This timely and topical look at the role of ethics in fieldwork takes into account some of the major issues confronting qualitative researchers. The main purposes of this book are twofold: to promote an understanding of the harmful possibilities of fieldwork; and to provide ways of dealing with ethical problems and dilemmas. To these ends, examples of actual fieldwork are provided that address ethical problems and dilemmas, and posit ways of dealing with them.

Throughout his literary career Walker Percy read and studied the philosophical thought of Charles Sanders Peirce in an attempt to re-present in language the world as Percy knew it. Beginning in 1984 and ending in 1990, the year of his death, Percy corresponded with Kenneth Laine Ketner about the "semiotic" of Peirce. Their letters - honest, instructive, and often filled with down-home humor - record an epistolary friendship of two men both passionately interested in Peirce's theory of signs. This volume (...) of letters provides a rich philosophical perspective for better understanding the fiction and nonfiction of Walker Percy. (shrink)

Republicanism is increasingly attracting more attention from political philosophy. However, a mere hermeneutical approach it is usually used, which tends to neglect the political, social and economic circumstances that shaped this tradition of thought. This article addresses the modern conception of republican freedom with the North American and the French case through the work of two of their most representative figures, Thomas Jefferson and Maximilien Robespierre. The article defends that the political, juridical and economic government – the republican political economy– (...) devised by both, keeps important similarities that the current political philosophy cannot ignore. To illustrate this relationship, it is shown that both thinkers received a deep and similar influence of natural law philosophy and of fiduciary theory when thinking and trying to implement their models of government and their idea of ownership. (shrink)

Este artículo ofrece una aproximación psicoanalítica al Derecho en el contexto de un mercado global como el actual. El propósito es explicar la ruptura entre Derecho, mercado y política, como consecuencia de la globalización económica, y proponer un esquema para pensar su posible articulación. Para explicar la ruptura entre Derecho, mercado y política, se describen tres modos de relación con el Derecho en la evolución de la economía de mercado, en analogía con los modos de relación con la ley edípica (...) en las tres estructuras psíquicas que define Lacan (psicótica, neurótica, perversa); la conclusión es que el modo de relación con el Derecho en el contexto económico actual corresponde a una estructura perversa. Para pensar la posible articulación entre Derecho, mercado y política, se recurre a una analogía con los tres registros de lo psíquico según Lacan -Simbólico, Imaginario, y Real-, y al concepto de sinthome, como solución singular que permite anudar esos tres registros. (shrink)

Renowed historian E.P. Thompson (1924-1993) single-handedly changed the marxist understanding of class and class consciousness in his pivotal book The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Thompson not only took issue with the economic and technological determinism that plagued marxist theory, he also took issue with philosophers — Althusser, Foucault, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, etc. — who variously described history as a process without a subject. Thompson was wary of philosophers. He nonetheless approvingly quotes Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) in his polemical (...) essay The Poverty of Theory (1978). This surprising reference went unnoticed to this day. Following Thompson’s original reference to Merleau-Ponty’s The Structure of Behavior (1942) leads one to a number of observations that the french philosopher made to history, social classes and class counsciousness in works such as Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Sense and Non-Sense (1948) and the Adventures of the Dialectic (1955). Those various observations show that Thompson and Merleau-Ponty shared the same phenomenological understanding of class consciousness. (shrink)

Within cinematic horror, trauma as a concept has often been used as an allegorical strategy to work through collective anxieties. This article on It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014) and Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017) strikes another note. It argues that, by their aesthetic qualities, both films are rendered traumatic in their affective orientation, both toward the cinematic world and toward the spectator. It analyses the two films through trauma as an affective-aesthetic strategy that puts emphasis on the edge of (...) the frame as well as on the offscreen space. This strategy evokes a sinister mood that exists independently of the protagonists, allowing us to meaningfully feel the effects of their trauma as we engage with the film. Especially the use of the offscreen space in both films contributes to the “traumatic mood” of the films, but it also functions to immerse the spectator in the invisible filmic world. In this way, It Follows and Get Out embody trauma as a denial of relief from dread, which we both recognize in the characters' experience, and feel in our own bodies through the effective creation of ever-present threat. (shrink)

The study provides insights on why large Finnish municipalities are engaging in sustainability reporting. The dataset consists of the sustainability disclosures of five large Finnish cities and of a set of interviews conducted with the personnel responsible for composing the sustainability reports in these cities. Preliminary findings suggest that this rising practice is again an example of a fad, arising as the public sector organizations mimic the corporate sector without anyone really pondering whether the municipalities and the public sector as (...) a whole truly need a similar practice the corporations have. We maintain that there are better ways to use a municipality’s scarce resources than imitating the corporate sustainability reporting practices through producing a sustainability report, the main task of which seems to be to exist. (shrink)

