mashinini led students from Morris Isaacson High School to join up with others who walked from Naledi High School. A crowd of between 3,000 and 10,000 eventually ended up near Orlando High School. According to Raymond Marlowe, a local photographer, Tsietsi Mashinini was heading the march. According to the entry “Hector Pieterson” on Wikipedia, Dr Edelstein died on June 16, 1976 , stoned to death by mob and left with a sign around his neck proclaiming “Beware Afrikaaners.” The first child to die that day was called Hastings Ndlovu. According to Pat Motsiri, Orlando West is claiming struggle heritage through the Hector Pieterson Museum, while Hector Pieterson was from Jabavu. According to Pat Motsiri, his generation effectively struggled between 1980 and 1991, forcing the release of Nelson Mandela and negotiations with the apartheid regime while the 1976-generation was safely in exile. Nevertheless, this has not been recognized in any monument. After the abolition of apartheid, the generation from 1976 returned from exile, occupied important government and ANC positions, creating an abundance of 1976 memorials and refusing to acknowledge that this was only possible because of the younger generation’s struggle. He calls this a generational conflict. According to Archibald Dlamini, the park officer responsible for the Memorial Acre, he started working for the municipality in 1978. In 1981/82 , Isaac Makhele from Pimville, who used to work in the cemetery business, was the first developer of the park. It used to be just a normal park until City Parks decided to develop the Memorial Acre in 2006. In 2007 the work was stopped by the community. According to Brian Mokhele, he left the country in 1989 after he participated in the riots of 1986. But when he returned in 1999 he found that nothing had changed. He says that they were promised to be protected by the Constitution, but that reality is different. The police uses fear to suppress them so that they don’t come out to talk openly. He has been arrested twice, both times harassed and tortured by the police, but in the end always released without indictment. He says that this is their way to threaten communities to back off from politics. According to Moses, who is sitting outside rolling a joint, Brian knows everything. He tells Brian to tell me everything he knows. According to Brian Mokhele, Tsietsi Mashinini was possibly murdered in 1990 during his exile in New York. Two weeks before he was supposed to return to South Africa, his papers in order, he was found dead under mysterious circumstances. His coffin was sealed when he was buried. According to Pat Motsiri, he came up with the idea for the Memorial Acre in 2003 . He submitted the documents for the proposal to the council, which sidelined him as soon as the budget came out in 2005 . According to Brian Mokhele, there was on estimation R 41,000,000 spent to redesign the park and turn it into the Memorial Acre. The millions were divided by Amos Masondo, the mayor of Soweto, the local councilor Bongani D. Zondi, and the director of the city of Johannesburg, Pat Lephunya. They were dividing the money between several contractors: Tsietsi Mashinini’s brothers were involved in the development of the park, they got the tender to do the green areas, the landscaping. Construction was done by other companies, some did the paving, the toilets, etc. EMBA, a private company appointed by the municipality was in control of the money flow, but the money was quickly gone. According to Raymond Marlowe, the contractor bought a BMW with the money. According to Archibald Dlamini, the Mashinini brothers got the tender, so the space would look more like the other places around in Soweto. It was agreed that after they were done, they would return the property to the municipality. They did whatever they could do. According to Mafaisa, a member of the Jabavu business community, he was one of the contractors for the landscaping and the pavement under Mpho Mashinini, one of the brothers. He says that I should contact Mavi for information on Mpho. According to Poi Stuurman, a local youth worker, Mafaisa is one of the guys who ran away with the money. According to Mavi, Mpho Mashinini was never a contractor. The contracts were organized by Sbu Butelezi, the former head of the Gauteng Department for Public Works. The June 16 Foundation and the Mashinini brothers will be the beneficiaries of the park when it is finished. According to Brian Mokhele, City Parks did not accept the Memorial Acre because it was not finished. The rest of the year, the unfinished park is not maintained, as should have happened. This was done deliberately so that in the end they can just clean the whole thing up and have a reason to redo the whole park. According to Brian Mokhele, the Mashinini brothers now work for the government. People that manipulate for money purposes always come from the government’s side. Because the park was left unfinished, the people from the neighborhood are taking away the stones to decorate their own homes with. According to Archibald Dlamini, because City Parks doesn’t accept responsibility of the park, he officially has nothing the guard, except for his cottage, which is municipal property. The thieves come at night and destroy the park, but he cannot do anything because he is sleeping. According to the website of the Thanda Foundation on June 16, 2006 a bronze statue of Hector Pieterson, the first child to die in the 1976 protests, made by Kobus Hattingh and Jacob Maponyane was unveiled in the Maponya Mall in Soweto. The statue is sculpted after the famous image shot by Sam Nzima of Mbuyisa Makhubo carrying the dead body of the boy. The sculpture was sponsored by the Thanda Foundation, founded by the Swedish entrepreneur Dan Olofsson and South-African entrepreneur Matthews Phosa. According to the official website of the City of Johannesburg, the Memorial Acre and Artwork were unveiled in 2006. According to a blog post on sowetouprisings.com, the Memorial Acre was still under development on July 24, 2006. According to Archibald Dlamini, City Parks only cleans up the park once a year just before the June 16 celebrations. Everybody is waiting for the Mashinini brothers to finish their job. The last time he talked with them was in 2007 . According to a sign on the school grounds of the Morris Isaacson High School, the June 16 Trail will be finished in 2008 . According to a blog post on sowetouprisings.com, the Memorial Acre contains another monument erected in Tsietsi’s honor. The monument was created as part of the Sunday Times Heritage Public Art program. Its physical form resembles a giant book which symbolizes the crisis in education experienced in 1976. On the face of the book is the map of the route taken by the students from Morris Isaacson High School in Central Western Jabavu to Phefeni Junior Secondary in Orlando West (currently the site of the Hector Pieterson Museum), while the back cover of the ‘book’ is inscribed with a tribute to Tsietsi Mashinini. The monument was revealed on June 16, 2008 . According to Marcus Neustetter, the billboards on the Memorial Acre were part of a school project realized in 2008. Following several workshops, the students from different high schools along the June 16 Trail were invited to work with artists on the billboards, while the neighborhood community was invited to watch the process during the festivities on June 15 and 16, 2008 . The billboards were supposed to be removed because of construction works on the Memorial Acre, which never ended up happening. According to Brian Mokhele, the former toilet facilities were converted into a house for the park officer. This park officer has been working for city parks for more than 12-15 years, but does nothing here, because the park, including the new toilet buildings, is not finished. The government is now moving around looking for people to take this job because they stopped it. They confronted everybody who was going in and chased them away. According to John, in 2009 , some girls, around 16 or 17 years old, were raped by four men who had been drinking in a local shebeen. When the bar quit they said that they would go home by car, but instead raped the girls on the Memorial Acre nearby. This happened in the unfinished toilets, because the doors couldn’t be closed. According to Brian Mokhele, there used to be some fences around the park because of the construction work that was eventually stopped, but these were also stolen. According to Archibald Dlamini, people from the neighborhood started about two and a half years ago, and the last piece was stolen near the end of 2009 . Sometimes he would catch someone with a roll of fence, and then use it for his own cottage. According to the official website of the City of Johannesburg, a statue of Tsietsi Mashinini by Johannes Pokhela was revealed on June 16, 2010 , “Youth Day.” According to Shirley Makutoane, deputy principal of Isaac Morrison High School, the statue of Tsietsi Mashinini, funded by the June 16 Foundation, has temporarily been placed within the school perimeter. The statue will be moved to the Memorial Acre when it will be finished, in 2011 . According to Brian Mokhele, beside the June 16 Foundation, there is also a June 16 Memorial Acre Foundation. Both foundations are quarreling about the money involved in the Memorial Acre project. Nobody knows who’s involved in them. According to Marcus Neustetter, the June 16 Foundation consists of people that were part of 1976 protest movement, local government officials, representatives of the Hector Pieterson Museum, and the council. According to students from the Isaac Morrison High School, the statue of Tsietsi Mashinini is on the school ground because on the Memorial Acre it would be vandalized by youths from White City, an adjacent neighborhood. Accorcing to Brian Mokhele, the statue of Tsietsi should eventually be mounted on the Memorial Acre. It is wrong that the statue is in the school at the moment, because it is not a public school. He wants the statues to depict the massiveness of the force that was coming into Soweto after the protests. According to Brian Mokhele, City Parks, City of Jo’burg, City Lights, and SAPS are making some sort of plan to take the plan back. They want to remove the trees from the Memorial Acre, and redesign the Memorial Acre into a relaxing park, without political content. They want to depoliticize the square. In doing so,they will have their own employment and not use local workforces. According to Brian Mokhele, the community wants to remove the monuments, amphitheater, and sculptures from the Memorial Acre because they do not resemble anything. The sculptures should be depicting the truth of what happened, because the Memorial Acre is a political heritage site. He wants to involve the people that actually participated in the struggle to make the monument so that everyone can enjoy it and get a better understanding of the struggle heritage. Therefore, he proposes collective ideology in which everyone has a say. This would prevent future vandalization of the monument. According to Pat Motsiri, the sculptures must depict the event around June 16, 1976. Like the story of Dr Edelstein, who was pierced by pickaxes, forced into a garbage bin and burned alive. According to Jonas Staal, the Memorial Acre should be destroyed, its elements stacked on pallets, thus forming the Monument for the Distribution of Wealth . According to Mafaisa, his men can do the work quickly. He has about twenty men working under him. (shrink)

