This article presents a critical examination of the process of stakeholder dialogue in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) field. It utilises data from a three-year research project into stakeholder dialogue processes to discuss three central themes: first, what is meant by the term ‘dialogue’, both from a theoretical perspective and from its practical application within CSR; second, the challenges of creating effective dialogue; and third, measuring and assessing the potential outcomes of dialogue. In providing a critical overview of these themes, (...) the article examines the nature of organisational learning through stakeholder engagement and dialogue. It questions the motives behind engagement in dialogue and highlights some of the potential challenges for organisational learning posed by opting for a stakeholder dialogue approach. It argues that organisations engaging in stakeholder dialogue must have a clear understanding of the implications of undertaking a dialogue process and have a long-term perspective regarding the outcomes and learning likely to emerge from it. While stakeholder dialogue may produce significant results, it is argued, many of these may be difficult to quantify on a short-term basis. (shrink)

Campaigning activities of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have increased public awareness and concern regarding the alleged unethical and environmentally damaging practices of many major multinational companies. Companies have responded by developing corporate social responsibility strategies to demonstrate their commitment to both the societies within which they function and to the protection of the natural environment. This has often involved a move towards greater transparency in company practice and a desire to engage with stakeholders, often including many of the campaign organisations that (...) have been at the forefront of the criticisms of their activity. This article examines the ways in which stakeholder dialogue has impacted upon the relationships between NGOs and businesses. In doing so, it contributes to the call for more ‘stakeholder-focused’ research in this field (Frooman in Acad Manag Rev 24(2): 191–205, 1999; Steurer in Bus Strategy Environ 15: 15–69 2006). By adopting a stakeholder lens, and focusing more heavily upon the impact on one particular stakeholder community (NGOs) and looking in depth at one form of engagement (stakeholder dialogue), this article examines how experiences of dialogue are strategically transforming interactions between businesses and NGOs. It shows how experiences of stakeholder dialogue have led to transformations in the drivers for engagement, transformations in the processes of engagement and transformations in the terms of engagement. Examining these areas of transformation, the article argues, reveals the interactions at play in framing and shaping the evolving relationships between business and its stakeholders. (shrink)

This article examines the theoretical implications of the changing relationships between NGOs and businesses that have emerged as a response to the evolving agenda around CSR and sustainable development. In particular, it focuses upon examining whether greater engagement from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in this area reflects a process of appropriation and co-optation of protest by the business community. To examine this process, the article considers two forms of appropriation—appropriation of language and appropriation via participation—as a basis for discussion. While co-optation (...) pressures are identified within both areas, the article argues that co-optation is identified almost as an inevitable outcome of engagement without significant consideration of the ability of movements to identify and respond to these processes. In identifying an alternative approach, the article utilises Mouffe’s framework of agonistic pluralism. Mouffe’s framework, it is argued, provides an understanding of the way in which agonistic relationships are emerging between NGOs and businesses while highlighting the continuance of conflict between parties struggling to influence the contested interpretations of responsible business. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Tensions between an idea of philosophy and the practice of the essay are explored in relation to the work of Montaigne in the sixteenth century and Hume in the eighteenth. The comparison between the two lays a basis for thinking about the contrast between philosophy as a way of life and its opposite. The changing and equivocal character of the philosophical essay is further explored with reference to Adorno’s “Essay as Form” and Howard Caygill’s recently published collection, Force and (...) Understanding. (shrink)

Can the institutional systems that prepare Black nurse researchers question the ways their systemic pathways have impacted health equity knowledge development in nursing? We invite our readers to keep this question in mind and engage with our conversation as Black nurse researchers, scholars, educators, and clinicians. The purpose of our conversation, and this article, is to explore the transactional impact of knowledge development pathways and Black faculty retention pathways on the state of health equity knowledge in nursing today. Over a (...) series of conversations, we discuss the research exploitation of communities of color, deficit research funding, knowledge capitalization, the marginalization of diversity as a continuous process, a lack of sociocultural authority, and our thoughts on solutions. We conclude by using the wisdom of a generation to answer our initial question. (shrink)

Individualism: The Cultural Logic of Modernity is an edited collection of sixteen essays on the idea of the modern sovereign individual in the western cultural tradition. Reconsidering the eighteenth-century realist novel, twentieth-century modernism, and underappreciated topics on individualism and literature, this volume provocatively revises and enriches our understanding of individualism as the generative premise of modernity itself.

About the Author James Elkins is E.C. Chadbourne Chair in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His many books include Pictures and Tears, How to Use Your Eyes, and What Painting Is, all published by Routledge. Michael Newman teaches in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is Professor of Art Writing at Goldsmiths College in the University of (...) London. His publications include the books Richard Prince: Untitled (couple) and Jeff Wall, and he is co-editor with Jon Bird of Rewriting Conceptual Art. (shrink)

In recent years, a number of prominent scholars have touted the use of litigation as an effective tool for making public health policy. For example, Stephen Teret and Michael Jacobs have asserted that product liability claims against car makers have played a significant role in reducing automobile-related injuries, Peter Jacobson and Kenneth Warner have argued that litigation against cigarette manufacturers has advanced the cause of tobacco control, and Phil Cook and Jens Ludwig have suggested that lawsuits against the firearms (...) industry can reduce gun violence. Critics have attacked this use of litigation as doing more harm than good to public health and as a misuse of the courts. This debate involves two distinct controversies: one over whether the public health benefits of litigation outweigh its costs and the other over the proper role of courts within our system of government. (shrink)

In Taking Frege at his Word, Joan Weiner proposes a wide-ranging re-thinking of Frege’s philosophical and mathematical projects. She begins by outlining what sh.

