Despite the proliferation of studies on corporate social responsibility (CSR), there is a lack of consensus and a cardinal methodological base for research on the quality of CSR communication. Over the decades, studies in this space have remained conflicting, unintegrated, and sometimes overlapping. Drawing on semiotics—a linguistic-based theoretical and analytical tool, our article explores an alternative perspective to evaluating the quality and reliability of sustainability reports. Our article advances CSR communication research by introducing a theoretical-cum-methodological perspective which provides unique insights (...) into how to evaluate the quality of CSR communication. Particularly, we illustrate the application of our proposed methodology on selected U.K. FTSE 100 companies. Our two-phased analysis employed the Greimas Canonical Narrative Schema and the Semiotic Square of Veridiction in drawing meanings from selected sustainability/csr reports. In addition, we present a distinctive CSR report quality model capable of guiding policy makers and firms in designing sustainability/csr reporting standards. (shrink)

Responsible Management in Africa delivers a rich reservoir of indigenous value-narratives based on a well-balanced philosophical anthropology, enriching global knowledge in the philosophy of management and in business ethics and contributing much-needed insights for leaders around the world to manage enterprise responsibly.

Dans cet essai philosophique articulant une corrélation entre conscience noire universelle, métaphysique, histoire et géopolitique d'un côté, et une dichotomie entre traditionalisme et progressisme de l'autre, Kemi Seba trace le chemin d'une pensée critique permettant à l'homme et à la femme noirs, qu'ils soient d'Afrique, des Caraïbes, d'Asie, du Proche ou du Moyen-Orient, d'Amérique ou d'Océanie, de trouver en eux-mêmes les clefs de leur survie, dans un monde dominé, temporairement, par l'occidentale suprématie."--Page 4 of cover.

African nations are many and diverse, each one of them a multicultural home to philosophies that have enriched human communities over the centuries. Yet, the continent's wisdom remains largely undocumented. Of particular importance are those insights that could serve as stimuli to the more responsible and sustainable management of the global economy and the earth's resources. African philosophies about the way to live a flourishing life are predominantly virtue-oriented. However, narratives of African conceptions of virtue are uncommon. This book therefore (...) helps bridge an important gap in literature. Authors writing from South Africa, Ghana, Egypt, Kenya, Mauritius, Côte D'Ivoire and Nigeria share research on indigenous wisdoms on virtue, displaying a marked consensus about the communitarian nature of African virtue ethics traditions and virtues essential for a flourishing life. They also show how indigenous virtue ethics improve corporate practices. This book will be a launchpad for further studies in Afriethics as well as a medium for sharing rich knowledge with the rest of the world.These chapters form a unique record in ethics for researchers, teachers, students and management practitioners of responsible management and African studies. (shrink)

Managers often face moral decision crossroads that demand self-leadership and require an internal locus of control. This article suggests that the concept of a locus of control should be incorporated into business ethics education in Nigeria, keeping in mind environmental characteristics that inhibit internality, and, based on a qualitative study carried out in Eastern Nigeria, that Rotter's scale be adapted to reduce response bias in this environment. Both incorporation of the concept and adaptation of the scale would be useful in (...) enhancing the ethical reasoning capabilities of future business leaders. (shrink)

Responsibilities towards employees constitute a recognised general subject area in the field of business ethics. Thus, research has been done regarding respecting employees’ rights to fairness in dismissal procedures, to their privacy, to a fair wage, etc. Employee loyalty has also been shown to be very important both in management literature and in legal debate but much less attention has been given to employer loyalty which could be one of the responsibilities of an employer to his or her employee. Rather, (...) some confusion regarding the nature of loyalty has at times led to suggestions that loyalty should be replaced by self-interest. However, scholars who favour this view usually do so in reaction to the one-sidedness of loyalty expectations. This paper proposes that loyalty is a duty that employers also owe their employees, based on the reciprocal nature of certain rights and duties within human relationships and an understanding of psychological contracts. Thus the paper argues that loyalty should be a mutual expectation between the parties rather than unidirectional. In fact, employer loyalty enriches the employers themselves in terms of their human fulfilment, since it is a human virtue, and leads to employee loyalty response, which then impacts the bottom-line.The paper’s content is also important insofar as it could contribute to building ethical duty foundations for employers in developing countries where weak regulatory environments combine with the harshness of the economy to make it an employers’ world and make instances of unfairness towards employees common. (shrink)

