This paper, based on the recent UNESCO report Our Cultural Diversity, makes a plea for including art as an integral part of culture. Serious doubts are raised about the long-term effects oflopsided scientific-technical education. The pioneering but neglected ideas of Goethe, Schiller, Steiner, Tagore and Read on the role of art in total human development have been discussed. According to the author, the critical innovation in the sphere of education is now going to be on the borders between art, science (...) and religion. (shrink)

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Companies seeking to effectively manage the ethical dimensions of their business have created formal and informal practices, including those with the labels “ethics and compliance” and “corporate social responsibility” (CSR). However, there is little research describing how practitioners who create and implement these practices understand their meaning and relationship. Leveraging a communities of practice theoretical perspective, this qualitative study proposes that these practices can be studied as artifacts of managerial learning. Thematic analysis of interviews with senior managers suggests that practices (...) have diverse meaning, with only informal relationships between them in most cases. Theoretically, this research offers a new lens through which to view compliance and CSR practices as socially negotiated, contextual, and dynamic. Practically, it suggests that there may be new opportunities for learning if managers create practices through an intentional exploration of shared meaning. (shrink)

This article offers an in-depth case study of a global high tech manufacturer that aligned its ethics and compliance, corporate social responsibility, and sustainability practices. Few large companies organize their responsible business practices this way, despite conceptual relevance and calls to manage them comprehensively. A communities of practice theoretical lens suggests that intentional effort would be needed to bridge meaning between the relevant managers and practices in order to achieve alignment. The findings call attention to the important role played by (...) employees who broker understanding between managers and practices, and the boundary objects used to create shared meaning and engagement. They also highlight that an organizing logic is necessary but not sufficient to align practices. This study describes the dynamics of alignment and provides a practical road map for scholars and managers interested in understanding how responsible business practices may be collectively organized. (shrink)

Based on self-determination theory, we conceptualized the effect of empowering leadership on employee’s voice via harmonious passion. This paper further explored the moderating effect of job characteristics in voice process, and proposed a moderated mediation model. Using a sample of 674 supervisor-subordinate dyads, we found that (1) empowering leadership was positively related to employees’ harmonious passion and voice behavior, (2) harmonious passion played a mediating role in the relationship between empowering leadership and employee voice, and (3) job autonomy strengthened the (...) effect of harmonious passion on employee voice, which, in turn, enhanced the mediated relationship between empowering leadership and employee voice via harmonious passion. We discuss the implications of these findings for research and practice. (shrink)

What does Saussure really mean by “semiology”? This is the question we try to answer in this text. In fact, reading his writings and notes, we realize that Saussure uses the term “semiology” in different contexts and with different meanings. So the notion of “semiology” issued from his works is more complex than it seems because it undergoes several transformations throughout the development of Saussurian thought. The term “semiology” never appears in the texts published during in his lifetime, but we (...) find several mentions of this notion in the manuscript sources that make up the Saussurian corpus. While this term appears first during the period between 1881 and 1891, especially in all the documents known under the title of Phonétique, in the Gothic lessons, and in the manuscript “De l’essence double du langage”, the notion of “semiology” is presented to the public in the Cours de linguistique générale with a very precise meaning that has been taken up in Adrien Naville’s Nouvelle Classification des sciences. Then, after the publication of a large part of Saussure’s autograph writings, Ecrits de linguistique générale, we can return to this notion not only to trace its genesis, but also to better understand its complexity. And this is what we propose to do in this article. (shrink)

Circular economy thinking has become the subject of academic enquiry across several disciplines recently. Yet whilst its technical and business angles are more widely discussed, its philosophical underpinnings and socio-economic implications are insufficiently investigated. In this article, we aim to contribute to their understanding by uncovering the circular economy role in shaping a new vision, highlighting the social and economic dimensions of future imaginaries and the mechanisms that can enable them to bring about change in the social context. We believe (...) that defining the vision that the circular economy is contributing to shape is key to explain its conceptual framework and activities. Drawing on the concept of fictional expectations, we uncover one of the plausible social dimensions inherent to the circular economy thinking thereby opening up a new perspective on the current debate in the circular economy literature wherein authors, by contrast, are emphasising the lack of an explicit social dimension. Fictional expectations are introduced to refer to those imaginaries of the future that can catalyse social action in the present and counteract societal addictions, in which modern society seems to be trapped. We show how a circular economy inspired vision can be instrumental to the emergence of a fictional expectation that can provide therapies to the current societal addiction of wasteful production and consumption systems. This philosophical background allows us to provide, in conclusion, a new conceptualisation of the circular economy as a cognitive framework instrumental to the emergence of a future imaginary. (shrink)

The Database on Ethics Related Legislation and Guidelines was launched in March 2007 as the fourth database of the UNESCO Global Ethics Observatory system of databases in ethics of science and technology. The database offers a collection of legal instruments searchable by region, country, bioethical themes, legal categories and applicability to specific articles of the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights and International Declaration on Human Genetic Data. This paper discusses the background and rationale for the database and (...) its role as a consultative and comparative resource hub for the study of ethics related legal instruments across the world, with the purpose of informing and inspiring relevant stakeholders on the implementation of the principles contained within the UNESCO declarations on bioethics. (shrink)

Since the World Summit endorsed the Responsibility to Protect document in 2005, a growing number of governments have begun to shape their foreign policies with R2P in mind. This paper seeks to clarify the basis, the nature, and the extent of our duty-to-others in the situations specified by R2P by bringing together current concerns and discussions surrounding the conceptualization of R2P as an imperfect duty. I begin by demonstrating that our imperfect duties to others are not optional, that Kantian imperfect (...) duty is relevant to the discussion on R2P if read correctly, and that R2P must not be converted to perfect duties for meritorious deeds and what it mean to be a virtuous person to remain meaningful. Next, I discuss the scope of our duty-to-others, primarily regarding the limitations that we ought to observe when framing specific R2P operational duties. I argue that Kantian ethics must guide political and military responses to human catastrophes in order to ensure humanitarian ends are achieved. (shrink)

