SUMMARYHaving first met in 1835, John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville began ‘an extremely interesting and mutually laudatory correspondence'; but their splendid friendship did not last. A popular thesis focuses on letters exchanged in 1840 to 1842 that reflect conflicting views on the Eastern Question and argues that Mill initiated the ‘strange interruption’. Given Mill's commitment to the ‘agreement of conviction and feeling on the few cardinal points of human opinion’ as a prerequisite of genuine friendship, such interpretation sounds (...) plausible. However, circumstantial evidence, most notably Mill's willingness to have a frank discussion with Tocqueville on pending issues, contradicts the assertion that Mill was enraged by Tocqueville's 1841 letter. This essay suggests focusing attention on two additional cardinal differences between them—their contrasting views of François Guizot and confrontation vis-à-vis benevolent imperialism. Moreover, personal matters such as Harriet Taylor's dislike of Tocqueville and Mill's departure from the London and Westminster Review are also believed to have largely led to Mill discontinuing correspondence with Tocqueville. (shrink)

The focus on translational research in clinical trials has the potential to generate clinically relevant genetic data that could have importance to patients. This raises challenging questions about communicating relevant genetic research results to individual patients. An exploratory pharmacogenetic analysis was conducted in the international ovarian cancer phase III trial, AGO-OVAR 16, which found that patients with clinically important germ-line BRCA1/2 mutations had improved progression-free survival prognosis. Mechanisms to communicate BRCA results were evaluated, because these findings may be beneficial to (...) patients and their families. Communicating individual BRCA results was not anticipated during clinical trial design. Consequently, options were not available for patients to indicate their preference for receiving their individual results when they signed pharmacogenetic informed consent. Differences in local requirements, clinical practice, and opinion regarding the ethical aspects of how to convey genetic results to patients are all potential barriers to returning individual BRCA results to patients. Communicating the aggregate BRCA result from this study provided clinical investigators with a mechanism to disseminate the overall study finding to patients while taking individual circumstances, local guidelines and clinical practice into account. This study illustrates the importance of increasing the clarity and scope of informed consent and the need for patient engagement to ensure clinical trial participants can indicate their preference regarding receipt of potentially important individual pharmacogenetic results. This study was registered in the NCT Clinical Trial Registry under NCT00866697 on March 19, 2009, following approval from participating ethics committees. (shrink)

Our competitive, service-oriented societies are taking a toll on the late-modern individual. Rather than improving life, multitasking, "user-friendly" technology, and the culture of convenience are producing disorders that range from depression to attention deficit disorder to borderline personality disorder. Byung-Chul Han interprets the spreading malaise as an inability to manage negative experiences in an age characterized by excessive positivity and the universal availability of people and goods. Stress and exhaustion are not just personal experiences, but social and historical phenomena (...) as well. Denouncing a world in which every against-the-grain response can lead to further disempowerment, he draws on literature, philosophy, and the social and natural sciences to explore the stakes of sacrificing intermittent intellectual reflection for constant neural connection. (shrink)

Transparency is the order of the day. It is a term, a slogan, that dominates public discourse about corruption and freedom of information. Considered crucial to democracy, it touches our political and economic lives as well as our private lives. Anyone can obtain information about anything. Everything—and everyone—has become transparent: unveiled or exposed by the apparatuses that exert a kind of collective control over the post-capitalist world. Yet, transparency has a dark side that, ironically, has everything to do with a (...) lack of mystery, shadow, and nuance. Behind the apparent accessibility of knowledge lies the disappearance of privacy, homogenization, and the collapse of trust. The anxiety to accumulate ever more information does not necessarily produce more knowledge or faith. Technology creates the illusion of total containment and the constant monitoring of information, but what we lack is adequate interpretation of the information. In this manifesto, Byung-Chul Han denounces transparency as a false ideal, the strongest and most pernicious of our contemporary mythologies. (shrink)

This study explores how Asian American experiences are depicted in four high school U.S. history textbooks and four middle school U.S. history textbooks used in Virginia. The analytic framework was developed from the scholarship of collective memories and histories of immigration in Asian American studies. Content analysis of the textbooks suggests the overall narrative of Asian American history in U.S. history textbooks aligns with the grand narrative of American history, that is, the “story of progress.” This major storyline of Asian (...) Americans – that they suffered from nativist racism and discrimination for a long time, overcame these obstacles through their hard work and efforts, and achieved the American dream – fits well into the master narrative of American progress, highlighting the process of their belonging to the U.S. as citizens. This storyline misrepresents the realities and diversity among Asian ethnic groups and their migration histories as well as the fluid nature of their identities across national borders. These findings stress the continued challenges in representing Asian American experiences as well as other marginalized groups in U.S. history textbooks. (shrink)