The paper looks into one branch of Ukrainian economy - the food industry. It is established that marketing activities of food industry companies have some specific features, namely mismatching of an agricultural performance period and production time; a perishable nature of products, which necessitates tight time frames of storage and sales; production focus on the direct consumer; a high level of materials consumption of products released, which requires a large quantity of feedstock as well as high qualification skills and (...) expertise from workers. The activity of a domestic bakery is described. It is determined that the complexity of its production processes and increased information flows requiring in-line processing for acquisition of appropriate data served as a basis for introduction of the special 'Marketing' software by its Marketing Department. The conducted analysis of the information product allowed to establish that the user of the above software maintains routine accounting and control of product supplies. To that end, information is processed, parameters related to production and supplies analyzed. The software significantly improves operational efficiency owing to an increased number of accountable factors and reduced decision making time. That bundled software however makes no provisions for development of a unified integrated management system, which reduces the company operating efficiency. It is established that to date there are many information systems available for food production automation, the Oracle E-Business Suite-based technology, developed by TopS BI, among them. It was offered for application at the food enterprise in question. The above system allows to automate production planning and management processes at various levels: from daily shop planning and management with step-by-step product quality control to scaled-up calendar planning of production, including that for a group of enterprises. (shrink)

The notion of implicature has been a matter of discussion since Grice put it forward. He proposed a schema to explain how implicatures are generated and inferred, but the key condition it contains has been surprisingly overlooked. Davis detected it and named it determinacy, though for him this requirement raises several problems that make the whole Gricean theory of implicature untenable. I claim that, although the determinacy condition is flawed, it still captures a crucial mechanism of how implicatures are interpreted. (...) I attempt to recover this requirement under the relevance theory approach and show that, unlike the determinacy condition, the strength condition does not face the problems Davis formulates. Keywords: implicature, determinacy, strength, Cooperative Principle, principle of relevance, Gricean theory, relevance theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE PARTY'S OVER (ALMOST): TERMINAL CELEBRATION IN CONTEMPORARY FILM Tony Bartlett Syracuse University Movies are a universal language, and as we approach more and more integrated levels of global economy and communication they increasingly become a universal symbol system. At these levels a modern movie from China orNigeria will display swiftly recognizable sensibilities and situations to any viewer in Europe or the USA, and vice versa. But should we (...) not, therefore, also feel prompted to indicate a universal de-symbolization, if movies along with the modern world reflect constitutive elements of decomposition and collapse. For I would like to suggest in this essay that not only do movies constitute a kind ofplanetary envelope, literally a "film" of collective imaginai references wrapped around the world, but that this "film" is peculiarly apt to dismemberment, to breaking up before our eyes even as it still holds together, to abuilt-in "crisis" that is part ofits very nature. The two films that form a background to these remarks, Natural Born Killers and Pulp Fiction, are, I suggest, movies that set out actively to represent this cinematic crisis. In Adam Smith's The Wealth ofNations (Bk. 2, Vol. 5, 795-97), the grandfather ofmodern capitalism discusses the fate ofthe laborer who leaves arural village in which he is known and his life observed, or "attended to," by others. He moves to a great city where promptly "he is sunk in obscurity and darkness." Smith's concern is not directly to remedy this misery ofthe worker forced to seek employment in the anonymity ofthe city, but to avoid a possible course ofaction he might take. He wishes to divert him from the possibility of joining "a small religious sect," in whose company the newly depersonalized worker will achieve "a degree of consideration which he never had before." 2 Tony Bartlett Adam Smith does not relish the prospect ofthe mushroom growth ofclosed, "unsocial" religious factions within the heart of industrialized political economies, and he proposes two remedies by which the state, "without violence," might correct these tendencies. His proposals are remarkable both for their conjunction ofcertain themes and their prescience. The first is a plan for the imposition of the study of science and philosophy on the middle ranks ofthe poor, for science is "the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition." Next to this classic Enlightenment nostrum comes the following: The second ofthose remedies is the frequency and gaiety of publick diversions. The state, by encouraging, that is by giving entire liberty to all those who for their own interest would attempt, without scandal or indecency, to amuse and divert the people by painting, poetry, musick, dancing; by all sorts ofdramatic representations and exhibitions, would easily dissipate, in the greater part of them, that melancholy and gloomy humour which is almost always the nurse ofpopular superstition and enthusiasm. Publick diversions have always been the object of dread and hatred, to all the fanatical promoters ofthose popular frenzies. Here are the movies before the fact. Adam Smith in his charter for emergent industrial capitalism sketches an alliance between education and entertainment that together will prevent any reversion to the darkness ofsmallscale society and its ready excrescence of religious fanaticism. All of the components of cinema aesthetic are assembled in Smith's prophetic vision: cinematography, script, score, choreography, plot, spectacle. The only thing lacking was the technology to capture them together on film, and with the release ofinventive energies attending division oflabor that would only be a matter of time. Cinema is the born ally ofrational modernity, and is in itself the child of industrial alienation and the need to find a mass aesthetic to substitute for the control exercised by the sacred in a traditionally local setting. But, ofcourse, there are several levels ofirony that are not lost on us here. First, Smith says explicitly that the state has a direct interest in such mass entertainment. What then is the relationship between the much prized freedom ofthe creative artist and the very concrete concern for self-preservation on the part ofthe state? He specifies that the people's entertainment must be without scandal or indecency: what now should be said when political leaders... (shrink)

In the United States, screening the urine of employees or job applicants for the presence of drugs has become commonplace. A survey of 794 large- and mediumsized companies, conducted by the American Management Association in January 1994, found that 87 percent of them now test job applicants for drug use. In 1987, a similar survey found that 22 percent screened job applicants. Federally mandated drug testing programs with random testing requirements affect millions of workers in the transportation industry, (...) the nuclear power industry, and the United States civil and military services.As some of these programs pass their fifth anniversary since being instituted, it is important to assess the forces that led to their creation. Whether or not these programs are considered successful depends on what one expects to achieve by such widespread testing. (shrink)

There is a strong association between reliance on the promotional activities of pharmaceutical companies and a generally less appropriate use of prescription drugs. Pharmaceutical companies direct some of their promotion towards health workers who do not have the authority to prescribe medicines, such as nurses in certain countries. The aim of this study was to determine the impact that exposure to the marketing methods of pharmaceutical companies has on judgments made by nursing students about health worker—pharmaceutical (...) company relationships. A cross-sectional survey was carried out with 442 nursing students in Istanbul, Turkey. The exposure of students to the marketing methods of pharmaceutical companies, whether it be indirectly through observation or directly by first-hand experience, increases the probability that students will adopt rationales that underlie affirmative judgments of health worker—pharmaceutical company relationships. Based on the pervasiveness and ability of drug promotion to influence the perceptions of students, it is imperative that attempts be made to reduce its negative impact. (shrink)