Fair trade is a new form of commercial partnership whereby actors in the North engage with actors in the South on a number of conditions, including setting a minimum price, a development bonus, and so on. But above all, fair trade organizations in the South are implementing mechanisms that more or less facilitate the empowerment of their members. This article analyzes the empowerment effects of two fair trade organizations in South India. It shows that while positive effects can be seen, (...) the prevailing social norms in India are extremely influential for women at the moment, so that women are putting all their hopes on their daughters through their education. (shrink)

One hundred years ago, Frederick Taylor and the pioneers of scientific management went into battle on US factory-floors. Armed with stopwatches and clipboards, they were fighting a war over measure. A century on and capitalist production has spread far beyond the factory walls and the confines of 'national economies'. Although capitalism increasingly seems to rely on 'cognitive' and 'immaterial' forms of labour and social cooperation, the war over measure continues. Armies of economists, statisticians, management-scientists, information-specialists, accountants and others are engaged (...) in a struggle to connect heterogeneous concrete human activities on the basis of equal quantities of human labour in the abstract – that is, to link work and capitalist value. In this paper, we discuss contemporary capital's attempt to impose the 'law of value' through its measuring of immaterial labour. Using the example of higher education in the UK – a 'frontline' of capitalist development – as our case-study, we explain how measuring takes places on various 'self-similar' levels of social organisation. We suggest that such processes are both diachronic and synchronic: socially-necessary labour-times of 'immaterial doings' are emerging and being driven down at the same time as heterogeneous concrete activities are being made commensurable. Alongside more overt attacks on academic freedom, it is in this way that neoliberalism appears on campus. (shrink)

The theory of vortices seems to contradict Descartes’s willingness to accept in physics only “principles also accepted in mathematics.” We show that this cosmological theory is on the contrary consistent with the Cartesian mathematical norm – explaining phenomena only by the properties that bodies have in common with mathematical objects – and partly implied by the thesis according to which the essence of matter consists of extension – circular motion being the only one allowing movement in a world saturated by (...) a homogeneous extension. In this respect, the incoherence of the Principles of Philosophy resides rather in the gap between the claim to have “proved by mathematical demonstration” and in the fact that, to pass from the level of general principles to that of cosmology, Descartes sets up a series of auxiliary hypotheses concerning the genesis of the world. (shrink)

Psychiatrists working with war veterans have, in recent years, constructed ‘moral injury’ as a separate manifestation of war trauma that is distinct from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. This paper argues that for moral degradation to occur, it necessarily involves one’s commissions or omissions that transgresses one’s personal morality, and hence, distinguishes sufferers of moral injury from PTSD sufferers who were witnesses to traumatic and morally abhorrent events. To this end, it clarifies how some of the situations surrounding moral injury are misunderstood, (...) by discussing the process of moral reasoning in the context of moral dilemmas, dirty hands, and moral blind alleys. Finally, it concludes that when we conceptualise moral injury as being caused by one’s commissions and omissions in moral dilemmas, we find that shame and guilt are situation-appropriate responses with a role to play in what ethics mean. (shrink)

This paper examines the tools used to mediate intersubjectivity as a central element in Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenological theory of ensembles. It first presents a brief account of ordinary individuals acting in and through violent groups from the viewpoints of psychology and phenomenology. Next, using Sartre’s ontology of consciousness, the paper establishes the phenomenological structure of consciousness and intersubjectivity to explain, with recent psychological findings, how individual agents in violent groups come to deny their moral responsibility for the group’s ideology and (...) action. Finally, through Sartre’s theory of ensembles, the paper shows how collectives of individuals evolve into groups. In violent groups, instruments of terror are used to mediate intersubjective relationships, and this explains how individual perpetrators and those complicit may sense a lack of control and perceive that they have diminished moral responsibility even though they are responsible for collective violence. (shrink)

Investigating the methods of natural science research is one of the important topics of the dialectics of nature.

The system reachability set is calculated by covering all possible behaviours of the system through a finite number of simulation steps to ensure that the system trajectory stays within a set safety region. In this paper, the theory of the game method is applied to the design of the controller, a very small controller is designed, and good control results are obtained by simulation. The system gradually shows a divergent trend and cannot achieve stable control. A multihop channel reservation Medium (...) Access Control protocol based on a parallel mechanism is proposed. The multihop channel reservation mechanism is proposed based on periodic node sleep, and the node uses the reservation frame to make the reservation of the channel and transmits the data according to the reservation information; the parallel mechanism is used to make the reservation information and data transmission simultaneously. (shrink)

Committing financial fraud is a serious breach of business ethics. However, there are few large scale studies of financial fraud, which involve ethical considerations. In this study, we investigate the pervasive financial scandals, which by the end of 2012 involved more than a third of the US-listed Chinese companies. Based on a sample of 262 US-listed Chinese companies, we analyze factors that differentiate between firms that commit financial fraud and those that do not. We find that firms more predisposed to (...) unethical behavior, due to their low regional social trust in the home country and low respect for regulations and laws as proxied by political connections, are more likely to commit accounting and financial fraud. They take advantage of low hurdles for listing via reverse mergers and avoid third-party monitoring through poor governance and auditors. Finally, we find evidence, after these scandals, of non-fraudulent firms differentiating themselves from the fraudulent firms by sending costly signals such as insiders purchasing shares, increasing dividends, and going private. (shrink)