Extant literature on Political CSR and the role of governments in the governance of business conduct tends to neglect key implications of the political-institutional macro-context for public deliberation. Contextual assumptions often remain rather implicit, leading to the need for a more nuanced, explicit and context-sensitive exploration of the theoretical and practical boundary conditions of Political CSR. In non-democratic political-institutional contexts, political pluralism and participation are limited, and governmental agencies continue to play the most central role in regulation and its enforcement. (...) Drawing on a qualitative case study on a nuclear energy project in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, we show how both governments and MNCs co-create a context hostile to socially responsible business conduct in the sense of Political CSR. Utilizing rich qualitative data derived from interviews, public documents, and participant observation between 2008 and 2018, we specifically illuminate how—through which interactions and strategies—the multiple governmental and corporate actors involved counter civil society demands for public deliberation, indicating the limitations of Political CSR in non-democratic political-institutional contexts. We particularly contribute to the development of Political CSR by analysing the role of coercive and discursive forms of power. We thus offer a more nuanced perspective on the role of governments in constraining the room for public deliberation in the sense of Political CSR. (shrink)

This paper develops propositions on the added value for SMEs of normatively based, employee-oriented corporate social responsibility (CSR). We suggest that not only motives but also the skills of the owner/manager as an institutional entrepreneur are critical in dealing with institutional variance. Also, the transfer of employee-oriented CSR can have positive results for SMEs that could imply that globalisation is not only a race to the bottom.

Building on the computer science concept of _code smells_, we initiate the study of _law smells_, i.e., patterns in legal texts that pose threats to the comprehensibility and maintainability of the law. With five intuitive law smells as running examples—namely, duplicated phrase, long element, large reference tree, ambiguous syntax, and natural language obsession—, we develop a comprehensive law smell taxonomy. This taxonomy classifies law smells by when they can be detected, which aspects of law they relate to, and how they (...) can be discovered. We introduce text-based and graph-based methods to identify instances of law smells, confirming their utility in practice using the United States Code as a test case. Our work demonstrates how ideas from software engineering can be leveraged to assess and improve the quality of _legal_ code, thus drawing attention to an understudied area in the intersection of law and computer science and highlighting the potential of computational legal drafting. (shrink)

This volume contains thirteen papers that were presented at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics/Société canadienne d’histoire et de philosophie des mathématiques, which was held at Ryerson University in Toronto. It showcases rigorously reviewed modern scholarship on an interesting variety of topics in the history and philosophy of mathematics from Ancient Greece to the twentieth century. -/- A series of chapters all set in the eighteenth century consider topics such as John Marsh’s (...) techniques for the computation of decimal fractions, Euler’s efforts to compute the surface area of scalene cones, a little-known work by John Playfair on the practical aspects of mathematics, and Monge’s use of descriptive geometry. -/- After a brief stop in the nineteenth century to consider the culture of research mathematics in 1860s Prussia, the book moves into the twentieth century with an examination of the historical context within which the Axiom of Choice was developed and a paper discussing Anatoly Vlasov’s adaptation of the Boltzmann equation to ionized gases. The remaining chapters deal with the philosophy of twentieth-century mathematics through topics such as an historically informed discussion of finitism and its limits; a reexamination of Mary Leng’s defenses of mathematical fictionalism through an alternative, anti-realist approach to mathematics; and a look at the reasons that mathematicians select specific problems to pursue. -/- Written by leading scholars in the field, these papers are accessible to not only mathematicians and students of the history and philosophy of mathematics, but also anyone with a general interest in mathematics. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment &Responsibility, Volume 31, Issue 3, Page 859-874, July 2022.

This article summarises and comments on the book Studies in Matthew’s Gospel: Literary design, intertextuality, and social setting, by Wim Weren, published during 2014. The essence of this book is all about meaning: the meaning of a structure, texts, and consequently the understanding of the Gospel of Matthew. For Weren, ‘Meaning is the result of the interplay between a textual unit and such other factors as language, literary context, and cultural setting’. This relates to the three parts of the content (...) of this monograph. His approach in studying Matthew comes from three perspectives: firstly intratextuality, then intertextuality, and finally extratextuality. He has deliberately chosen this order of successive steps so that they complement each other. (shrink)

Contributors consider the limits of our knowledge of a world of unlimited knowability by examining philosophical thought from the Classical Greeks to the present.