While the challenges workers face in the gig economy are now well-known, reflections on emancipatory solutions in political philosophy are still underdeveloped. Some have pleaded for enhancing workers' bargaining power through unionisation; others for enhancing exit options in the labour market. Both strategies, however, come with unin-tended side-effects and do not exhaust the full potential for worker self-government present in the digital gig economy. Using the republican theory of freedom as non-domination , I argue that G.D.H. Cole's 20th-century (...) defence of guild socialism offers a promising avenue for enhancing worker autonomy in the gig economy. Platform companies rely on relational and structural domination to undermine worker autonomy, but Cole's guild socialism was specifically designed to enhance autonomy in the workplace. Following Cole's advice today would amount to a defence of worker-owned cooperative platforms. By putting workers in control of platform design and governance, cooperative platforms create new opportunities for worker autonomy. However, platform coopera-tivism faces serious challenges if it plans on becoming a realistic alternative to the traditional gig economy. (shrink)

Organisational psychological defences protect the self-esteem and moral integrity of the organisational personality even at the expense of sacrificing the morality of actions. This paper analyses the spectrum of defences used by an oil refinery and its parent company during an oil spill incident. A hypothetical model of defences built on Swajkowski’s four responses to accusations of organisational misconduct – refusals, excuses, justifications and concessions – is tested through this case. On the basis of empirical findings it is obvious that (...) defences delay, impede and interrupt the mitigation and recovery actions of incidents. It is not possible to break the defence behaviour of individuals because it is a built-in psychological mechanism in all humans serving a valuable purpose of dosing the pain of injury. However, it is possible to separate individual and organisational behaviour so that automatic organisational procedures mitigate, recover and, ultimately, prevent incidents. The organisational psychological task of crisis management is to mitigate the organisation’s ego defences, recover from its emotional turmoil and prevent further traumas by making its ego stronger and more flexible. The argument of this paper is that in practice organisational defences act as bumpers against becoming too conscious of the gap between the corporate rhetoric and reality, as subconscious breaks against too fast change demands, and as batteries in their preconscious effort to prepare for the change. Organisational refusals act as bumpers, excuses as breaks and justifications as batteries, while concessions imply that a change towards a more responsible corporation is taking place. (shrink)

Service providers working for a service organization are asked to express such positive emotions as joy, pleasure, and politeness required at the organizational level rather than their natural emotions they are experiencing at the moment. They cannot express their emotion they are actually going through and accordingly, their level of emotional labor and emotional dissonance influence on their job commitment and trust toward their organization. This study thus set out to investigate the effects of leading variables of emotional labor on (...) the level of emotional labor and the impact of emotional labor on organizational trust and organizational commitment with a subject group of college administrative staffs. Three underlying factors such as job stress, intimacy, and professionalism were identified as the determinants of emotional labor. Conceptual background about job stress, intimacy, emotional labor, and organizational effectiveness as the core variables of the study was investigated. Based on the conceptual background and our research questions, 5 research hypotheses and the proposed research model regarding the effects of emotional labor on organizational commitment and trust were developed. We also tried to include the moderating effects of work environment and gender of service providers on the research model. Unlike many different studies on emotional labor from the traditional perspective of service, this study also offers a practical implication by expanding and applying it to the field of college administrative service, which is an area where service providers are in the different working environment from the traditional company work environment. Finally, the managerial implications and the limitations of the study were also discussed. (shrink)