Extortion is one of the ways that the formal economy leaks. Like bribery, extortion is not adequately documented because perpetrators are unlikely to record it. Like bribery, it raises the cost of business. It is similar to facilitating payments in that neither seeks something to which the payer is not entitled and so they may seem less harmful than outright bribery . Both are however harmful and lead to worse forms of corruption, . This paper explains how extorters operate and (...) proposes a framework of what characterizes every incident.The paper examines 159 victim narratives of experiences of extortion of fifty-five postgraduate students. In a challenging economy where businesses struggle for profitability, a discussion of money leakages is relevant. Understanding how extortion works will make it easier to recommend anti-extortion mechanisms. The extortion cycle proposed depicts the incidence and spread of corruption through self-perpetuation. Adopting the style of Nielsen the paper concludes by suggesting a bidirectional approach to fighting extortion—one aiming at creating a more enabling environment for ethical behaviour and another at forestalling individual unethical behaviour. (shrink)

Esta lectura de Patriagonia, poemario escrito por la poeta Huichille-chilena, Ivonne Coñuecar, intenta dar cuenta de la estética de tres de sus textos reunidos en esta edición: Catabática, Adiabática y Anabática desde una mirada feminista y queer, interseccional y descolonial. La lectura explora la urdimbre de relacio-nes identitarias no binarias, de territorio y estado-nación, como una serie de revueltas geodésicas y eróticas, geopoéticas y políticas. La hablante poética da cuenta de chispazos y desplazamientos de memoria rupturista a partir de múltiples (...) agenciamientos de poder que abarcan el cuerpo, la familia heteropatriarcal y la centralidad capital del Estado neoliberal. (shrink)

Human Quality Treatment (HQT) is a theoretical approach expressing different ways of dealing with employees within an organization and is embedded in humanistic management tenants of dignity, care, and personal development, seeking to produce morally excellent employees. We build on the theoretical exposition and present a measure of HQT-Scale across several studies including cross-culturally to enhance confidence in our results. Our first study generates the 25 items for the HQT-Scale and provides initial support for the items. We then followed up (...) with a large study of managers (n = 363) from Nigeria in study 2, which confirms the theoretical properties of the five dimensions of HQT and highlights a two-factor construct: HQT Ethically Unacceptable and HQT Ethically Acceptable using a 20-item HQT-Scale. Study 3 with a large sample of New Zealand employees (n = 452) again confirms the nature of the construct and provides construct validity tests. Finally, using time-lagged data, study 4 (n = 308) focuses on New Zealand employees and job attitudes and behaviors, and a well-being outcome. That study not only confirms the theoretically implied effects but also shows the HQT Ethically Acceptable factor mediates the detrimental effects of HQT Ethically Unacceptable. Overall, our four studies provide strong support for the HQT-Scale and highlight important understandings of HQT and humanistic management in the workplace. (shrink)

Organisations are increasingly expected to respond to societal and environmental issues within their supply chains. The nuances of this expectation necessitate the consideration of the disparities in corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices within supply chains. Drawing on the stakeholder theory, this paper examines the meanings and influences on socially responsible purchasing (SRP) in supply chains. It adopts an interpretivist qualitative methodology, relying on data from semi-structured, face-to-face interviews with practitioners from multi-national and indigenous organisations in Nigeria. Our findings present a (...) useful understanding of SRP based on the specific endogenous-level and exogenous-level influences. In particular, we develop an encompassing scope for SRP's meaning, outlining its key components, clarifying its boundaries and highlighting inconsistencies in its description. Our study provides a fresh understanding of SRP, with attendant contributions to the broad literature on CSR, corporate governance and supply chain management. It also offers insights to managers, purchasers, suppliers, financial analysts and policy-makers in embedding SRP. (shrink)

The concept of normal is so familiar that it can be hard to imagine contemporary life without it. Yet the term entered everyday speech only in the mid-twentieth century. Before that, it was solely a scientific term used primarily in medicine to refer to a general state of health and the orderly function of organs. But beginning in the middle of the twentieth century, normal broke out of scientific usage, becoming less precise and coming to mean a balanced condition to (...) be maintained and an ideal to be achieved. In Normality, Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens offer an intellectual and cultural history of what it means to be normal. They explore the history of how communities settle on any one definition of the norm, along the way analyzing a fascinating series of case studies in fields as remote as anatomy, statistics, criminal anthropology, sociology, and eugenics. Cryle and Stephens argue that since the idea of normality is so central to contemporary disability, gender, race, and sexuality studies, scholars in these fields must first have a better understanding of the context for normality. This pioneering book moves beyond binaries to explore for the first time what it does—and doesn’t—mean to be normal. (shrink)

