Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, EarlyView.

This book introduces Tao Xingzhi's ideas and thoughts on education. Tao Xingzhi, one of the very few figures in whose name a national association has been established to commemorate his life and work, has been influential in education and social reforms in contemporary China. Over twenty articles written by Tao Xingzhi have been selected for this book and these articles touch on key aspects of Tao's ideas on education and his plans in developing China's educational system. Influenced by John Dewey, (...) Tao's writings were grounded in the Chinese social and cultural context. This book provides an important angle to examine the social and historical roots of recent educational reforms in China. Tao's unmistakable emphasis on providing equal education opportunities to people from different social groups is especially relevant for China today"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to explore the dynamic and intervention mechanisms of daily abusive experience affecting daily work engagement. Drawing on conservation of resources theory, we examine the effect of daily abusive supervision on daily work engagement through daily negative emotions from the resource consumption perspective, and the moderation effect of coworker support from the resource provision perspective. Using a daily diary approach and based on a sample of 73 employees for 5 consecutive days in China. The results (...) reveal that daily abusive supervision has a significant negative effect on daily work engagement, daily negative emotions mediate this relationship, and coworker support had a cross-level moderating effect between daily abusive supervision and daily negative emotions. Our study shows ways to boost employees’ daily work engagement and especially ways buffer the negative effect of abused experience on work engagement. (shrink)

本書係作者將以前不同時期寫作的有關邏輯學知識的科普文章及學術論文彙集在一起，圍繞著辯證邏輯、科學邏輯、邏輯思維技巧、創新思維研究等方面的議題，系統地闡述了作者的邏輯學術觀點。 雖然這些論文及文章多數都是以前已發表過的，但其中有很多觀點和內容，至今仍具有一定的科學性、創新性、趣味性和應用性，具有較高的學術價值。通過閱讀本書，還能使讀者瞭解到中國大陸在邏輯學方面的發展狀況及學術 環境狀況，對於人們豐富邏輯學知識。啟迪智慧，掌握邏輯技巧，提高邏輯思維素質。同時也能進一步地瞭解大陸學者的思想意識和學術風格，都具有的啟發意義和洞察意義。.

The number of articles published in open access journals has increased dramatically in recent years. Simultaneously, the quality of publications in these journals has been called into question. Few studies have explored the retraction rate from OAJs. The purpose of the current study was to determine the reasons for retractions of articles from OAJs in biomedical research. The Medline database was searched through PubMed to identify retracted publications in OAJs. The journals were identified by the Directory of Open Access Journals. (...) Data were extracted from each retracted article, including the time from publication to retraction, causes, journal impact factor, and country of origin. Trends in the characteristics related to retraction were determined. Data from 621 retracted studies were included in the analysis. The number and rate of retractions have increased since 2010. The most common reasons for retraction are errors, plagiarism, duplicate publication, fraud/suspected fraud and invalid peer review. The number of retracted articles from OAJs has been steadily increasing. Misconduct was the primary reason for retraction. The majority of retracted articles were from journals with low impact factors and authored by researchers from China, India, Iran, and the USA. (shrink)

The study is based on validating and exploring the effects of a mega project plan on infrastructure development and Sustainable Project Management. The CPEC has great importance to infrastructure development and economy-boosting. The current study's primary aim is to deal with environmental protection, economic boost up, international relations influencing to the Project's success. The paper also addressed project management as a moderator between environmental protection, economic boost up, international relations, and the CPEC project's success. The primary data has been gathered (...) by using questionnaires, and PLS-SEM has been employed for the analysis. The results revealed that environmental protection, economy boost up, and international relations have a positive association with the success of CPEC. The outcomes also exposed that project management moderating among the nexus of economy boosts up the international relations and success of CPEC. The present study results guided how Pakistan and China make the CPEC project stronger with the efficient implementation of practices required for protecting the environment, with the economic growth and boost up, and good strong relations with foreign countries. This study was an attempt to validate the different factors to check their association with each other in a new environment, resulting in a leading edge for the success of mega projects that influence project management. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound psychological and behavioral impact on people around the world. Consumer purchase behaviors have thus changed greatly, and consumer services companies need to adjust their business models to adapt to this change. From the perspective of consumer psychology, this paper explores the impact of consumer purchase behavior changes over the course of the pandemic on the business model design of consumer services companies using a representative survey of 1,742 individuals. Our results show that changes (...) in consumer purchase behavior have a significant impact on the design of consumer services firms’ business models. Specifically, changes in consumers’ purchase object, motive, and timeframe are more likely to spark a novelty-centered business model design, whereas changes in purchase method tend to inspire an efficiency-centered one. Our findings provide a theoretical reference for consumer services companies in designing business models when faced with unexpected crises. (shrink)