Este texto aborda la concepción de la propiedad republicana-jeffersoniana y defiende que el principio político-filosófico que subyace a la misma es el del pacto fiduciario. Para ello se exponen las características de las relaciones fiduciarias diferenciándolas a su vez de las contractuales. Para ilustrar este tipo de relaciones, se abordan dos casos de estudio estrechamente relacionados en el republicanismo de Jefferson: las instituciones políticas y la propiedad. Se pretende así mostrar que su concepción republicana-fiduciaria es la que alimenta el principio (...) de la “utilidad pública” de la propiedad privada presente todavía hoy en el constitucionalismo moderno y democrático. This paper addresses the Jeffersonian-republican conception of property and defends that the political-philosophical principle that underlies it is that of the fiduciary agreement. In order to do so, the characteristics of fiduciary relationships are exposed, differentiating them from the contractual ones. To illustrate this type of relationships, two closely related case studies in Jefferson’s republicanism are addressed: political institutions and property. The aim is thus show that his republican-fiduciary rationale is the one that feeds the principle of eminent domain of private property which is still present in modern and democratic constitutionalism. (shrink)

Drawing from the example of Asian elephant conservation in Laos, this article primarily intends to reveal the elephantocentric vision adopted by mainstream conservation project in direction to the species. In the second part, I will present some ethnographic notes collected among local population who daily live and work with pachyderms. These notes will help in opening up a broader and more ecocentric approach of elephant conservation by highlighting links between biological and cultural diversity. By revealing the cosmo-ecological view of elephants (...) as thought locally, I will then propose an enlarged vision of elephant conservation. (shrink)

There is a longstanding debate in the stakeholder literature as to who and what really counts as the stakeholders of the firm. Likewise, there have been discussions on whether nature should be considered a stakeholder of the firm. However, one seldom encounters any definitions of the key concepts, that is of nature or the natural environment . We seek to contribute to the debate by taking a closer look at what this thing called nature actually is. In addition, we discuss (...) the implications of this conceptual refinement for the stakeholder model. In order to reinforce the status of the natural environment in the stakeholder model, we propose that any visualisation of a stakeholder network should be embedded in the natural environment. (shrink)

The conception of property is usually moulded upon diverting historical and political-philosophical frameworks. The current interest on the commons illustrates these divergences when they come up between a ‘pure’ public and a ‘pure’ private form of ownership. This conceptual triad misleads by conflating private property with an absolute property right while equating public property with a centralised political regime. This article traces the republican conception of property in order to show how it draws a legal and philosophical continuum around different (...) forms of ownership, based on a fiduciary principle underlying the relationship between the sovereign or principal and its agent. Despite modern socialism apparently left aside the question of the commons, the republican-fiduciary rationale was reformulated according to the modern industrial capitalist society. (shrink)

Co-écrit par Chloé Galibert-Laîné et Guillaume Grandjean, l’essai vidéo GeoMarkr (22 minutes, 2022) explore différentes pratiques de l’enquête spatiale médiatisée, des explorations filmiques de Chris Marker au jeu vidéo GeoGuessr. Les deux auteurices ont proposé à Corentin Lê de se joindre, le temps d’un échange, à leurs déambulations théoriques.

This paper intends to explore the topic of consciousness in relation to the domain of the contemporary dream, its narration and interpretation. "Consciousness" involves the experience and interplay of dream, fantasy and "reality." Hence an ethnography of the dreaming subject involves several interlinked domains: the cultural construction of dream symbolism, dream narration, and dream interpretation within and through a group setting. The paper is based on findings from a recent ethnographic study of dreamwork groups in the U.K. Examples from the (...) study will explore how personal identity and consciousness is represented and invented through the production of socially informed imaginative contents in both dreamwork and guided fantasy. Key words: dreamwork, anthropology, metaphor, group therapy. (shrink)

This paper is a first attempt to study the problem of aggregation of individual ordinal probabilistic beliefs in an Arrowian framework. We exhibit some properties an aggregation rule must fulfil; in particular we prove the existence of a “quasi-dictator”.

Holding to the truth of death—death is al - ways most/just [one’s] own—shows an - other kind of cer tainty, more pri mor dial than any cer tainty re gard ing be ings en - coun tered within the world or for mal ob - jects;foritisthecertaintyof be ing-in-the-world.2 Mar tin Heidegger, Be ing and Time..