Abstract“Culture of honor” means that individuals deter others by signaling their commitment to violent retaliation. We develop a multilevel explanation of cross-level interdependence of honor and violence. According to our concept of system-level honor, a social system is loaded with deterrence signaling if culture of honor is highly prevalent in the system. In line with the Smith and Price (1973, in Nature,https://www.nature.com/articles/246015a0) model, we argue that high system-level honor discourages Prober-Retaliator behavior: some individuals might tend to challenge others they assume (...) to be inferior to increase their own reputation. Both individual culture of honor and system-level honor contribute to an increase in violence (H1; H2). However, as system-level honor and deterrence become more prevalent, the impact of individual honor diminishes because engaging in violent behavior becomes increasingly expensive within such a system (H3). As a second contextual effect, inequality in culture of honor should therefore increase violent behavior because it encourages Prober-Retaliator behavior (H4). We analyze the effect of culture of honor on school violence among 15-year-old adolescents. Disentangling the micro- and context-level effects of culture of honor on violent behavior in a multilevel analysis framework allows the estimation of a cross-level interaction using a large data set from more than 25,000 adolescents in more than 1,300 schoolroom contexts. Results are in line with our H3, but not with H4. Model-based predictions show that the deterrent effect must be unrealistically high to generate an equilibrium of average violence. (shrink)

Het verhaal van de natuurkunde is ook een persoonlijk verhaal, want achter de feiten gaan altijd mensen schuil. Van Einstein, die Beethoven op zijn viool probeert te spelen, tot Van Swinden, die jarenlang in het planetarium in Franeker werkt. Cees Andriesse, die 'Titan kan niet slapen' schreef, een biografie over Christiaan Huygens, heeft veel gevoel voor deze verhalen. In deze nieuwe geschiedenis van de natuurkunde wordt dan ook ruim aandacht besteed aan de zoektocht en wederwaardigheden van grote figuren, maar ook (...) van collega's uit de tijd dat Andriesse in Groningen werkte. De wetenschap draait om onmiskenbare relaties tussen harde feiten; die gaan spreken onder de pen van Andriesse, die oog heeft voor de ontdekkers en zichtbaar maakt hoe zijn eigen begrip is ontstaan. Het is hem niet te doen om de mechanisering van de natuurkunde, maar om de historisering daarvan. Dit boek biedt een nieuw perspectief op grote ontdekkingen, waarbij zowel God, als literatuur als psychologie een rol spelen. (shrink)

v. 1. International perspectives on business ethics -- v. 2. New theoretical directions -- v. 3. Behavioral business ethics -- v. 4. Managing business ethics.

Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie Jahrgang: 3 Heft: 2 Seiten: 300-318.

The term information has become a universal and omnipresent keyword in almost all areas of our modern world—be it in science or society in general. This is not only obvious from the naming of whole scientific branches like Information Theory, Information Science or Informatics but even more from common speaking—characterising our present time and society as information age viz. information society. However, what information might mean, is by no means clear and there is a wide range of interpretations covering, among (...) others, its technical, communicational, educational, mental, and scientific aspects. But is the use of the same term justified when adopted in Biology, Physics, Archaeology, Law, Communication Technology, and Informatics (to list just a few of the involved scientific branches) or do its different uses at least have some common characteristics—some sort of common denominator? Is information natural, e.g. manifesting itself as a material phenomenon residing in organisms, stars, atoms, or genes, or is it just a cultural product of human communication, thinking, and interpretation? In this article, we try to clarify some of the most important interpretations, discuss and contrast them with the Informatics point of view. Interpretations range from taking information as material, transferable signals (following Shannon’s Information Theory or the genetic approaches), treating it as a sign (following a semiotic approach), as a commercial product (now common in Web-based Information Business) to considering it a pure mental phenomenon bound to humans or human-like individuals or even to groups and societies. Based on these interpretations, we shall throw a critical glance on current trends in human science and society—focusing on the now popular concept of information society —and then derive some theses and guidelines for further research escorting the growth and dispersal of information technology. As it will turn out, an information society which defines itself through the number of computers, internet connections and network links is based on a very narrow, techno-centric concept of information. However, a reflection on the educational and cultural aspects of information might lead to a better-qualified society consisting of responsible and critical citizens. (shrink)

