Background: In modern society, death has become ‘forbidden’ fed by the medical technology to conquer death. The technological paradigm is challenged by a social-liberal political ideology in postmodern Western societies. The question raised in this study was as follows: Which arguments, attitudes, values and paradoxes between modern and postmodern tendencies concerning treatment and care of older persons with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator appear in the literature? Aims: The aim of this study was to describe and interpret how the field of (...) tension concerning older persons with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator – especially end-of-life issues – has been expressed in the literature throughout the last decade. Methods: Paul Ricoeur’s reflexive interpretive approach was used to extract the meaningful content of the literature involving qualitative, quantitative and normative literature. Analysis and interpretation involved naive reading, structural analysis and critical interpretation. Ethical considerations: The investigation complied with the principles outlined in the Declaration of Helsinki. Findings and discussions: The unifying theme was ‘Normativity under change’. The sub-themes were ‘Death has become legitimate’, ‘The technological imperative is challenged’ and ‘Patients and healthcare professionals need to talk about end-of-life issues’. There seems to be a considerable distance between the normative approach of how practice ought to be and findings in empirical studies. Conclusion: Modern as well as postmodern attitudes and perceptions illustrate contradictory tendencies regarding deactivation of the implantable cardioverter defibrillator and replacement of the implantable cardioverter defibrillator in older persons nearing the end of life. The tendencies challenge each other in a struggle to gain position. On the other hand, they can also complement each other because professionalism and health professional expertise cannot stand alone when the patient’s life is at stake but must be unfolded in an alliance with the patient who needs to be understood and accepted in his vulnerability. (shrink)

We investigate the relationship of corporate social responsibility (CSR) (often assumed to reflect corporate voluntarism) and government (often assumed to reflect coercion). We distinguish two broad perspectives on the CSR and government relationship: thedichotomous(i.e., government and CSR are / should be independent of one another) and therelated(i.e., government and CSR are / should be interconnected). Using typologies of CSR public policy and of CSR and the law, we present an integrated framework for corporate discretion for engagement with public policy for (...) CSR. We make four related contributions. First, we explain the dichotomous and the related perspectives with reference to their various assumptions and analyses. Second, we demonstrate that public policy for CSR and corporate discretion coexist and interact. Specifically, we show, third, that public policy for CSR can inform and stimulate corporate discretion and, fourth, that corporations have discretion for CSR, particularly as to how corporations engage with such policy. (shrink)

It has often been observed that color is a highly preferred attribute for use in distinguishing descriptions, that is, referring expressions produced with the purpose of identifying an object within a visual scene. However, most of these observations were based on visual displays containing only colors that were maximally different in hue and for which the language of experimentation possessed basic color terms. The experiments described in this paper investigate whether speakers’ preference for color is reduced if the color of (...) the target referent is similar to that of the distractors. Because colors that look similar are often also harder to distinguish linguistically, we also examine the impact of the codability of color values. As a third factor, we investigate the salience of available alternative attributes and its impact on the use of color. The results of our experiments show that, while speakers are indeed less likely to use color when the colors in a display are similar, this effect is mostly due to the difficulty in naming similar colors. Color use for color with a basic color term is affected only when the colors of target and distractors are very similar. The salience of our alternative attribute size, manipulated by varying the difference in size between target and distractors, had no impact on the use of color. (shrink)

John Adams vs Thomas Paine: Rival Plans for the Early Republic by historian Jett B. Conner explores how the two rivals helped shape America's first constitutions--the Articles of Confederation and those of several states-- and how they continued contributing to American political thought as it developed during the so-called "critical period" between the adoption of the Articles of Confederation and the start of the Constitutional Convention of 1787. It also focuses on the creation of our democratic republic and compares Paine's (...) and Adams's approaches to structuring constitutions to ensure free government while guarding against abuses of power and the excesses of democratic majorities. (shrink)