Reproduced with the kind permission of the author. Currently available in the collection I Looked Alive . © 2010 The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions | ISBN 978-1934029-07-7 Originally published 2003 Four Walls Eight Windows. continent. 1.1 (2011): 43-51. Introduction Ben Segal What interests me is instigated language, language dishabituated from its ordinary doings, language startled by itself. I don't know where that sort of interest locates me, or leaves me, but a lot of the books I see in the stores (...) seem to lack language entirely. Gary Lutz (2006). This issue of continent.'s fiction section features a reprint of “This Is Nice of You” from the first edition of Gary Lutz's collection I Looked Alive . That book was originally released by Four Walls Eight Windows in 2003 and has since been reissued in 2010 by The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions. Calamari Press has also reissued Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way (originally published by Knopf, largely forgotten and dismissed, and then re-issued by the too-short-lived 3rd Bed). “This Is Nice of You” was edited for the re-issue of I Looked Alive and, as the original book is out of print, the earlier version of the story has been hard to come by for some time. This initial version is a bit longer than the new version—Lutz is a master of tightening down his texts to their most linguistically intensified cores—but it is in no way sloppy. It is a great privilege for continent. to be able to make available rare texts of (first) aesthetic and (second) scholarly value. For those readers unfamiliar with Gary Lutz, I believe this story will serve as a worthy introduction. Like Raymond Carver, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and so many other important twentieth century and contemporary short story writers, Lutz studied with and was edited by Gordon Lish. This connection is apparent in his attention to sound and the sentence as compositional unit, but Lutz's is a unique voice. “This Is Nice of You” bears Lutz's trademark torqued and turning syntax, his sexed-but-nameless characters, his rendering of the human body and its emissions as utterly discomfiting. Lutz's preoccupations with the mundane raise ordinariness, via startling language and observation, to grandiosity and grotesquery. In the fall of 2008, Lutz delivered a lecture entitled “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” to writing students at Columbia University. The lecture was later printed in The Believer (and is linked below). In it, he spoke about the importance of the sentence as a compositional unit, as even the distinguishing formal characteristic of prose. Specifically, Lutz explained that, from Lish, he had developed a "poetics of the sentence." Accordingly, Lutz constructs his stories at the level of the sentence, paying extreme attention to the material of words- their letters and their sounds- and the way they abut one another and interact on this material level even before they are employed in the service of traditional aims of fiction like meaning or story. Lutz often uses a(n almost constraint-related) technique called consecution. Letters or sounds from one word are carried forward into the following, producing drama and movement in the language itself at a level entirely apart from that of plot. For example, you can see how the 't's in the first sentence of “This Is Nice of You” repeat fast and hard through met and then soften into the 'th's of brothers and they. This close attention to the specific material and characteristic conditions of prose means that Gary Lutz's work always involves both a happening in language and of language. “This Is Nice of You” has a richness and depth that is hidden not in symbolism or obscure reference but on the surface of the page, in the language of every sentence. FURTHER READING Lutz, Gary. “ The Sentence Is a Lonely Place. ” The Believer January, 2009. Web. Short stories and excerpts at Web del Sol . Web. Taylor, Justin. “ An Interview with Gary Lutz .” Bookslut. July, 2006. Web. THIS IS NICE OF YOU [156] [1] I was a man dropping already well through my forties, filthy with myself, when, taking a turn at the toilets one afternoon, I met two brothers-they said they were brothers-who swore they had a sister, a schoolteacher, an officer of instruction at the county college, a whirlwind midlife turmoil of everything already put to ruin, who had gone off from a new marriage in an old car, an upkept and ennobling sedan, but had returned now to the apartment and [157] was living there alone with the little runoff there was from the marriage-some outcurved appliances, apparently, and low-posted furniture promoting its own mystery but becoming figurable in certain concentrations of TV light-and, above all, a telephone (on a pedestal, they insisted), the handpiece of which she gripped in lieu of exercise, or in fury, and I thus let out my little, reliable cry that I was in fact a student of the telephone, that it was a debasing apparatus in the main, with its meager economy of bells and tones, and the intimacy of the mouthpiece that sent your breath, tiny aftervapors of it, back toward your lips, so that regardless of the party accepting the outgoing products of your voice, you were, at most, in a further, rivaling exchange with yourself alone, and this is what must have brought the two of them around, the men who proclaimed brotherhood with the woman, because they offered me her phone number, put it at my disposal on a piece of paper one of them had already committed it to, a tearing from a menu, and the looks the men were now giving me had deletions in them, already, of my exact, beanpole shape and size. So off I went to a pay phone, the nearest canopied one I could find. The woman answered after the second ring and said she needed a lift right that very moment into the little, unlevel city close by. She was idling in the doorway of the building when I pulled up in front, and I helped her into the car, then got back in myself. I had always had a way of not having to look at people that nonetheless brought them to me in full, and so I still am certain of the susceptive and impressible comp-[158]lexion, the shimmer on the mouth, a lipstick of low brilliance, a difficulty around the eyes, the hair short and rayed out exclamation ally, skin bagged up over the elbow bone, conflict even in how her arms stayed at her sides—in sum, a spinal loveliness for me, an off-blonde quantity with shadowed, thumbworn hollows that put me out of as much as I might have ever known of women before. I set the two of us into the narrow traffic, and I remember telling her, by way of explaining the little burden which I had shifted, by now, from the shelf of the dashboard and onto my lap, that when you lived in filth, as I then did, a daily newspaper came to count for a lot, although instead of the thick-supplemented local paper I bought a trimmer one from a backlying town—not, of course, for any affluences of native data it carried, but as an article of house ware: a rough immaculacy in four lank sections, a set of fresh, hygienic surfaces to come between the table, say, and whatever I had going for me at the table, if the table was where I was going forward—because what else so cheap comes so clean and far-spreading? The woman told me that her own trouble with paper was that through a modest hole, no larger than a quarter, that had been drilled a foot or so above the floor (the standard height, she had reasoned, of legitimate electrical outlets), and by means of which her faculty office had at last gained communication with the roomier but unoccupied office next door, more and more often shot a single sheet of paper, plain copier paper she had rolled just barely into a tube, [159] so that after landing on the floor of the neighboring office the paper would preserve little if any of the curl, and there would be nothing written or typed on it, of course, and it was always a blank sheet that had been ageing on her desk for some time and had already been moved around, or advanced, from station to station on the desktop, coming into further creaselets and crimps and other infirmities—paper, in short, still too bare and unfraught to be thrown responsibly and forgettably away, and yet too seasoned and beset with irritations of the surface (a molelike blemish, say, or what looked like a tiny hair, an eyelash, sunk into it, or frecklings, or notational pressings of a fingernail), too wrought, in sum, for the paper to be appointed to any secure curricular purpose. Her office, she claimed, was in fact full of such paper, much-handled and singularized sheets of it by the loose, functionless hundred. I had to get it across to the woman that I myself no longer had an office, or any other place to divide me reliably from everybody else, and that for much of the daylight I thus appeared to be among people because I kept putting myself where people came together into even closer-fitting assortments, the viewing areas and showrooms and rotundas and such: I took in the lean-to look of the women, the tongues coming and going in what the men kept thinking of to say—whole families of low knees for me to bark my shins against during the crowded and involving way out. At home afterward, in the one room where my life was packed down, I would keep my nose stuck in the safehold of the phone [160] book, where the names of people suffered reduction to mere episodes of the alphabet and underwent humbling declensions down every column (Lail, Lain, Laine, Lainerd), and he names of streets, of the towns and townships, got docked in crude, heedless abbreviations (the vowels almost always the first to get poked out), and I would run my eyes over the telephone numbers themselves, each sequence of digits another fallible run of the infinite. I thus corrected my feelings for people and assembled myself emotionally into whatever else I had at hand—the obligating arms of the clothes hangers, usually, or the keen-angled understructure, the guardian legginess, of the ironing board. The woman said that in her case, though, it was more a matter of making slow circuits of the classroom where she had to put across the Emporial Sciences, retail theory and methods, to heat-giving and suggestive young women, some of them world cruelties already. There was the cooing of empty stomachs in the hour just before lunch, and the braying and fizzle of loaded stomachs in the low hours of the afternoon. She would recite her notes in a voice barely loyal to anyone octave, a tiny alluvium of slaver hardening at the corners of her mouth on the days she gave the glassy lozenges a slow, warming suck, and she would take lowering notice of how whatever she said succumbed at once to freak spellings and razzing paraphrase in the big, dividered notebooks; and because in midafternoon light the world looked as thorough, as filled in, as it was ever going to get, a better way to set about ruining her eyes was to review how hair had [161] established itself on the arms of the young women, because almost every arm had brought across itself a welcome and diversifying shadow. On one girl it would be a fine, driftless haze afloat above the white of the arm, never seeming to touch down on the skin itself. (An atmosphere, at most, of chestnut brown.) On another, it was as if copper wire, the narrowmost lengthlets of it, had been stuck into the fleshy batter of the thick, freckled forearms. On a third: a field of it–wheat-colored, thin-spun. On a fourth; a differencing, darkish updrift that shaded off as it approached the inner bend of the elbow, then re-emerged at the base of the upper arm as whiskery fringe. On others it was a brassy or rust-colored frizz, or it was as coarse as cornsilk, or it looked fussed on, as if the arm had been slowly stroked with charcoal. But here the woman broke off, or I may well have made an interruption of my own—I think I must have asked whether she was hungry, and she said if I was, and so on one of the lesser streets I parked the car and led her down into a belowstairs eating house I still remembered. Sandwiches were presently lowered in front of us. I watched her remove the festooned toothpick from hers and then play her fingers over the toasted planes before she took a fond first bite. "This is nice of you," she said. I must have looked at her in the way I then had of getting people to speak so they would not seem to be dwelling any longer on my features, because if on the well-set face the mouth and eyes are said to seem frozen in elegant orbit about the til) of the nose, then mine was a face that behold-[162]ers, regarders, could not help trying to round off with greater success, to goad the particulars of it back into the arcs they had wandered away from—the mouth, for instance, having been pursed and pinched suchwise that it seemed resident more on one side of the face than the other—and there were other signs of original strife to be busied with (slapdash eyebrows unbunched, it appeared, from reserves of hair elsewhere on my person; a showing of adult acne, a shrivelly little relevance of it, confined to the declivity of my nose); and so to be polite, the woman thus sank her gaze into her sandwich, and told me, in a voice lowered accordingly, that, one late-childhood summer, she had devoted herself to collecting postage stamps: it was a tongue-involving sideline to early-arriving puberty, and she liked having to lick the pale, gummed hinges instead of the sticky backs of the stamps themselves before entering everything into the hosting album; and once, during some foul weather between her and a brother (the older, thrown-over one, who had already made a habit of fooling the underside of his arm across the top of hers and calling her "pussified"), she reached for the shoe box in which she had let duplicate stamps accumulate—Spanish ones, mostly, of a fading orange—and sent the box slooshing through the lower air so that the stamps showered onto the brother's bare legs with a full, delicate harm. The woman was now touching up the surface of her iced tea with tiny activities, initiatives, of the longspun spoon. I myself was good at getting my touch onto things, although in a way that seemed to mix up the motive atoms inside [163] them, but I was satisfied that for the moment my sandwich, the unbitten-at half of it, was displayable and fit and local to my plate. The woman went on to say that, as a child, she had been bundled off, many an afternoon, to the slope-ceilinged quarters of a bachelor uncle who, when speaking of anybody not immediately present, could not bring himself to use the person's name but instead would say "an acquaintance of mine in ..." and then mention the name of some lapsed homeland, or little-loved rural orchestra, or backset building about to come down; and it was never a riddle, this device of his (not once could the girl have been expected to identify any of the subjects), and no matter how often and aloud he insisted that particularizing persons any further—bringing even a first name down upon anyone of them—would have been indecent, he claimed, much like doing things to people while they slept, the girl accepted all of the uncle's prim and extravagant evasion for what he surely must have intended it to be: a neat, protective trick to space the world out a little