The popularity of Fair Trade is increasing swiftly in many parts of the World. However, there is still a paucity of research analysing the northern fair trade actors outside the Anglo-American communities. This paper contributes by presenting a qualitative study of how the Finnish World Shop movements’ key actors understand the movement’s role and position in the rapidly changing operating environment. The study depicts the polyphonic nature of this particular democratic social movement and discusses how success, public trust and the (...) importance of different stakeholders become constructed in various ways within it. (shrink)

According to Gérard Genette, the chief function of an authorial preface is to ensure that the text is read properly. In other words, the purpose of the preface is to attract the reader’s attention and to steer him or her toward a particular understanding of the book. A preface, then, aims to get readers to read the book and often on certain terms, i.e., the author’s. As such, the authorial preface of Marx’s Capital (1867) is especially important — it allows (...) us to understand how Marx himself hoped to be understood by his readers. Commentators, whether hostile or sympathetic, usually focus on the postface to the second edition of Marx’s work. We will instead focus on the preface to the first edition, as to uncover Marx’s immediate political aims and ethical concerns. (shrink)

The sharing economy (SE) is a strongly contested idea, both conceptually and politically. This paper first explores multiple existing definitions, emphasizing the challenges in both conceptual and operational terms they usually entail. It is argued that most of the common definitions tend to exacerbate tensions between informativeness and veracity, resulting in the SE becoming a catch-all concept. Alternatively, it is often suggested to operationalize the concept by breaking it down among its main areas, such as consumption, knowledge, production, and finance. (...) However, these kinds of classifications lack logical-formal consistency and substantive validity. The paper then addresses the political-normative debate by briefly presenting the three main existing perspectives on the SE: (i) as a more inclusive form of capitalism, (ii) as the advancement of the neoliberal agenda, and (iii) as a sort of emancipatory economy. The primary aim of this paper, however, is not to advocate for a singular viewpoint or scrutinize any particular author’s theory, but to examine three common errors that the emancipatory conception may easily fall into: (i) overemphasizing the role of communities in economic activity, (ii) attributing an inherent collaborative propensity to individuals, and (iii) understanding markets from an a-institutional and psychological standpoint. The conclusions suggest that to truly realize the emancipatory potential of the SE, the conception should distance itself from standard economic theory and adopt a more institutional approach akin to classical political economy. (shrink)

In this book, Tarja Laine provides insights into how traumatic cinema invites profound affective engagement with the pathology of memory that lies at the heart of trauma. The author reveals that traumatic cinema communicates the inability to process a traumatic event by means of its aesthetic specificity as a time-based medium.

The second German edition of Capital appeared in nine issues, from July 1872 to March 1873. Marx added an afterword in which he hoped to answer his western European critics, whom he felt did not grasp his work. To understand the afterword to the second German edition of Capital, one must take into account both what Marx wrote in his book and what Marx’s British, French, German and Russian critics said about his work between 1867 and 1872.

The study analyses how the corporate rhetoric of sustainability has developed in Finland during 1985-2005. The dataset consisting of the disclosures of four leading Finnish companies has been analyzed through discourse analytic methods. The findings question whether the ever-increasing popularity of sustainability-related concepts actually means that society is moving forward on the road towards sustainability.

But under the requirement of philosophic consistency, and the impact of the perfectly valid reflection that experience is always my experience, and never part of some object independent of me, the world shrinks to the extension of my experience only, and I am left with bundles of my sensations. What are the natural consequences of such an epistemological sophistication?One plausible and natural reaction is what one might call the ‘Indian’ one. It runs roughly as follows: my experience of the world (...) is, alas, only my experience. It is not ‘the real’. Moreover, the world disclosed in my experience is one of misery, precariousness, insecurity, which ends in old age and death and within which no secure, reliable, undeceptive goods can be found. The flux and precariousness which make it so unhappy a place, also make it most ill-suited to be an object of knowledge. — E. Gellner (1974: 114). (shrink)

Charles Sanders Peirce , the most important and influential of the classical American philosophers, is credited as the inventor of the philosophical school of pragmatism. The scope and significance of his work have had a lasting effect not only in several fields of philosophy but also in mathematics, the history and philosophy of science, and the theory of signs, as well as in literary and cultural studies. Largely obscure until after his death, Peirce's life has long been a subject of (...) interest and dispute. Unfortunately, previous biographies often confuse as much as they clarify crucial matters in Peirce's story. Ketner's new biographical project is remarkable not only for its entertaining aspects but also for its illuminating insights into Peirce's life, his thought, and the intellectual milieu in which he worked. (shrink)