In this article, we use qualitative methodology to explore how 15 low‐income women of diverse sociocultural location construct and experience health and weight gain during pregnancy, as well as how they position themselves in relation to messages pertaining to weight gain, femininity and motherhood that they encounter in their lives. Discussing the findings through a feminist poststructuralist lens, we conclude that the participants are complex, fragmented subjects, interpellated by multiple and at times conflicting subject positions. While the discourse of maternal (...) responsibility (i.e. managing personal behaviours for the baby's health) is very much in evidence in their narratives, embodied experiences of pregnancy, lived experiences of financial constraints and religious beliefs provided some with an alternative discourse and resistant subject position. Participants also had mixed emotions about weight gain; they recognized the need to gain weight in order to have a healthy pregnancy, but weight gain was also not welcome as participants reproduced the dominant discourse of obesity and the discourse of ‘feminine’ bodily norms. Based on our results, we advocate for change to recent clinical guidelines and social discourses around pregnancy and weight gain, as well as for policies that provide pregnant women with a range of health‐promoting resources. (shrink)

Asymmetric cell division generates cell diversity and contributes to cellular aging and rejuvenation. Here, we review the molecular mechanisms enabling budding yeast to recognize spindle pole bodies (SPB, centrosome equivalent) based on their age, and guide their non‐random mitotic segregation: SPB inheritance requires the distinction of old from new SPBs and is regulated by the SPB‐inheritance network (SPIN) and the mitotic exit network (MEN). The SPIN marks the pre‐existing SPB as old and the MEN recognizes these marks translating them into (...) spindle orientation. We next revisit other molecules and structures that partition depending on their age rather than their abundance at mitosis as, for example, DNA, centrosomes, mitochondria, and histones in yeast and other systems. The recurrence of this differential behavior suggests a functional significance for numerous cell types, which we then discuss. We conclude that non‐random segregation may facilitate asymmetric cell fate determination and thereby indirectly aging and rejuvenation. (shrink)

It has often been observed that color is a highly preferred attribute for use in distinguishing descriptions, that is, referring expressions produced with the purpose of identifying an object within a visual scene. However, most of these observations were based on visual displays containing only colors that were maximally different in hue and for which the language of experimentation possessed basic color terms. The experiments described in this paper investigate whether speakers’ preference for color is reduced if the color of (...) the target referent is similar to that of the distractors. Because colors that look similar are often also harder to distinguish linguistically, we also examine the impact of the codability of color values. As a third factor, we investigate the salience of available alternative attributes and its impact on the use of color. The results of our experiments show that, while speakers are indeed less likely to use color when the colors in a display are similar, this effect is mostly due to the difficulty in naming similar colors. Color use for color with a basic color term is affected only when the colors of target and distractors are very similar (yet still distinguishable). The salience of our alternative attribute size, manipulated by varying the difference in size between target and distractors, had no impact on the use of color. (shrink)

Mainstream nursing history often positions itself in opposition to philosophy and many nursing historians are reticent of theorizing. In the quest to illuminate the lives of nurses and women current historical approaches are driven by reformist aspirations but are based on the conception that nursing or caring is basically good and the timelessness of universal values. This has the effect of essentialising political categories of identity such as class, race and gender. This kind of history is about affirmation rather than (...) friction and about the conservation of memory and musealization. In contrast, we will focus on how we imagine nursing history could be used as a philosophical, critical perspective to challenge the ongoing transformations of our societies. Existing reality must be confronted with strangeness and the historically different can assume the function of this counterpart, meaning present and past must continuously be set in relation to each other. Thus, critical history is always the history of the present but not merely the pre‐history of the present – critique must rather present different realities and different certainties. In this paper, we use this approach to discuss the implementation of the nursing process (NP) in Germany. The nursing process appears to be a technology that helped to set up an infrastructure ‐ or assemblage ‐ to transform nursing interventions into a commodity exchangable between consumers and nurses in a free market. In our theoretical perspective, we argue that NP was a step in the realization of the German ordoliberal program, a specific variety of neoliberalism. In order to implement market‐orientation in the healthcare system it was necessary to transform hospitals into calculable spaces and to make all performances in the hospital calculable. This radically transformed not just the systems, but the ways in which nurses and patients conveived of themselves. (shrink)

This Course Companion supports the new syllabus for 2009 and includes all options. It promotes cross-cultural links and connections to TOK, international-mindedness and the IB learner profile. Written by two experienced IB examiners and teachers, it contains historical information alongside data from the latest research. Students are stimulated by a wealth of engaging activities and features. They are encouraged to think critically and relate ideas to other subjects and to world issues. There is an emphasis on research and research methods, (...) as well as advice on internal and external assessment. (shrink)

For Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, the Unconscious is characterized by the fact that it is born from the repression of impulses. For Carl Jung, on the other hand, the Unconscious is made up of everything that is not conscious. According to Jung: “It is inherent to reality and to the communication of the conscious with the Unconscious, and allows the becoming of the individual”. He called it “collective” because its pictorial manifestations, the archetypes, were common to all human beings. (...) For 20 years he searched, with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, for an extra-personal origin of the Unconscious, called “synchronicity”. The study of near-death experiences sheds new light on this question: the last image the dying man/woman sees would be himself a few weeks before his birth. The ego is believed to be built in the fetal stage around the discovery of the body, and to remain unchanged until brain death. Personalism would describe the fetus’ access to self-consciousness by discovering his body. (shrink)

Multinational corporations (MNCs) have come under pressure to adopt private regulatory initiatives such as supplier codes of conduct in order to address poor working conditions in global supply chain factories. While a well-known literature explores drivers and outcomes of such monitoring schemes, this literature focuses mainly on large firms and has ignored the growing integration of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) into global supply chains. Furthermore, the literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR) in SMEs primarily emphasizes domestic initiatives and not (...) global challenges. Focusing on the Business for Social Compliance Initiative (BSCI), this article examines the positions of private actors, who demand and supply private regulation as well as the positions of those firms, who are the targets of such schemes. As the BSCI has grown its membership, MNCs increasingly request that SMEs meet BSCI requirements in global supply chains even though compliance is a “mission impossible” for many smaller firms. As a result of this development, the private regulatory system is facing growing strain. (shrink)

Research seeking a scientific foundation for the theory of art appreciation has raised controversies at the intersection of the social and cognitive sciences. Though equally relevant to a scientific inquiry into art appreciation, psychological and historical approaches to art developed independently and lack a common core of theoretical principles. Historicists argue that psychological and brain sciences ignore the fact that artworks are artifacts produced and appreciated in the context of unique historical situations and artistic intentions. After revealing flaws in the (...) psychological approach, we introduce a psycho-historical framework for the science of art appreciation. This framework demonstrates that a science of art appreciation must investigate how appreciators process causal and historical information to classify and explain their psychological responses to art. Expanding on research about the cognition of artifacts, we identify three modes of appreciation: basic exposure to an artwork, the artistic design stance, and artistic understanding. The artistic design stance, a requisite for artistic understanding, is an attitude whereby appreciators develop their sensitivity to art-historical contexts by means of inquiries into the making, authorship, and functions of artworks. We defend and illustrate the psycho-historical framework with an analysis of existing studies on art appreciation in empirical aesthetics. Finally, we argue that the fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure can be amended to meet the requirements of the framework. We conclude that scientists can tackle fundamental questions about the nature and appreciation of art within the psycho-historical framework. (shrink)

While a substantial amount of the literature describes corporate benefits of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, the literature is silent concerning why some companies announce CSR initiatives, yet fail to implement them. The article examines company delistings from the UN Global Compact. Delistings are surprising because the CSR agenda is seen as having won the battle of ideas. The analysis proceeds in two parts. I first analyze firm-level characteristics focusing on geography while controlling for sector and size; I find that (...) geography is a significant factor while small firms are more likely to be delisted than large firms and some sector characteristics determine delistings. Next, I proceed to uncover country-level characteristics including the degree of international economic interdependence as well as the quality of governance institutions. Multivariate regression analysis shows that companies are less likely to be delisted from countries where domestic governance institutions are well-functioning. To a lesser extent, I find that firms from countries with international economies are more willing to comply with the UN Global Compact requirements. Countries with a high share of outward FDI/capita have a lower share of delisted firms as do countries that are internationally competitive. (shrink)