This chapter explores what it can mean to say that culinary products (i.e., recipes and their outputs) are creative. It answers this question by distinguishing between three different kinds of creativity (idle, productive, and super-productive creativity) and two different kinds of creative domains, locked-in and expandable ones. It argues that culinary products can be creative in the three different ways just mentioned and that, accordingly, the creative domain constituted by the culinary arts turns out to be an expandable one.

The modern historian of Greece and Rome often depends for his information on writings whose reliability is no greater, though often much less, than that of the histories, now lost in whole or part, which their authors followed. The quality of these histories can sometimes be detected from the internal evidence of the extant derivative accounts, even when we cannot name the historians with any certainty.

This paper canvasses recent arguments in favor of commercial markets in human transplant kidneys, raising objections to those arguments on grounds of the role of injustice, exploitation, and coercion in compromising the autonomy of those most likely to sell a kidney, namely, the least well off members of society.

Consider the concept combination ‘pet human’. In word association experiments, human subjects produce the associate ‘slave’ in relation to this combination. The striking aspect of this associate is that it is not produced as an associate of ‘pet’, or ‘human’ in isolation. In other words, the associate ‘slave’ seems to be emergent. Such emergent associations sometimes have a creative character and cognitive science is largely silent about how we produce them. Departing from a dimensional model of human conceptual space, this (...) article will explore concept combinations, and will argue that emergent associations are a result of abductive reasoning within conceptual space, that is, below the symbolic level of cognition. A tensor-based approach is used to model concept combinations allowing such combinations to be formalized as interacting quantum systems. Free association norm data is used to motivate the underlying basis of the conceptual space. It is shown by analogy how some concept combinations may behave like quantum-entangled particles. Two methods of analysis were presented for empirically validating the presence of non-separable concept combinations in human cognition. One method is based on quantum theory and another based on comparing a joint probability distribution with another distribution based on a separability assumption using a chi-square goodness-of-fit test. Although these methods were inconclusive in relation to an empirical study of bi-ambiguous concept combinations, avenues for further refinement of these methods are identified. (shrink)

Carruthers (2000; 2005) provides a general defence of reductive representationalism about phenomenal consciousness while critiquing first-order theories of the sort proposed by Baars (1988), Tye (1995), Dennett (2001), and others (thereby motivating a form of higher-order account). The present paper defends first-order theories against that attack.

Studies in Stoicism contains six unpublished and seven republished essays, the latter incorporating additions and changes which Brunt wished to be made. The papers have been integrated and arranged in chronological order by subject matter, with an accessible lecture to the Oxford Philological Society serving as Brunt's own introduction.

In this paper, we discuss an approach to ‘design for wow’ that focuses on the emotions that constitute a wow-experience. In this approach, the eliciting conditions of these emotions are used to define a product character with a high wow-impact. In addition to the approach, a measurable wow-index is introduced. First, a concept of wow is described in which wow is explained as a combination of fascination, pleasant surprise, and desire. The eliciting conditions of these three emotions are examined and (...) combined to a ‘wow-appraisal.’ This concept is applied in the design of a mobile telephone. A combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods was used to formulate concern themes relevant for the wow-appraisal. These themes were used to create a layered product character and a prototype of the final design. An evaluation study demonstrated that the product designed with this approach rated higher on the wow-index than alternative products. (shrink)

We consider the global structure of momentum space Π3, 1 in a field theory which is covariant with respect to the action of global conformal group G. We show that Π3, 1 is a homogeneous space for G which coincides with (S3×S1)/Z2 compact space. The radius of momentum space determines the natural invariant ultraviolet cutoff which may take the form of a Pauli-Vilars form factor in perturbation theory. We demonstrate in the case of the massless λφ4 theory how the conventional (...) ultraviolet divergences which appear in the flat momentum space are regularized in Π3, 1 global momentum space. (shrink)