The concept of the self in Western psychology derives primarily from the work of Freud, Jung, and Rogers. To some extent Western formulations of the self evidence a homunculus-like quality lacking in some Eastern conceptions, especially those derived from the Vijnanavada and Zen Buddhist traditions. The Buddhist notion of self circumvents reification, being an impermanent gestalt formed by the interaction of five skandhas or aggregates . Each skandha is in turn a transient pattern formed by the interaction of the other (...) four. The fifth skandha includes eight consciousnesses, one of which results in the experience of the ego or self as homunculus, which Buddhist psychology rejects as delusion. Implications for psychotherapy and everyday life are discussed. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Jonathan Wolff is Professor of Philosophy at University College London. He is the author of Robert Nozick (1991), An Introduction to Political Philosophy (1996) and Why Read Marx Today (2002). He is currently working on a number of topics at the intersection of political philosophy and public policy.

We identify a normative paradox of responsible management education. Business educators aim to promote social values and develop ethical habits and socially responsible mindsets through education, but they attempt to do so with theories that have normative underpinnings and create actual normative effects that counteract their intentions. We identify a limited conceptualization of freedom in economic theorizing as a cause of the paradox. Economic theory emphasizes individual freedom and understands this as the freedom to choose from available options. However, conceptualizing (...) individuals as profit-maximizing actors neglects their freedom to reflect on the purposes and goals of their actions. We build on the work of pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, who distinguishes between habitualized and creative problem-solving behaviors, conceptualizes knowledge construction as a process of interdependent scientific social inquiry, and understands actors as having the freedom to determine what kind of people they wish to be. We apply pragmatist theory to business education and suggest equipping students with a plurality of theories, supplementing neoclassical economics with other economic perspectives and views from other disciplines on economic behavior. Moreover, we suggest putting students into learning situations that require practical problem solution through interdependent social inquiry, encouraging ethical reflection. In doing so, we contribute by linking the problematic conceptions of freedom identified in economic theorizing to the debate on responsible management education. We conceptualize a pragmatist approach to management education that explicitly re-integrates the freedom to discursively reflect on the individual and societal purpose of business activity and thereby makes existing tools and pedagogies useful for bringing potential freedom back into business. (shrink)

Prototype theory makes a crucial distinction between central and peripheral sense of words. Geeraerts explores the implications of this model for a theory of semantic change, in the first full-scale treatment of the impact of the most recent developments in lexicological theory on the study of meaning change. He identifies structural features of the development of word meanings which follow from a prototype-theoretical model of semantic structure, and incorporates these diachronic prototypicality effects into a theory of meaning change.

Three different ways in which systems of axioms can contribute to the discovery of new notions are presented and they are illustrated by the various ways in which lattices have been introduced in mathematics by Schröder et al. These historical episodes reveal that the axiomatic method is not only a way of systematizing our knowledge, but that it can also be used as a fruitful tool for discovering and introducing new mathematical notions. Looked at it from this perspective, the creative (...) aspect of axiomatics for mathematical practice is brought to the fore. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Based on theoretical insights of discourse ethics as developed by Jürgen Habermas, we delineate a proposal to further develop the institutionalization of social accounting in multinational corporations (MNCs) by means of “Social Accountability 8000” (SA 8000). First, we discuss the cornerstones of Habermas's discourse ethics and elucidate how and why this concept can provide a theoretical justification of the moral point of view in MNCs. Second, the basic conception, main purpose, and implementation procedure of SA 8000 are presented. Third, we (...) critically examine SA 8000 from a Habermasian perspective, and discuss advantages and drawbacks of the initiative. Fourth, to address the drawbacks, we introduce a “discourse-ethically” extended version of SA 8000. We show that this approach is theoretically well-founded and able to overcome some of the current deficits of the certification initiative. We demonstrate that the extended version of SA 8000 can be successfully applied on a cross-cultural basis, and that our findings have significant implications for other international ethics initiatives. (shrink)

Moritz Pasch (1843ber neuere Geometrie (1882), in which he also clearly formulated the view that deductions must be independent from the meanings of the nonlogical terms involved. Pasch also presented in these lectures the main tenets of his philosophy of mathematics, which he continued to elaborate on throughout the rest of his life. This philosophy is quite unique in combining a deductivist methodology with a radically empiricist epistemology for mathematics. By taking into consideration publications from the entire span of Paschs (...) highly original, but virtually unknown, philosophy of mathematics is presented. (shrink)