This is an essay based on a story with observations, about present and sparkling moments from everyday life coexisting with a mother living with dementia. The story is used to begin philosophical underpinnings reflecting on ‘how it could be otherwise’. Dementia deploys brutal existential experiences such as cognitive deterioration, decline in mental functioning and often hurtful social judgements. The person living with dementia goes through transformation and changes of self. Cognitive decline progressively disrupts the foundations upon which social connectedness is (...) built, often creating a profound sense of insecurity. The challenge for carers and healthcare professionals is therefore to find ways of clarifying a concept of agency. It will be worthwhile developing the ability of attuning into ‘what is there’ arising from every corner of the care situation. Understanding and practicing this can strengthen existence and the experience of connectedness and meaning, empowering the person with dementia. It is important to find ways, relational moves, in which carers and healthcare professionals can embed the creativity appearing in mundane everyday situations filled with surplus of meaning, sharing mental landscapes (and embodied relational understanding) with the person living with dementia – seizing and sharing aesthetic moments (verbal and nonverbal) being present together. We argue that carers and healthcare professionals may find this understanding of care useful. This implies looking into a phenomenological‐hermeneutic perspective developing competences as well as practical wisdom understanding and being aware of the creative and innovative possibilities (often preverbal and unnoticed small things) in everyday life of what we, inspired by psychoanalyst Daniel Stern, call sparkling moments of meeting, creating experience with the other that is personally undergone and lived through in the present. (shrink)

Silence in organizations refers to a state in which employees refrain from calling attention to issues at work such as illegal or immoral practices or developments that violate personal, moral, or legal standards. While Morrison and Milliken (Acad Manag Rev 25:706–725, 2000) discussed how organizational silence as a top-down organizational level phenomenon can cause employees to remain silent, a bottom-up perspective—that is, how employee motives contribute to the occurrence and maintenance of silence in organizations—has not yet been given much research (...) attention. In this paper, we argue that this perspective is a meaningful complementation of the existing literature and that it is sensible to conceptualize distinct forms of employee silence (Pinder and Harlos, Research in personnel and human resources management. JAI Press, Greenwich, 2001; van Dyne et al., J Manag Stud 40:1359–1392, 2003). Drawing on past research and theory we conceptualize four forms of employee silence, namely quiescent, acquiescent, prosocial, and opportunistic silence. We present scales to assess the four forms and provide empirical tests for their distinctiveness and patterns of relationships to various correlates and potential antecedents and consequences. (shrink)

Previous reports have demonstrated that the comprehension of sentences describing motion in a particular direction (toward, away, up, or down) is affected by concurrently viewing a stimulus that depicts motion in the same or opposite direction. We report 3 experiments that extend our understanding of the relation between perception and language processing in 2 ways. First, whereas most previous studies of the relation between perception and language processing have focused on visual perception, our data show that sentence processing can be (...) affected by the concurrent processing of auditory stimuli. Second, it is shown that the relation between the processing of auditory stimuli and the processing of sentences depends on whether the sentences are presented in the auditory or visual modality. (shrink)

Zeki and co-workers recently proposed that perception can best be described as locally distributed, asynchronous processes that each create a kind of microconsciousness, which condense into an experienced percept. The present article is aimed at extending this theory to metacognitive feelings. We present evidence that perceptual fluency—the subjective feeling of ease during perceptual processing—is based on speed of processing at different stages of the perceptual process. Specifically, detection of briefly presented stimuli was influenced by figure-ground contrast, but not by symmetry (...) or the font of the stimuli. Conversely, discrimination of these stimuli was influenced by whether they were symmetric and by the font they were presented in , but not by figure-ground contrast. Both tasks however were related with the subjective experience of fluency . We conclude that subjective fluency is the conscious phenomenal correlate of different processing stages in visual perception. (shrink)

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, there emerged a radically new kind of music based on recorded environmental sounds instead of sounds of traditional Western musical instruments. Centered in Paris around the composer, music theorist, engineer, and writer Pierre Schaeffer, this became known as musique concrète because of its use of concrete recorded sound fragments, manifesting a departure from the abstract concepts and representations of Western music notation. Furthermore, the term sound object was used to denote our perceptual images (...) of such fragments. Sound objects and their features became the focus of an extensive research effort on the perception and cognition of music in general, remarkably anticipating topics of more recent music psychology research. This sound object theory makes extensive use of metaphors, often related to motion shapes, something that can provide holistic representations of perceptually salient, but temporally distributed, features in different kinds of music. (shrink)