This study investigated the impact of online product reviews on consumers purchasing decisions by using eye-tracking. The research methodology involved development of a conceptual framework of online product review and purchasing intention through the moderation role of gender and visual attention in comments, and empirical investigation into the region of interest analysis of consumers fixation during the purchase decision process and behavioral analysis. The results showed that consumers’ attention to negative comments was significantly greater than that to positive comments, especially (...) for female consumers. Furthermore, the study identified a significant correlation between the visual browsing behavior of consumers and their purchase intention. It also found that consumers were not able to identify false comments. The current study provides a deep understanding of the underlying mechanism of how online reviews influence shopping behavior, reveals the effect of gender on this effect for the first time and explains it from the perspective of attentional bias, which is essential for the theory of online consumer behavior. Specifically, the different effects of consumers’ attention to negative comments seem to be moderated through gender with female consumers’ attention to negative comments being significantly greater than to positive ones. These findings suggest that practitioners need to pay particular attention to negative comments and resolve them promptly through the customization of product/service information, taking into consideration consumer characteristics, including gender. (shrink)

This essay looks into a particular aspect of Sinological challenge to the modern project of Chinese philosophy within the Western academy through the lens of authorship, using the Zhuangzi 莊子 as a case study. It explores philosophical implications for texts whose authorship is in doubt and develops a new heuristic model of authorship and textuality, so that a more robust intellectual space for the philosophical discourse on Chinese classics can be carved out from the dominant historicist Sinological discourse. It argues (...) that philosophical and Sinological approaches to Chinese classics have divergent scholarly objectives and follow different disciplinary norms. To clarify such divergence, it proposes a heuristic model to distinguish two sets of scholarly objects operative in Sinology and philosophy respectively, namely original text versus inherited text, historical author versus textual author, and authorial intent versus textual intent. These two sets of scholarly objects are related, at times overlapping but often irreducibly distinct, with the former in the pairs belonging to Sinologists and the latter to philosophers. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with the contrast in views between traditional mainstream Chinese philosophy and Western liberal individualism on the importance of the concept of individual rights in social and political thought. The contrast is striking because, whereas individual and political rights have long featured in public discourse in the West, in China, mainstream social and political thought has developed without a notion of individual rights. In search of the significance of this major difference, the paper traces ideas of (...) the self in China through Confucian ethics, and compares the Confucian conception of the self with the deontological liberal conception of the subject as a bearer of rights in the West. Having established that the Chinese way of thinking about the self and about moral agency is in stark contrast to the image of the self as a bearer of rights in the deontological conception, the paper goes on to discuss the inadequacy of the moral individualism of a rights‐based morality and argues for an alternative view of morality which places importance on the intrinsic value of collective goods and on membership in a society. (shrink)

No community fully achieves the ideal of the rule of law. Puzzles about the content of the ideal seem to make it necessarily unattainable (and, therefore, an incoherent ideal). Legal systems necessarily contain vague laws. They typically allow for change in the law, they typically provide for unreviewable official decisions, and they never regulate every aspect of the life of a community. It may seem that the ideal can never be achieved because of these features of legal practice. But I (...) ask what counts as a 'deficit' in the rule of law, and I argue that none of these features of legal practice necessarily amounts to a deficit. I conclude that communities fail to achieve the rule of law only because of official infidelity to law, and the failure of lawmakers to pursue the ideal (or their decision not to pursue it). The rule of law is not necessarily unattainable. (shrink)