Outside directors’ regular board meeting attendance is important in improving the effectiveness of a governance system. Such attendance is evidence of their commitment to the firm as key other players in monitoring and decision making. Using a unique dataset for Korean firms, and three-level random coefficients models, we find that, foreign outside directors, an independent appointment process, professional knowledge of business operations and accumulated firm-specific knowledge are important factors that affect outside directors’ attendance of board meetings. The results also confirm (...) that both outside directors’ personal characteristics and the social context are crucial in understanding their board meeting attendance. Further analysis shows that a positive corporate environment that supports the outside director system encourages outside directors’ attendance at board meetings. (shrink)

This study explores how financial executives retrospectively account for their crossing the line into financial statement fraud while acting within or reacting to a financialized corporate environment. We conduct our investigation through face-to-face interviews with 13 former C-suite financial executives who were involved in and indicted for major cases of accounting fraud. Five different themes of accounts emerged from the narratives, characterizing executives’ fraud immersion as a meaning-making process by which the particulars of the proximal social context and individual motivations (...) collectively molded executives’ vocabularies of fraud immersion. Our executives’ narratives portray their fraud entanglement as typically occurring in small, incremental steps. Their accounts expand our understanding of the influence of socialization on executive-level financial fraud beyond the individualized focus of the fraud triangle model. (shrink)

The primary purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between the dynamic capabilities embedded in ESG management, which are being pursued by global companies, and corporate performance amid increasing uncertainty. Furthermore, the secondary purpose is to examine the function of environmental uncertainty moderating the DCs-performance relationship. Concerning the analysis tool, this study employs topic modeling with Word2Vec embedding that analyzes unstructured data. This was employed as an alternative method beyond the limitations of the traditional approach, i.e., survey or (...) interview. A DCs dictionary was constructed by redesigning the 12 detailed dimensions of Teece’s DCs into 10 dimensions, and then time series scores of individual global companies were extracted by applying this dictionary to the sustainability reports of 97 companies. Sustainability reports of 153 companies among Fortune Global 500 companies announced in 2020 were originally collected, but in the process of collecting additional financial data about these companies from OSIRIS, a total of only 97 companies was selected in the end due to omission of data. A fixed effect panel analysis was conducted, and the main findings are as follows: First, the DCs embedded in ESG management have a positive or negative direct effect on corporate performance. In particular, a statistically significant relationship was not observed in the innovation oriented capabilities, whereas a statistically significant positive relationship was observed in the customer oriented capabilities. Second, uncertainty moderates the relationship between DCs and corporate performance positively or negatively. Interestingly, the moderating effect of uncertainty only appears in the function of the sensing and reconfiguring capabilities. From this, it can be seen that the function of DCs, which is embedded in the ESG management of global companies, is limited due to the imbalance between the sensing-seizing-reconfiguring capabilities. These findings imply that, despite the positive function of DCs embedded in ESG management, costs and benefits occur at the same time, and DCs can improve performance only if there is an organizational adaptation strategy suitable for uncertainty. Accordingly, business managers need to recognize the importance of pursuing sensing-seizing-reconfiguring capabilities in a balanced way to improve corporate performance through ESG management under uncertainty. (shrink)

Background Although the importance of clinical ethics in contemporary clinical environments is established, development of formal clinical ethics services in the Australia health system has, to date, been ad hoc. This study was designed to systematically follow and reflect upon the first 18 months of activity by a newly established service, to examine key barriers and facilitators to establishing a new service in an Australian hospital setting. Methods: how the study was performed and statistical tests used A qualitative case study (...) approach was utilised. The study gathered and analysed data using observations of service committee meetings, document analysis of agendas and minutes, and semi-structured interviews with committee members to generate semantic themes. By interpreting the thematic findings in reference to national capacity building resources, this study also aimed to provide practice-based reflections for other health agencies. Results: the main findings An overarching theme identified in the data was a strong commitment to supporting clinicians facing difficult patient care decisions and navigating difficult discussions with patients and families. Another key theme was the role of the new clinical ethics support service in providing clinicians with a pathway to raise system-wide issues with the organisation Executive. While there was strong clinical engagement, consumer and community participation remained a challenge, as did unresolved governance issues and a need for clearer policy relationship between the service and the organisation. Conclusions: brief summary and potential implications Considering these themes in relation to the national capacity building resources, the study identifies three areas likely to require ongoing development and negotiation. These are: the role of the clinical ethics support service as a link between the workforce and the Executive; the incorporation of consumers and patients; and ethical reasoning. To improve the effectiveness of the service, it is necessary to increase clarity on the service’s role at the governance and policy level, as well as develop strategies for engaging consumers, patients and families. Finally, the capacity of the service to reflect on complex cases may be enhanced through explicit discussions of various different ethical frameworks and ways of deliberating. (shrink)