Little is known about when corporate social responsibility (CSR) leads to a sustainability case (i.e., to improvements in environmental and social performance). Building on various forms of decoupling, we develop a theoretical framework for examining pathways from institutional pressures through CSR management to sustainability performance. To empirically identify such pathways, we apply fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to an extensive dataset from 19 large companies. We discover that different pathways are associated with environmental and social performance (non)improvements, and that pathways (...) to success and failure are for the most part not symmetrical. We identify two pathways to improved environmental performance: an exogenous and an endogenous one. We find two pathways to improved social performance that both involve integrating social responsibility into the core business. Pathways to nonimprovements are multiple, suggesting that failure can occur in a number of ways, while there are only a few pathways to sustainability performance improvements. (shrink)

According to general relativity, we live in a four-dimensional curved universe. Since the human mind cannot visualize those four dimensions, a popular analogy compares the universe to a two-dimensional rubber sheet distorted by massive objects. This analogy is often used when teaching GR to upper secondary and undergraduate physics students. However, physicists and physics educators criticize the analogy for being inaccurate and for introducing conceptual conflicts. Addressing these criticisms, we analyze the rubber sheet analogy through systematic metaphor analysis of textbooks (...) and research literature, and present an empirical analysis of upper secondary school students’ use and understanding of the analogy. Taking a theoretical perspective of embodied cognition allows us to account for the relationship between the experiential and sensory aspects of the metaphor in relation to the abstract nature of spacetime. We employ methods of metaphor and thematic analysis to study written accounts of small groups of 97 students who worked with a collaborative online learning environment as part of their regular physics lessons in five classes in Norway. Students generated conceptual metaphors found in the literature as well as novel ones that led to different conceptions of gravity than those held by experts in the field. Even though most students showed awareness of some limitations of the analogy, we observed a conflict between students’ embodied understanding of gravity and the abstract description of GR. This conflict might add to the common perception of GR being counterintuitive. In making explicit strengths and weaknesses of the rubber sheet analogy and learners’ conceptual difficulties, our results offer guidance for teaching GR. More generally, these findings contribute to the epistemological implications of employing specific scientific metaphors in classrooms. (shrink)

Theoretical Laws and Normative Rules: Kant and Bolzano's Views on Logic'"1" Anita Von Duhn, Genf Does logic instruct us how to think correctly? ...

Foucaults Werk hat nicht nur die Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften entscheidend beeinflusst. Das Handbuch gibt einen systematischen Überblick über Foucaults Leben und Werk. Es stellt die Kontexte dar, aus denen heraus seine Werke entstanden sind und erklärt Grundbegriffe des Foucault‘schen Denkens wie Archiv, Biopolitik, Diskurs, Dispositiv, Genealogie, Körper und Macht. Mit einem umfangreichen Kapitel zur Rezeption in den verschiedenen Disziplinen. Für die 2. Auflage wurde das Handbuch durchgesehen und aktualisiert sowie um neue Artikel zu Foucaults journalistischen und medizingeschichtlichen Arbeiten sowie zu (...) seinen Vorlesungen über das Wahrsprechen und zur Ödipus-Thematik erweitert. Außerdem setzt sich ein Beitrag ausführlich mit dem 2018 posthum erschienenen vierten Band der Geschichte der Sexualität auseinander. (shrink)

When making end-of-life decisions in intensive care units (ICUs), different staff groups have different roles in the decision-making process and may not always assess the situation in the same way. The aim of this study was to examine the challenges Danish nurses, intensivists, and primary physicians experience with end-of-life decisions in ICUs and how these challenges affect the decision-making process. Interviews with nurses, intensivists, and primary physicians were conducted, and data is discussed from an ethical perspective. All three groups found (...) that the main challenges were associated with interdisciplinary collaboration and future perspectives for the patient. Most of these challenges were connected with ethical issues. The challenges included different assessments of treatment potential, changes and postponements of withholding and withdrawing therapy orders, how and when to identify patients’ wishes, and suffering caused by the treatment. To improve end-of-life decision-making in the ICU, these challenges need to be addressed by interdisciplinary teams. (shrink)