In recent years, more and more people are applying Convolutional Neural Networks to the study of sound signals. The main reason is the translational invariance of convolution in time and space. Thereby the diversity of the sound signal can be overcome. However, in terms of sound direction recognition, there are also problems such as a microphone matrix being too large, and feature selection. This paper proposes a sound direction recognition using a simulated human head with microphones at both ears. Theoretically, (...) the two microphones cannot distinguish the front and rear directions. However, we use the original data of the two channels as the input of the convolutional neural network, and the resolution effect can reach more than 0.9. For comparison, we also chose the delay feature (GCC) for sound direction recognition. Finally, we also conducted experiments that used probability distributions to identify more directions. (shrink)

This paper proposes a coevolutionary scenario on the origins of compositionality and word order regularity in human language, and illustrates it using a multi-agent, behavioral model. The model traces a `bottom-up' process of syntactic development; artificial agents, by iterating local orders among lexical items, gradually build up basic constituent word order(s) in sentences. These results show that structural features of language (e.g. syntactic categories and word orders) could have coevolved with lexical items, as a consequence of general learning mechanisms (e.g. (...) pattern extraction and sequential learning) initially not language-specific. Keywords: Computer simulation; language origin; coevolution; compositionality; word order regularity. (shrink)

The majority of the extant languages have one of three dominant basic word orders: SVO, SOV or VSO. Various hypotheses have been proposed to explain this word order bias, including the existence of a universal grammar, the learnability imposed by cognitive constraints, the descent of modern languages from an ancestral protolanguage, and the constraints from functional principles. We run simulations using a multi-agent computational model to study this bias. Following a local order approach, the model simulates individual language processing mechanisms (...) in production and comprehension. The simulation results demonstrate that the semantic structures that a language encodes can constrain the global syntax, and that local syntax can help trigger bias towards the global order SOV/SVO. (shrink)

Are there Buddhist conceptions of the unconscious? If so, are they more Freudian, Jungian, or something else? If not, can Buddhist conceptions be reconciled with the Freudian, Jungian, or other models? These are some of the questions that have motivated modern scholarship to approach ālayavijñāna, the storehouse consciousness, formulated in Yogācāra Buddhism as a subliminal reservoir of tendencies, habits, and future possibilities. -/- Tao Jiang argues convincingly that such questions are inherently problematic because they frame their interpretations of the Buddhist (...) notion largely in terms of responses to modern psychology. He proposes that, if we are to understand ālayavijñāna properly and compare it with the unconscious responsibly, we need to change the way the questions are posed so that ālayavijñāna and the unconscious can first be understood within their own contexts and then recontextualized within a dialogical setting. In so doing, certain paradigmatic assumptions embedded in the original frameworks of Buddhist and modern psychological theories are exposed. Jiang brings together Xuan Zang’s ālayavijñāna and Freud’s and Jung’s unconscious to focus on what the differences are in the thematic concerns of the three theories, why such differences exist in terms of their objectives, and how their methods of theorization contribute to these differences. -/- Contexts and Dialogue puts forth a fascinating, erudite, and carefully argued presentation of the subliminal mind. It proposes a new paradigm in comparative philosophy that examines the what, why, and how in navigating the similarities and differences of philosophical systems through contextualization and recontextualization. (shrink)