This is the first major study of Michel Foucault as a political thinker. Written in clear prose, Foucault and the Political explores the ramifications for political theory of the whole range of Foucault's writing, including materials only recently made available. Jon Simons argues that Foucault's work is animated by a tension between his presentation of modern life as "unbearably heavy" and his temptation to escape its limitations by aiming for "unbearable lightness." Through expositions of Foucault's ideas on power/knowledge, subjectification, governmentality, (...) political rationality and the aesthetics of existence, Simons demonstrates how Foucault resists both extremes. Foucault's thought entails an ethic of permanent resistance, best embodied in radical democracy. Simons relates Foucault's work both to contemporary political thinkers, such as Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor and Jurgen Habermas, as well as to scholars challenging conventional political categories, especially feminist and gay theorists such as Judith Butler. (shrink)

Source attributions based on positive versus negative valence were examined in four experiments. The two sources were individuals who were depicted positively or negatively, and the content of their statements was similarly valenced. When valenced information about the sources was provided after learning the statements, test biases to attribute positive statements to the positive source and negative statements to the negative source were strongly present. Providing the same information prior to learning improved memory, but did not entirely eliminate test biases (...) based on valence. Signal detection analysis suggests that these “halo effect” biases are criterion-based and not memory-based. Therefore, the results are more consistent with descriptions of source-monitoring processes that can benefit from familiarity-based partial information as opposed to descriptions in which source monitoring is primarily recollection-based. (shrink)

Bayesian probability is normally defined over a fixed language or eventspace. But in practice language is susceptible to change, and thequestion naturally arises as to how Bayesian degrees of belief shouldchange as language changes. I argue here that this question poses aserious challenge to Bayesianism. The Bayesian may be able to meet thischallenge however, and I outline a practical method for changing degreesof belief over changes in finite propositional languages.

One of the main problems plaguing neo-logicism is the Bad Company challenge: the need for a well-motivated account of which abstraction principles provide legitimate definitions of mathematical concepts. In this article a solution to the Bad Company challenge is provided, based on the idea that definitions ought to be conservative. Although the standard formulation of conservativeness is not sufficient for acceptability, since there are conservative but pairwise incompatible abstraction principles, a stronger conservativeness condition is sufficient: that the class of acceptable (...) abstraction principles be strictly logically symmetrically class conservative . The article concludes with an examination of which classes of abstraction principles meet this criteria. (shrink)

The job of a leader includes caring for others, or taking responsibility for them. All leaders face the challenge of how to be both ethical and effective in their work. This paper focuses on the requirement that leaders be present to care for their followers in times of crisis. It examines the story of Nero playing his fiddle while Rome burns. This is a tale that has been repeated in various forms by ancient historians and modern writers. The fact that (...) the story gets repeated through the ages tells us about the kind of care that people expect from their leaders. (shrink)

Despite many attempts to achieve an adequate definition of living systems by means of a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, the opinion that such an enterprise is inexorably destined to fail is increasingly gaining support. However, we believe options do not just come down to either having faith in a future success or endorsing skepticism. In this paper, we aim to redirect the discussion of the problem by shifting the focus of attention from strict definitions towards a philosophical framework (...) that allows conceiving of living systems as a natural kind, but whereby natural kinds are not to be defined by fixed necessary and sufficient conditions. We argue for a property-cluster kind approach according to which living systems constitute a natural kind with vague boundaries, capable of changing, and whose members do not need to instantiate every property. We draw from Boyd’s homeostatic property-cluster theory and introduce two modifications, one regarding homeostatic mechanisms and another related to the scientific role of kinds. Thus, our view overcomes some difficulties of Boyd’s theory and we are able to account for the natural kindhood of living things. We also emphasize the most appealing features of our approach for specific research fields and address three objections to this sort of approach. (shrink)

This paper summarizes Grmek's theoretical contribution to history of disease and explores to what extent the longue durée could still be a useful concept in order to better understand past perceptions of, and reactions to, diseases. The case of the medical responses to epidemic disease in pre-industrial Europe is synthetically expounded in order to illustrate this issue.

A project conceiving of political assemblages as anything larger than just an object of intellectual history will have to face a question—what is the potential scope and entailments of the idea of political assemblages outside of the very specific late twentieth-century milieu that it was conceived in? And given the present moment, there is also is much more specific question that should well be taken up: what place any project organized as a political assemblage could have in an era of (...) global capitalist accelerated economic inequalities and anthropocentric warming? Drawing on debates in contemporary social and cultural anthropology about Dumont, hierarchy, actor-network theory, and ontology, this essay... (shrink)