further in her favor, to scatter the population so that wherever her hand might at last come down, it would have to be on herself alone. And here I could sense that the woman wanted from my mouth an account of as much as I myself might have ever managed of attachment, so I told her I had once owned a house (a rising, really, of much-fingered, handwrought architecture that amounted to a little family of rooms above garages: a boxlike building with a rattly thorax of downspouts [164] and drainpipes and an unfolded but full-toned fire escape), and I had had for a time a boarder, a student, a high-colored, loose-packed representative of declining girlhood, hung with necklaces and barrettes, a girl of precise but shifting leanings and inclinations; and the afternoon she had come round to ask after the room, I stood in the entranceway, handshaken and asweat, and from what would later be my memory of the girl, I made off with, first, how every pore of her nose seemed to be sheltering within itself a tiny dark seedlet, a grain of something immediately, enormously valuable. And an almost lipless mouth (just a slit, practically), the teeth inside looking wet, watered-it was my life's chore, at that instant, to keep from sending the back of my thumb blotterlike across the line of them (I was later to learn she drank everything cold and through the narrowest of straws). And her hair: it was tea-colored hair she had, long and reachful, an unstopped downcome of it. Tall for a girl, but she managed to stay out of much of her height and put herself across as somebody backward, or behind. I must have told the girl, as best I could, that I of course had a wife, a full-faced, imperishable partner, though for the moment she was gone otherwhere in the marriage, and here the woman, my present companion, my tablemate, whose feet were now parked, in parallel, on the grade of my upper leg, interrupted to say that her husband, too, had been such a liar, and what could I bring up by way of reply other than that a lie is a truth struck through with other, further truth, or that a lie is the present multiplied by the past or that a lie [165] is an outcry of borrowed hope? The woman gave me an allowed look of disgust, her eyes lowered but still popular with me, and on I went with what had now become the girl of my story. For there had been a great, gainful carpet in the room I put the girl into, a matty expanse of coarse, grabby piles, an engrossing affair that took things into itself and held them tight, misered them, and I of course insisted that the girl not bother herself with its upkeep, that I enjoyed weekly access to a prestigious, upstanding vacuum cleaner; but no sooner was the girl out of the house each morning than I would withdraw from my room, where time was unportionable, and loose myself into the ticktock impertinence of the girl's room and get down on my knees, and, going after the carpet first with my fingers, then with a forceps, and finally by unspooling lengths of clear package-sealing tape and pressing them against the tufts in neat rectangles to catch what I might have missed, I brought vast tracts of the carpet to depletion, recovering not simply the girlinesses, the girleries, one would expect (buttons, straight pins, downed jewelry), but flirtier personalia in the form, say, of a stray confetto brought into the world when a page had been wrung with out caution from a spiral-bound notebook, or some pleated paper shells of the chocolates she required, or one of the bargain antihistamines she took to get her naps going, or a trash-bag tie ragged enough to show the kinked line of the wire within (this I would get wound around my finger), or a cough drop enwrapped like a bonbon (I would undo the [166] wings of the wrapper and have to decide whether to suck the drop all down or begin chewing it midway)—I became the following, the public, that these things, these off-faIlings, had come to have; but mostly there was hair, afloat above the uppermost pushings of the fabric of the carpet an almost continuous haziness of loose hairs of all lengths and sources, and I would have to set them out on a fresh sheet of paper and assort them according to the regions of the body they had taken their departure from, and in no time I had nest-like filiations of broken filaments and smaller involvements of the hairs that made me think of hooks, of barbs, of treble clefs, and each pile required a separate envelope, to be filed in a separate shoe box for every sector of the body until, I hoped, the boxes themselves would no longer be enough and I would have raised something semblable, brought up something equal in volume to the comprehensive girl herself. And her wastebasket! For every bit of rubbish, every dreariment she tossed into the thing, I would, in secret, deposit a reciprocal discard of my own, matching a spotted, confessory tissue of hers with a lurid throwaway after my own heart–the cardboard substructions of a fresh parcel of underwear, maybe, or tearings from pantyhose I now and again pressed against a span of my forearm to work onto it the complications of female shading I otherwise made do, choosily, without. I thus built the two of us up together in her trash! One afternoon-it was another of those lifeful, unsam-[167]pled days on which the world humors us each a little differently to keep us nicely on our last legs—I discovered in the wastebasket an inch-deep textbook of hers, a paperback with a celery-colored cover that had come partly unglued, and this dilapidation I paired off, naturally, with a name-your baby guide to whose pages, during my recurrent turnings of them, in bed or at table, I had contributed dried produces of my person, a chemical splendor entirely mine. This coupling sent a sudden spigoty thrill from me that forced an unbuckling and an unzipping and a cleanup with a handkerchief I then ventured responsively into the wastebasket as well. It was in the bathroom afterward that I found a suds-clouded puddle on the unlevel floor of the tub, a little undrained remainder, rimmed with offscum, of the girl's prolonged early-morning soak, and this was as much as I needed to get on my hands; I pressed them flat against the wet porcelain, then flapped them around in the air, and that was when I noticed it—in the amphitheater of the toilet bowl, an orange-yellow tint, or value, to the waters. When the girl arrived home that evening, I told her, of course, that I had discovered fresh, unforeseen trouble within the tank of thelet (a misalignment of the trip lever, a waywardness of the float ball, a ulation of the lift wires, kinks and defects, really, throughout the entire system) and that in fine it was an apparatus now operable only by means of advanced and strenuous equilibrial manipulations that it would be unseemly, inhospitable, of me to pre-[168]sume to burd to burden her with–so that from here on out, following any leak or evacuation she need merely lower the lid and then, before quitting the room, ring the handbell that had been placed on the would seeeverythinghing else. But the bell never rang, not even once, and from my window the next morning I watched the girl carry from the house a little plastic bag distended balloonishly, much like those bags you will remember having seen in the hands of children bearing homeward their solitary carnival-prize goldfish. In fact, I never ran across the likes of the girl again. The man who came to collect her things-not the father, apparently, but an advocate, an upholder-l found to be dull-eared and lax in his speech, and the better part of his face seemed to have already begun making tiny, rotational departures from whatever it was that the eyes, themselves impressively mobile, were just that moment having to take in. (Was there a lamp in the house that was not that night slopping its wattage over everything?) I guess I was waiting for the man to take a laggard, last-minute interest in me, and by now I was pushing everything out into the paired first person–it was, I said, “Our night shot,” and I began including the two of us in whatever it might be doing out, the expected sprinkles and such—but he was no friendship buff, and he paid no heed to my telling him that the only dress of hers I'd ever twidged myself into even part of the way had been the simplest of them all, a large-buttoned wonder of depthless blue, and then only on the principle that one naturally fits whatever one has into whatever somebody else [169] had first, or how else would the world keep getting any taller with people? The man just went about the removal of the girl's things without having to be reminded too noticeably, I guess, of how every dick hangs by a thread. My listener, though, had by this time brought about some becoming slowings of her arm—it was an arm inclinable to langorous diagonals and magicianly swoops through the air above the tabletop—but it no longer was involving itself with her plate, so I suggested we shove off, I made payment for the food, and on our way to the car, and then in the car as I took to following her pointings, the directional tilts of her head, she said that you naturally kept putting more and more of yourself into another person, at first wondering how much she can take, how much of you is accumulable and how much she can hold, and you're letting things out, disbursing yourself, and you've soon got things set up in her, and room is being made for even more of you, and if you bring this off with enough people, even two or three, what you've got is at first a comfort, because you can pass yourself along and move a little more widely through the world and leave it to these others to man your grievances, your disappointments; and what brought this to mind, the woman said, was a term of financial hardship she had contrived for herself a few years back, an unpaid leave of absence from scrupling letter grades onto quiz papers (propped-up As, and upended Bs made to look, rather, like fannies; all As and Bs, no Cs or anything lower, the difference between an A and a B having less to do with the accuracy of whatever facts might [170] have been impounded in provided for an answer than with anything recallable about the way the enrollee ad conformed her body to the confining perpendiculars of her chair and the navel-level writing surface that projected from it, or the way there might one day have been an unignorable blush on the instep of a once-moseying foot, disburdened of its shoe, that had got itself trapped in the grillwork of that cagelike involvement, intended for books, that was welded to, or otherwise schemed into, the underworks of the chair)—this had been a duration, in short, of controlled difficulty when the misexpenditure of even a twenty-dollar bill had set her thrilling, gloating, over everything she would miss out on, and one afternoon she had made an engagement for a haircut, just a trim, and very early in the session the haircutter, a woman ill-defined in the face but otherwise full of conspicuities of emotion, set down the prevailing scissors and pressed the flat of a lukewarm hand against the woman's cheek, held it there for a good minute or longer, while the other hand eventually found its way into a drawer, a shallow treasury of slender specialty scissors, one pair of which the cutter withdrew and began routing deductively through the woman's hair, the other hand staying put on the cheek, longer and longer, and the woman went home and for afterward the bathtub was now a more likely destination than any of the upright furniture, and it got easier to fill the tub with further clarifying volumes than to clear space on the difficult heights of the sofa, and she was hardly claiming to have become a cleaner [171] person in result—she in fact would often discover, voyaging about her body, a browned, fractionary detail of a larger crepe of toilet tissue that must have got itself stuck in some assy crevice and was impossible to get plucked out of the revolving suds—she was saying only that she spent more and more of her time thus immersed, ill off in water, and the haircutter had surely had a hand in it, the woman was doing some of the cutter's life now, coming into some of its wrong, because you sometimes have to look to somebody else's life to get dimensions set back even part of the way around your own, and it should not have to be any less your own life when it comes from somebody else, and you could surely fudge a society out of anyone available person and get this person doubling for the many, so that in the little run of things perpetuable from one person to the next, every loose moment stood to become a complete, active finality. But by now this was a new day, with only an hour or so off it already, and the place the woman had made me bring us to, the man's place, with a promise that the man was elsewhere—this was on a little offshoot of a street, a stewy efficiency apartment the color had long ago gone out of; and when, once in bed, still clothed, I found among the sheets and blankets a spoiling pair of the man's underpants, one of the leg openings of which was puckered into an avid, sloppy mouth, I held myself accountable for redisposing the fabric until I got a befitting featurelessness back onto it; but all the while, I am sure I had to make myself go over again in my mind that if the body is the porter of as many organs of affec-[172]tion as there might one day turn out to be, then the idea was to let the thing carry you to where you would otherwise never have any reason to arrive, because I listened for the unmelodiof the the thede ofthe woman's zipper, and then the woman made me put myself out of my own clothes, the attritional corduroys and overshirt, and got herself up at last onto the topic not of the man whose apartment it was (because his story was scarcely the story of how the boy who decides he is half a girl no sooner starts to worry about where the other half might than he gets careless with where he rests his eyes, or what he gives even the feeblest of fingerholds to, and anything, even a crumbly triangle of pie offered on a saucer instead of on a pie plate proper, comes in easy, ready, wronging answer), but of her husband, and how, no more than a couple of months into the marriage, he had begun snugging away in his undershorts a little source of chanc, reliable frictions to nudge him onward through the workday—anything company-keeping that could be counted on not to slide out of the elasticky leg holes: a half-dollar packet of chocolate tittles, maybe, that was barely noticeable in the baggy surround of the widecut trousers so popular at the time. For by now the woman had at last brought what is usually called the other mouth to within only inches of my lips, but it is not a mouth, obviously, although I let myself go along with the goodwill behind the comparison, the way I will remain loyal to anything deliberately and faithfully misunderstood, and I fussed my tongue against the vital trifles hung inside of her, as much of the curtailed finery as I could find, [173] and gave the whole insimplicity of it a slow-circling, examinational lick, until I was taking a sudden tepid downwash on the tongue. It was a familiar, latrine in dribble that must have tasted, no doubt, like trouble just starting out.p [1] Editor's Note: Original pagination from first edition print denoted with bracketed page numbers. (shrink)