This book rewrites the story of classical Chinese philosophy, which has always been considered the single most creative and vibrant chapter in the history of Chinese philosophy. Works attributed to Confucius, Mozi, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, Han Feizi and many others represent the very origins of moral and political thinking in China. As testimony to their enduring stature, in recent decades many Chinese intellectuals, and even leading politicians, have turned to those classics, especially Confucian texts, for alternative or complementary sources (...) of moral authority and political legitimacy. Therefore, philosophical inquiries into core normative values embedded in those classical texts are crucial to the ongoing scholarly discussion about China as China turns more culturally inward. It can also contribute to the spirited contemporary debate about the nature of philosophical reasoning, especially in the non-Western traditions. -/- This book offers a new narrative and interpretative framework about the origins of moral-political philosophy that tracks how the three normative values, humaneness, justice, and personal freedom, were formulated, reformulated, and contested by early Chinese philosophers in their effort to negotiate the relationship among three distinct domains, the personal, the familial, and the political. Such efforts took place as those thinkers were reimagining a new moral-political order, debating its guiding norms, and exploring possible sources within the context of an evolving understanding of Heaven and its relationship with the humans. Tao Jiang argues that the competing visions in that debate can be characterized as a contestation between partialist humaneness and impartialist justice as the guiding norm for the newly imagined moral-political order, with the Confucians, the Mohists, the Laoists, and the so-called fajia thinkers being the major participants, constituting the mainstream philosophical project during this period. Thinkers lined up differently along the justice-humaneness spectrum with earlier ones maintaining some continuity between the two normative values (or at least trying to accommodate both to some extent) while later ones leaning more toward their exclusivity in the political/public domain. Zhuangzi and the Zhuangists were the outliers of the mainstream moral-political debate who rejected the very parameter of humaneness versus justice in that discourse. They were a lone voice advocating personal freedom, but the Zhuangist expressions of freedom were self-restricted to the margins of the political world and the interiority of one's heartmind. Such a take can shed new light on how the Zhuangist approach to personal freedom would profoundly impact the development of this idea in pre-modern Chinese political and intellectual history. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin is known for articulating two competing notions of freedom operative within the modern Western political philosophy, negative and positive. He provides a powerful defense of modern liberal tradition that elevates negative freedom in its attempt to preserve personal space for one's actions and choices while regarding positive freedom as suppressive due to its potentially collective orientation. This article uses Berlin as an interlocutor to challenge Zhuangzi, known for his portrayal of spiritual freedom in the Chinese tradition, prodding modern (...) Zhuangzians to bring the Zhuangzian spiritual freedom into the sociopolitical arena by reimagining new possibilities about politics. (shrink)

This article analyses the tradition of "articulating xing in terms of sheng" and related other expressions, and also examines the debate between Mencius and Gaozi concerning "xing is known by sheng" It claims that while Mencius' "human nature is good" discourse is influenced by the interpretive tradition of "articulating xing in terms of sheng", Mencius also transcends and develops this tradition. Therefore it is only when Mencius' views about the goodness of human nature are understood in the context of this (...) interpretive tradition that his ideas can be fully understood. Utilizing this framework, the Confucian understanding of rights is then explored. /// 通过对"以生言性"的传统及其不同命题表述的详尽分析，对孟子、告子"生 之谓性"的辩论做出梳理，指出孟子性善论一方面受到了"以生言性"传统的影响， 另一方面则超越、发展了这一传统，故只有将孟子性善论放在"以生言性"的传统 下才能得到真正的理解。从这一角度出发，为探讨儒家的权利观念提供了可能。. (shrink)

This essay aims to provide a philosophical analysis of the Chinese concept of cheng (sincerity) as a political virtue that could be incorporated to ground a duty of civility in liberal deliberative democracy. It is argued here that the virtue of sincerity is an essential feature of the liberal political culture taken for granted by Rawls in his theory of public reason. Ideal procedures and public discourse are not sufficient to generate civic virtues. The goal of this essay is to (...) show how, in the Chinese conception, the root of civility lies in the virtue of Cheng, which can provide the moral grounding for a duty of civility that is essential to sustaining the stability and overcoming the problem of defection from support of the common good in pluralistic states. (shrink)