There has been an increase in recent years in the use of empirical methods in healthcare ethics. Appeals to empirical data cannot answer moral questions, but insights into the knowledge, attitudes, experience, preferences and practice of interested parties can play an important part in the development of healthcare ethics. In particular, while we may establish a general ethical principle to provide explanatory and normative guidance for healthcare professionals, the interpretation and application of such general principles to actual practice still requires (...) interpretation and judgement. And many situations in healthcare practice are complex and may involve a variety of principles, each of which may conflict with the others. Simple surveys or interview studies may not be sufficient if we wish to develop a nuanced approach to ethical practice that can be set out in guidelines, codes or directives. We do not resolve moral questions by plebiscite. In this paper, the authors argue for the use of consensus methods to develop shared understanding of ethical practice, and they argue further for the combination of the Delphi method with the use of vignettes to illustrate the kind of situations that may occur in practice. They develop their argument in part by reference to their experience of using this approach in their recent research. (shrink)

Some arguments, based on the possible spontaneous violation of the cosmological principle (represented by the observed large-scale structures of galaxies), on the Cartan geometry of simple spinors, and on the Fock formulation of hydrogen atom wave equation in momentum space, are presented in favor of the hypothesis that space-time and momentum space should be both conformally compactified and should both originate from the two four-dimensional homogeneous spaces of the conformai group, both isomorphic (S 3 ×S 1)/Z 2 and correlated by (...) conformal inversion, but should not necessarily be identified with them. Within this framework, the possible common origin for the SO(4) symmetry underlying the geometrical structure of the Universe, of Kepler orbits, and of the H atom is discussed. One of the consequences of the proposed hypothesis could be that any quantum field theory should be naturally free from both infrared and ultraviolet divergences. But then physical spaces defined as those where physical phenomena may be best described through some set of fields, could be different from those homogeneous spaces. A simple, exactly soluble, toy model, valid for a two-dimensional spacetime, is presented where the conjectured conformally compactified homogeneous spaces are both isomorphic to (S 1 ×S 1)/Z 2,while the possible physical spaces could be two finite lattices which are dual since Fourier transforms, represented by finite, discrete, sums, may be well defined on them. (shrink)

The central limit theorem has been found to apply to random vectors in complex Hilbert space. This amounts to sufficient reason to study the complex–valued Gaussian, looking for relevance to quantum mechanics. Here we show that the Gaussian, with all terms fully complex, acting as a propagator, leads to Schrödinger’s non-relativistic equation including scalar and vector potentials, assuming only that the norm is conserved. No physical laws need to be postulated a priori. It thereby presents as a process of irregular (...) motion analogous to the real random walk but executed under the rules of the complex number system. There is a standard view that Schrödinger’s equation is deterministic, whereas wavefunction “collapse” is probabilistic —we have now a demonstrated linkage to the central limit theorem, indicating a stochastic picture at the foundation of Schrödinger’s equation itself. It may be an example of Wheeler’s “It from bit” with “No underlying law”. Reasons for the primary role of \ are open to discussion. The present derivation is compared with recent reconstructions of the quantum formalism, which have the aim of rationalizing its obscurities. (shrink)

L’identité juive de Jésus est un fait avéré. Dans le christianisme cependant, l’ignorance de la variété des courants d’idée dans le judaïsme au début de notre ère a conduit certains à placer l’enseignement de Jésus entièrement en marge ou même en dehors du judaïsme et à tirer argument de l’originalité de son message contre son origine juive. De même, certains courants de type monophysite ont sous-estimé, voire nié l’enracinement humain de Jésus et sa « racination » juive . Au sein (...) de milieux « post-chrétiens », à l’antisémitisme latent ou affiché, l’identité juive de Jésus fait scandale. Dans le judaïsme, parler de Jésus reste difficile, et tout messianisme fait peur. Depuis la deuxième moitié du XIXe s., toutefois, des savants juifs ont beaucoup fait pour réintroduire Jésus dans l’histoire du judaïsme. Les autorités de l’Église catholique et d’autres Églises ont rappelé sans détour la judéité de Jésus. L’humanité de Jésus et son enracinement historique ont retrouvé leur place dans la théologie, sans préjudice pour l’intégrité de la foi chrétienne. Il faut mentionner également les recherches sur les origines juives du christianisme. L’affirmation de l’identité juive de Jésus par les chrétiens et par les juifs est l’une des pierres de touche de la vérité des relations et du dialogue entre eux aujourd’hui. (shrink)