BackgroundMany medical emergency practices are regulated by written procedures that normally provide reliable guidelines for action. In some cases, however, the consequences of following rule-based instructions can have unintended negative consequences. The article discusses a case - described on a type level - where the consequences of following a rule formulation could have been fatal.Case presentationA weak and elderly patient has cardiac arrest, and a Do Not Resuscitate clause is written in the patient’s medical record. Paramedics at the scene cannot (...) see that the patient’s general appearance match conditions which would indicate the DNR clause, so they start cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and the patient survives. This turns out to be a crucial decision. The DNR clause is from an earlier bout with serious disease from which the patient has recovered, against all odds, and someone has forgotten to remove the clause from the medical record.AnalysisIn order to be able to interpret the validity of written guidelines, paramedics and other health workers need to develop personal skills that transcend the ability simply to follow written instructions. Within traditional virtue ethics, personal judgment is conceived of as crucial for being able to make ‘good’ autonomous decisions. Virtue ethical analyses, decision-making abilities and non-technical communication skills are important as conceptual tools when health workers need to make difficult clinical decisions.ConclusionThe case study accentuates the significance of prudent judgment in medical practice. In the case described, the consequence of trusting the written advance directive could have been fatal, but the point is general: for the purpose of achieving excellent organizational performance, it is insufficient for health workers to rely uncritically on rules and procedures. Even the clearest rule formulations must be interpreted contextually in order to determine ethically correct behavior and avoid potential negative consequences that are not in the patient’s best interests. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Human Rights and the Ethics of Globalization by Daniel E. Lee and Elizabeth J. LeeGuenther "Gene" HaasHuman Rights and the Ethics of Globalization Daniel E. Lee and Elizabeth J. Lee Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 264 pp. $27.99While there have been numerous books written on the nature of rights in a world of globalization, this book fills a gap by presenting a thoughtful and balanced discussion that is (...) firmly grounded in ethical theory yet takes into account the concerns of both nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and the realities of the business world. The authors acknowledge that there can be naive troublemakers in NGOs and greedy people in business as well as socially concerned people in both groups.The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 deals with the philosophical foundations for addressing ethical issues in business within the context of globalization. Here the authors advocate for a limited, carefully defined notion of rights, properly noting that not everything of ethical significance falls under the notion of rights. The important distinction they make is between negative rights (the rights to life and freedom), which oblige us never to harm others, and positive rights (rights of entitlement, such as education, medical care, housing), which depend upon the various types of relationships, voluntary or involuntary, in which people find themselves. The former apply universally to neighbors near and far; the latter, because they are defined by relationships, apply primarily to neighbors near to us. With globalization distant neighbors often become near neighbors—for example, when a company builds a production facility in another country. In view of this, the authors argue that the Enlightenment’s individualistic understanding of rights is incomplete. A fuller version of rights (rooted in Aristotle) situates all humans in social communities where mutual charitable treatment is better suited to promoting human flourishing. With this in mind, the authors use the second form of Kant’s categorical imperative (“Always treat others as ends”) to map out some helpful practical guidelines for multinational corporations that are conducive to human well-being. Such guidelines seek to take into consideration all the constituencies that these organizations are called to serve—including shareholders, customers, employees, suppliers, and communities of location.In part 2 the authors draw on these philosophical foundations and practical guidelines to discuss ethical issues related to business practices in four different [End Page 198] countries: respect for human rights in China given the widespread practice of outsourcing; the condition of workers in Liberia where Firestone is the largest employer; free trade and fair trade issues related to coffee growers in Ethiopia; and the question of whether low-wage factories (maquiladoras) in Mexico exploit workers or provide economic opportunity for them. The authors provide a fair evaluation of each situation rooting their discussion in the nature of each respective business and the conditions over which it has direct control.Part 3 deals with the possibilities and challenges of dealing with multinational corporations that do not respect human rights. Although many argue for sanctions and treaty provisions, the authors argue that these approaches have their limitations. As an alternative, they recommend the Alien Tort Claims Act as the most promising means of enforcing human rights standards among American multinational corporations with overseas operations.This is an insightful and balanced book on human rights and social ethics precisely because it has a positive view of markets and is optimistic about achieving greater social responsibility in the business world. It will be helpful to all committed to promoting ethical business practices in a growing global economy—not only in the church and academy but also in the legal community and business world and in NGOs.Guenther HaasRedeemer University CollegeCopyright © 2013 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Recently, the outsourcing of Information Technology activities to offshore locations has been gaining significant momentum, with some associated backlash by the workforce in the United States. Based on their 2005 survey [6], Global Insight, a private consulting firm, estimated that U.S. companies will spend about $38.2 billion in offshore IT services by 2010, compared with about $15.2 billion in 2005, primarily because the expected cost savings will grow by $11.7 billion in the same time period. Binder writing in "Foreign (...) Affairs" [2] states that offshoring expenditures will continue to increase dramatically, and the changes the offshoring phenomenon will bring will transform society. This paper focuses on the social impact of offshoring and the effects of the weighing of costs and benefits as a result of offshoring activities. (shrink)