Debt-ridden corporate growth and increased vulnerability was one of the causes of the 1997 financial crisis in Korea. Introduction of the outside director system has been the core part of the board reforms following the crisis. Our estimation using instruments obtained from a natural experiment illustrates that outside monitoring has improved capital structure of firms even when we control for the leverage regulation effect, enhanced compliance with leverage regulation and thus reduced business risks, and reduced excessive growth and excessive investment (...) more consistently for the top 10 largest chaebols than non-chaebol firms and smaller sized chaebol affiliates. Our results shed some light on why existing studies report the positive effect of outsiders on firm value and add value to existing agency theory by illustrating that the effect of improved governance on capital structure could be non-linear. (shrink)

This exploratory study investigates the ways in which secondary U.S. history teachers who attended two iterations of a teacher professional development workshop, focusing on the history of school desegregation in Virginia, planned to teach the history of school desegregation through historical inquiry. Conceptualizing the history of school desegregation as difficult history, the authors conducted the content analysis of 23 written lesson plans generated by workshop participants. The historiography of school desegregation, and research on four dimensions of historical inquiry such as (...) Change and Continuity, Causation, Multiple Perspectives and Historical Sources, guided the data analysis. The findings suggest that teachers in this study were most likely to design their inquiry around Causation, framing the history of school desegregation within the classical timeline of the Civil Rights Movement, which begins with the Brown v. Board of Education decision (1954) and ends with the Civil Rights Act of 1968. What was often absent in these inquiries was Massive Resistance, the backlash against the Brown v. Board of Education decision, collective and political actions of African American communities to implement the Brown decision, and varying perspectives within African American communities as well as Whites who opposed the Brown decision. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. (shrink)

This paper traces the origins of the concept of permaculture and discusses the sustainability of permaculture itself as a form of alternative agriculture. The principles of permaculture are shown to have many views and perspectives in common with Taoism and with Buddhist ecology and economics. The amalgamation of these Oriental traditions can be translated into the Kaya equation and beyond. It is argued that future permaculture movements should focus on revitalising the communitarian spirit of traditional farming villages instead of building (...) intentional communal communities. The paper also calls for more aggressive environmental-policy measures that support permaculture and internalise the non-market value of reduced fossil-fuel energy consumption and waste recycling. (shrink)

Die heutige Zeitkrise hängt nicht zuletzt mit der Verabsolutierung der vita activa zusammen. Sie führt zu einem Imperativ der Arbeit, der den Menschen zu einem arbeitenden Tier degradiert. Die Hyperaktivität des Alltags nimmt dem menschlichen Leben jegliche Kraft zum Verweilen und zur Kontemplation. Dadurch wird die Erfahrung erfüllter Zeit unmöglich. Notwendig für die Überwindung der heutigen Zeitkrise sind die Revitalisierung der vita contemplativa und das Wiedererlernen der Kunst des Verweilens.

Western thinking has long been dominated by essence, by a preoccupation with that which dwells in itself and delimits itself from the other. By contrast, Far Eastern thought is centred not on essence but on absence. The fundamental topos of Far Eastern thinking is not being but 'the way' (dao), which lacks the solidity and fixedness of essence. The difference between essence and absence is the difference between being and path, between dwelling and wandering. 'A Zen monk should be without (...) fixed abode, like the clouds, and without fixed support, like water', said the Japanese Zen master Dōgen. Drawing on this fundamental distinction between essence and absence, Byung-Chul Han explores the differences between Western and Far Eastern philosophy, aesthetics, architecture and art, shedding fresh light on a culture of absence that may at first sight appear strange and unfamiliar to those in the West whose ways of thinking have been shaped for centuries by the preoccupation with essence. (shrink)