According to recently excavated bamboo and silk material, the idea of du 獨 in the concept shendu 慎獨 does not refer to a spatial notion of dwelling in solitude or a solitary dwelling; rather it is the state before having made contact with external things, or the state “before feelings are aroused” (weifa 未發) of the inner heart/mind. It refers to internal thoughts and volitions, or “casting aside external sensations” (sheti 舍體). Shen 慎 should be glossed in accordance with the (...) Erya 爾雅 (Approaching Elegance), rendering it as “sincerity” (cheng 誠). Shendu then means to “cause one’s will to be sincere” (chengqiyi 誠其意). Zheng Xuan 鄭玄, in explaining shendu as being “cautious of the actions one performs in private” (shen qi xianju suowei 慎其閒居所為), completely strayed from the original meaning as found in the bamboo-silk texts. Zhu Xi 朱熹, seeing the insufficiencies of Zheng Xuan’s interpretation of shendu, broadened the meaning of du, and in particular added a spiritual meaning to it. However, due to influence by Zheng Xuan, Zhu Xi still preserved some misreadings of the term; especially in his interpretation of shendu in the Daxue 大學 (Great Learning) and Zhongyong 中庸 (Doctrine of the Mean). Considering that the Neo-Confucian methods of cultivation embodied in the ideas of “abiding in reverence and enriching the self” (jujing hanyang 居敬涵養), and “being refined and focused” (weijing weiyi 惟精惟一) actually accorded more with the original meaning of shendu, Zhu Xi’s misreading of shendu is indirectly related to the loss of its original meaning due to the broken transmission of the ancient texts. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to improve the entrepreneurial performance and sports morality of college teacher-and-student entrepreneurs. Consequently, psychological capital is creatively combined with social and political education to explore college entrepreneurs’ EP and sports morality. First, following a theoretical model implementation, this article proposes several hypotheses. Then, a questionnaire survey was designed, and the data were analyzed. The results show that gender has little impact on EP and sports morality; PsyCap significantly affects the EP of college entrepreneurs at (...) the age of 33–38 years; in terms of educational background, average scores of PsyCap + SPE of bachelors are the highest, followed by masters or above, and finally, the college undergraduate; the average score of PsyCap + SPE of married respondents is 4.0, while that of the unmarried is 3.7; there is a significant difference between college entrepreneurs’ EP under the dimension of the basic enterprise situation; and the average score of the length of entrepreneurship is 9.87, which has the most significant impact on the EP and sports morality, and the significance of sports morality is 0.04. Among them, the most significant impact on EP and sports morality is weekly sports participation, with a score of 9.67. Therefore, PsyCap + SPE plays a positive role in the EP of college entrepreneurs. In contrast, sports morality has little impact on EP. This study provides a reference for the research on the influence of entrepreneurship and sports morality of college entrepreneurs. (shrink)

This paper looks at transgender identities and the law in the context of marriage in common law jurisdictions. It particularly focuses on the nature and sources of authority over word meaning as well as the role of language and definition in classifying transgender individuals into a legal category. When it comes to the legal question of who may marry whom, and what the terms “man” and “woman” actually refer to, there is no statutory definition of the terms “man”, “woman”, “male” (...) and “female”. This has put the onus on judges, especially those who needed to decide whether a transgender person can marry in his/her affirmed sex, to interpret these terms. Two lines of cases in transgender jurisprudence are examined so as to have a close study of how the courts construed these terms and classified transgender people into a category. The first concerns United Kingdom cases, namely Corbett v Corbett, Bellinger v Bellinger and the Hong Kong case W v Registrar of Marriages, &. The second consists of Australian cases such as Secretary, Department of Social Security v State Rail Authority and Re Kevin. This paper discusses these issues by analyzing and comparing different cases in transgender jurisprudence as well as examining how these issues play out in contemporary Hong Kong. (shrink)

: This essay is an attempt to explain Nishida's logic of the predicate in its challenge to the Aristotelian object logic that is the foundation of substance metaphysics. It offers a comparative analysis of the critical issue of continuity so as to show why Nishida thinks Aristotelian logic cannot deal with the problematic of continuity of change while his own logic of the predicate can. It further explores the significance of Nishida's logic in providing the foundation for a non-substance ontology (...) of dynamic reality. (shrink)

Recent studies have revealed an astonishing diversity of sex chromosomes in many vertebrate lineages, prompting questions about the mechanisms of sex chromosome turnover. While there is considerable population genetic theory about the evolutionary forces promoting sex chromosome replacement, this theory has not yet been integrated with our understanding of the molecular and developmental genetics of sex determination. Here, we review recent data to examine four questions about how the structure of gene networks influences the evolution of sex determination. We argue (...) that patterns of epistasis, arising from the structure of genetic networks, may play an important role in regulating the rates and patterns of sex chromosome replacement. (shrink)