Tacit knowledge sharing discussed in this study is important in the area of business ethics, because an unwillingness to share knowledge that may hurt an organization’s survival is seen as being seriously unethical. In the proposed model of this study, distributive justice, procedural justice, and cooperativeness influence tacit knowledge sharing indirectly via two mediators: organizational commitment and trust in co-workers. Accordingly, instrumental ties and expressive ties influence tacit knowledge sharing indirectly only via the mediation of trust in co-workers. (...) The model is assessed by using data from different companies’ employees, who attend an evening college in Taiwan for advance study. The test results of this study indicate that tacit knowledge sharing is affected by distributive justice, procedural justice, and cooperativeness indirectly via organizational commitment. Additionally, tacit knowledge sharing is also affected by distributive justice, instrumental ties, and expressive ties via trust in co-workers. The paths from procedural justice and cooperativeness to trust in co-workers are shown to be insignificant. Managerial implications of the empirical findings are also provided. (shrink)

When a company raises its share price by sacking workers or polluting the environment, it is avoiding paying real costs. Accountancy, which quantifies certain rights, needs to combine with applied ethics to create a "computational casuistics" or "moral accountancy", which quantifies the rights and obligations of individuals and companies. Such quantification has proved successful already in environmental accounting, in health care allocation and in evaluating compensation payments. It is argued that many rights are measurable with sufficient accuracy to (...) make them credible and legally actionable. (shrink)

It is widely thought that firms that employ workers in “sweatshop” conditions wrongfully exploit those workers. This claim has been challenged by those who argue that because companies are not obligated to hire their workers in the first place, employing them cannot be wrong so long as they voluntarily accept their jobs and genuinely benefit from them. In this article, I argue that we can maintain that at least many sweatshop employees are wrongfully exploited, while accepting (...) the plausible claim at the core of many defenses of sweatshops, namely that engaging in a voluntary and mutually beneficial transaction with a person in need cannot constitute morally worse treatment of that person than doing nothing at all to benefit her. We can do this, I claim, by accepting that wealthy multinational corporations have positive duties to employ or otherwise benefit the global poor. I argue that these duties can be plausibly grounded in the fact that potential sweatshop workers are victims of global structural injustice, from which multinational corporations typically benefit. (shrink)

The COVID‐19 pandemic triggered an unprecedented health crisis that impacted healthcare systems worldwide. This study explores how Spanish healthcare workers learned, internalised and integrated values and work behaviours during the COVID‐19 pandemic and their impact on the personal sphere. This documentary research, using images, narratives and audiovisual content, was framed within the interpretative hermeneutic paradigm. Categories and subcategories emerged after a final theoretical sampling that focused on the analysis. Data triangulation between researchers favoured theoretical saturation. A total of 117 (...) images and 27 texts were selected. The analysis identified three stages: bewilderment, seeking functionality in the chaos and integrating chaos into care. The data reflects how the need for security and knowledge, and the exhaustion and frustration caused by the initial working conditions, prompted adaptive responses. These responses involved focusing on problem‐solving and strengthening group sentiments and solidarity. Subsequently, the data indicates the acceptance of new structural, organisational and communication aspects. The findings of the analysis will contribute towards finding a framework that can help understand community health crisis events. (shrink)

. In this paper we address the question of recovering a logic system by combining two or more fragments of it. We show that, in general, by fibring two or more fragments of a given logic the resulting logic is weaker than the original one, because some meta-properties of the connectives are lost after the combination process. In order to overcome this problem, the categories Mcon and Seq of multiple-conclusion consequence relations and sequent calculi, respectively, are introduced. The main feature (...) of these categories is the preservation, by morphisms, of meta-properties of the consequence relations, which allows, in several cases, to recover a logic by fibring of its fragments. The fibring in this categories is called meta−fibring. Several examples of well-known logics which can be recovered by meta-fibring its fragments (in opposition to fibring in the usual categories) are given. Finally, a general semantics for objects in Seq (and, in particular, for objects in Mcon) is proposed, obtaining a category of logic systems called Log. A general theorem of preservation of completeness by fibring in Log is also obtained. (shrink)

The Philosophy of Rhetoric is widely regarded as the most important work of a theory of rhetoric produced in the 18th century. Campbell's work engages such themes in an attempt to formulate a universal theory of human communication. Campbell attempts to develop his theory by discovering deep principles in human nature that account for all instances and kinds of human communication. He seeks to derive all communication principles and processes empirically. In addition, all statements in discourse that have to do (...) with matters of fact and human affairs are likewise to be empirically derived. Thus, his theory of rhetoric is vastly wider than, and different from, such classical theories as those proposed by Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, whose theories focused on discourse related to civic affairs. By attempting to elaborate a general theory of rhetoric through empirical procedures, Campbell's project reveals the limitations of his method. He cannot ground all statements empirically and it is at this point that his theological position comes into play. Inspection of his religious views shows that God's design of human nature, and God's revelations to humankind, make moral and spiritual truths known and quite secure to human beings, although not empirically. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:708 BOOK REVIEWS it can he noted that God must ultimately be understood within Aquinas's entire thought as the source of Trinitarian missions becoming present to people and not just as a being with a sublime simplicity and immutability who in the past set forth an array of beings. Revelation and salvation in Hegel are mentioned: but they do not quite escape the evolving depth of an incomplete God, (...) nor do they adorn and expand a human being whose particularity and limits are more than tragedy and opposition. From this dialogue admirably advanced by Brito's book, we understand why Aquinas must always be preserved from the mechanics (never more exciting than when applied to God) which neo-scholasticisms compulsively construct, and why Hegel must be studied for the dynamic of his thought-forms but not for his conclusions without resolution. University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana THOMA§ F. O'MEARA, O.P. Work in the Spirit. By MmosLAv VoLF. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Pp. xviii+ 252. $32.50 (cloth). Miroslav Volf initiates his theological inquiry by exammmg the contemporary situation of work, its transformation from a world of agricultural and industrial production into a system of information technologies. He attentively notes that this contemporary technology brings with it both advantages and disadvantages for workers. He also examines crises such as unemployment and discrimination which ac· company employment today. Despite both the ambiguity which accompanies the change in production and the threatening uncertainties caused by the current crises, he nevertheless emphasizes the duality of work: people consistently find their work to be both curse and delight. VoH wishes to emphasize this twin feature so that the theology he fashions wm he realistic and active. Volf pursues a theology of work which can account for varied developments in quite different economies and for the needs of succeeding generations. Thus Volf describes the activity of work in terms which are invariant with respect to time and place. By a theology which is adequate to this global concept of work, he means one " developed on the basis of a specifically Christian soteriology and eschatology. o. " (79). While Volf maintains an attention to the Christian traditions in recalling soteriology, he downplays a creation-based understanding of work in favor of one which is eschatological. Work is a cooperation with God in the transforming of the world on the way toward the new BOOK REVIEWS 709 creation of the end-time. Volf's laying-out the transformative character of work is insightful. It avoids the recurrent consequences of a theology of work based solely on creation: effort without limit and sullen acceptance of the toil. How does he accomplish this? First, he explores the lodes of dominant theoretical understandings of work by examining the.thought of A. Smith and K. Marx. Second, he presses for a pneumatological understanding of work. That is, he holds that rthe presence of the Spirit is key to human activity (133). Volf makes use of the theological tradition of the charisms in order to present more completely how human effort and divine activity can cooperate in work. Charisms are personal capacities which achieve development through interaction with the Spirit (112 and 130). He. (shrink)

Social accounting focuses on value transactions between organizations and their stakeholders; both market ones, where the value perceived by the different stakeholders is identified, and non-markets ones, where transactions are monetized at their fair value. There was long awareness of an emotional value translation, linked to the transfer of different products, services, remunerations, and incentives, regardless of whether they were market or non-market. Yet that emotional value seemed to be anchored in the field of psychology and managed to elude economic (...) science. This study seeks to identify emotional value with consumer surplus and, by extension, of the other stakeholders in a value transfer process. This proposal allows the emotional value to be anchored in the micro-economy and allows it to be objectively calculated using a regression involving three elements: the market price, the fair value interval, and a perceived satisfaction score by the different stakeholders in the form of significant sampling. The result obtained not only allows Social Accounting to be complemented with emotional value, but it also facilitates its incorporation in the strategy to optimize the emotional value. Furthermore, it enables a quantification of the perceived subjective utility, which opens up a research path where some possible lines are clearly identified. (shrink)

If a company’s share price rises when it sacks workers, or when it makes money from polluting the environment, it would seem that the accounting is not being done correctly. Real costs are not being paid. People’s ethical claims, which in a smaller-scale case would be legally enforceable, are not being measured in such circumstances. This results from a mismatch between the applied ethics tradition and the practice of the accounting profession. Applied ethics has mostly avoided quantification of rights, (...) while accounting practice has embraced quantification, but has been excessively conservative about what may be counted. The two traditions can be combined, by using some of the ideas economists have devised to quantify difficult-to-measure costs and benefits in environmental accounting. (shrink)

This article maintains that it is the constitutional responsibility of the courts, here the courts of the State of Michigan, to engage in judicial policymaking in the process of formulating common law rules. The article is written in response to the views expressed by some Justices of the Michigan Supreme Court that separation of powers concerns should impose significant limits on the power of the courts to establish and develop the common law of Michigan. Specifically, the contention is that policymaking (...) is exclusively the province of the legislature, so that the courts cannot properly formulate common law rules that may have significant social and economic effects. The article strongly disagrees with the proposition that there is any kind of constitutional constraint, either prudential or structural, on the power, and indeed, the constitutional responsibility of the Michigan courts (or the courts of any state) to engage in judicial policymaking in the process of formulating common law rules.The judicial power given to the Michigan courts by the Michigan Constitution includes the power to do what courts have always done in the Anglo-American legal system. The judicial power gives the courts the responsibility to adjudicate controversies between private persons and in the process to develop a common law through the workings of binding precedent and stare decisis. In so doing, the courts may properly take into account considerations of social and economic policy just as the legislature does when it engages in the process of enacting legislation. The difference between what the courts do and what the legislature does is a difference in process, not a difference in substance. Judicial policymaking takes place within the judicial process, that is, in the adjudication of controversies between persons in which the courts promulgate common law rules. The common law develops in a line of growth through the workings of binding precedent and stare decisis, and to the extent that there are limitations on the development of the common law, these are limitations that inhere in the judicial process itself. When the courts, for example, consider whether a new claim or a new defense should be recognized by the common law, they must consider whether that new claim or defense properly follows in the line of growth from existing doctrine and precedent. But if the courts conclude that it does, that is, if the claim or defense is consistent with the line of growth of existing doctrine and precedent, the courts are not constrained from recognizing the claim or defense on the ground that the substance of the claim or defense is a matter for the legislature rather than for the courts or that the resulting common law rule may have significant social and economic effects. The legislature, in contrast, enacts legislation through the legislative process. That process is a freewheeling one, often dependent on political compromise and completely unrestrained by the kind of limitations that inhere the judicial process. There is no legislative concept of line of growth, and the legislature can and often does enact legislation that brings about fundamental societal change or reverses the course of public policy. In our constitutional system, the most important questions of public policy are, of course, determined by the Legislature. Where the legislature disagrees with the policy choices reflected in a common law rule, the legislature has the power to enact legislation changing the common law rule. But there are many areas of private law where the legislature has not acted. In our constitutional system, where the matter in issue is not covered or preempted by legislation, the courts may formulate a common law rule to cover that matter, and in so doing may engage in judicial policymaking. Judicial policymaking is a part of the development of the common law, and the courts cannot avoid their responsibility to engage in judicial policymaking to the extent that it is necessary in the process of formulating the common law. As a constitutional matter, there are no separation of powers considerations that prohibit the courts from engaging in judicial policymaking. This part of the article traces judicial policymaking and the common law back to the seminal writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Roscoe Pound and Benjamin Cardozo.The article then discusses at length judicial policymaking and the development of the common law in Michigan. It shows that the clearest history of judicial policymaking in development of the common law is the liability-limiting rules of the late nineteenth century that were promulgated in the wake of the Industrial Revolution to protect the newly-emerging industries. During that time the courts in Michigan and elsewhere grafted on to the general principles of negligence law liability rules such as assumption of risk, contributory negligence, and the fellow servant doctrine, all of which had the effect of denying recovery to workers and other victims of industrial accidents. Beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, however, the Michigan Supreme Court began excising its constitutional power to make changes in the common law, expanding significantly the scope of tort liability in Michigan. Emphasizing that "rules created by the court could be altered by the court," and that the court had a "corrective responsibility when dealing with judge-made law," the Court, in approximately a 30 year period: eliminated the imputed negligence doctrine, under which the driver's negligence was imputed to the passenger in the passenger's suit against a third party; eliminated charitable immunity as a defense to a tort action; held that a wife could maintain at tort action for loss of her husband's consortium; abrogated the defense of assumption of risk, which had been applied outside of the employment area, held that there could be recovery for pre-natal injuries and finally abolished contributory negligence as a complete bar to recovery in favor of a comparative negligence approach. In these cases the Court discussed the relevant policy considerations influencing their decisions with respect to the common law rule at issue. In the last quarter century, the Court continued to take into account policy considerations in developing the common law, but not infrequently there was disagreement on the Court as to where policy considerations should lead, with some Justices arguing that policy considerations supported the imposition of tort liability, while other Justices argued that they did not.The article concludes that it has been demonstrated that in the development of the common law of Michigan, the Michigan Supreme Court has at all times engaged in judicial policymaking. From the liability-limiting rules of the late nineteenth century designed to protect the newly-emerging industries in this state, to the Court's exercise of its power to change the common law in Michigan over a 30 year period by expanding significantly the scope of tort liability in Michigan, to its recognition of new claims, such as a child's right to recover for loss of a parent's consortium caused by a negligent injury, to its imposition of limits on tort recovery, such as the open and obvious doctrine, the Court has invoked considerations of policy in support of its decisions. In these cases, the Court's invocation of policy considerations was sometimes accompanied by substantial disagreement among members of the Court over where policy should lead, but at no time did the Court ever suggest that separation of powers considerations should somehow operate as a kind of restraint on the Court's use of policy in the development of the common law. It is the power and responsibility of the Michigan Courts under the Michigan Constitution to make policy choices in formulating the common law. (shrink)

By combining state‐of‐the‐art approaches in ancient genomics, Meyer and co‐workers have reconstructed the mitochondrial sequence of an archaic hominin that lived at Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain about 400,000 years ago. This achievement follows recent advances in molecular anthropology that delivered the genome sequence of younger archaic hominins, such as Neanderthals and Denisovans. Molecular phylogenetic reconstructions placed the Atapuercan as a sister group to Denisovans, although its morphology suggested closer affinities with Neanderthals. In addition to possibly challenging our interpretation of (...) the fossil record, this study confirms that genomic information can be recovered from extremely damaged DNA molecules, even in the presence of significant levels of human contamination. Together with the recent characterization of a 700,000‐year‐old horse genome, this study opens the Middle Pleistocene to genomics, thereby extending the scope of ancient DNA to the last million years. (shrink)

Hyundai Motor Company (HMC) has departed from the general tendency in the neoliberal era toward labor casualization. Nonregular workers at HMC have succeeded in having their employment status converted from precarious to permanent. I investigate why informal workers at HMC have been more successful in regularizing their status than informal workers in the shipbuilding industry. I contend that the deskilled labor process in automobile production provides favorable conditions for informal workers to organize themselves and stage disruptive (...) protests. These differences in the labor process, however, cannot fully explain the success of HMC given the failure in other automobile factories. I argue that self-organization and protests led by rank-and-file informal workers as well as solidarity from left-leaning formal workers played decisive roles in formalizing informal workers at HMC. I conclude by stressing the importance of structural conditions and workers’ collective actions in explaining the divergent outcomes in limiting dualization. (shrink)