Despite tremendous investment to promote gender equity, U.S. public accounting firms continue to be gendered organizations. Our archival study examines gender equity within the partnership of these large firms for a one-year period. We find female partners are clustered in lower prestige client types including investment funds, benefit plans, and single audits, rather than higher prestige public company clients. Second, we consider whether there is gender bias in prestige of client served by female partners who lead public company audits. In (...) these tests of those individuals who have already achieved the partnership and lead public company audits, we find no evidence of bias. This research contributes to the understanding of gender bias in U.S. public accounting firms and helps inform the societal narrative on where women continue to be marginalized even when they have achieved the highest levels in an organization. (shrink)

COVID-19 is a highly contagious infection with no proven treatment. Approximately 2.5% of patients need mechanical ventilation while their body fights the infection.1 Once COVID-19 patients reach the point of critical illness where ventilation is necessary, they tend to deteriorate quickly. During the pandemic, patients with other conditions may also present at the hospital needing emergency ventilation. But ventilation of a COVID-19 patient can last for 2–3 weeks. Accordingly, if all ventilators are in use, there will not be time for (...) patients to ‘queue up’ to wait for those who arrived earlier to recover. Those who need a ventilator will die if they do not receive access to one quickly. Many nations now face the prospect that they failed to prepare appropriately for this foreseen risk of pandemic (another issue worthy of legal analysis) and that their populations will need far more ventilators than the health service can supply. For many weeks, the UK has been anticipating a surge of COVID-19 infections that could leave patients queuing in hospitals for ICU care. Luckily, social distancing has ‘flattened the curve’ and this problem might not arise. There is still a degree of risk, however, and other countries will not be so lucky. At some point, during this pandemic or the next, all countries will need to answer hard questions about whether and when scarce ICU resources (such as ventilators, beds and staff) should be either withheld or withdrawn from certain groups of patients solely for the purpose of providing them to others. Attempts to answer these questions can be found in a wide range of ICU triage protocols and ethical guidance documents, many of which embrace the foundational principle of ‘save the most lives’. Unfortunately, this worthwhile goal has generated many suggestions that could violate the law. This article identifies …. (shrink)

This empirical study examines corporate responses to activist shareholder groups filing social-policy shareholder resolutions. Using resource dependency theory as our conceptual framing, we identify some of the drivers of corporate responses to shareholder activists. This study departs from previous studies by including a fourth possible corporate response, engaging in dialogue. Dialogue, an alternative to shareholder resolutions filed by activists, is a process in which corporations and activist shareholder groups mutually agree to engage in ongoing negotiations to deal with social issues. (...) Based on a unique dataset of resolutions filed by member organizations of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility from 2002 to 2005 and the outcomes of these resolutions, our analysis finds that corporate managers are more likely to engage in dialogue with shareholder activists when the firm is larger, is more responsive to stakeholders, the CEO is the board chair, and the firm has a relatively lower percentage of institutional investors. (shrink)

BackgroundCommunity engagement in research has gained momentum as an approach to improving research, to helping ensure that community concerns are taken into account, and to informing ethical decision-making when research is conducted in contexts of vulnerability. However, guidelines and scholarship regarding community engagement are arguably unsettled, making it difficult to implement and evaluate.DiscussionWe describe normative guidelines on community engagement that have been offered by national and international bodies in the context of HIV-related research, which set the stage for similar work (...) in other health related research. Next, we review the scholarly literature regarding community engagement, outlining the diverse ethical goals ascribed to it. We then discuss practical guidelines that have been issued regarding community engagement. There is a lack of consensus regarding the ethical goals and approaches for community engagement, and an associated lack of indicators and metrics for evaluating success in achieving stated goals. To address these gaps we outline a framework for developing indicators for evaluating the contribution of community engagement to ethical goals in health research.SummaryThere is a critical need to enhance efforts in evaluating community engagement to ensure that the work on the ground reflects the intentions expressed in the guidelines, and to investigate the contribution of specific community engagement practices for making research responsive to community needs and concerns. Evaluation mechanisms should be built into community engagement practices to guide best practices in community engagement and their replication across diverse health research settings. (shrink)

We present a computational model of dialectical argumentation that could serve as a basis for legal reasoning. The legal domain is an instance of a domain in which knowledge is incomplete, uncertain, and inconsistent. Argumentation is well suited for reasoning in such weak theory domains. We model argument both as information structure, i.e., argument units connecting claims with supporting data, and as dialectical process, i.e., an alternating series of moves by opposing sides. Our model includes burden of proof as a (...) key element, indicating what level of support must be achieved by one side to win the argument. Burden of proof acts as move filter, turntaking mechanism, and termination criterion, eventually determining the winner of an argument. Our model has been implemented in a computer program. We demonstrate the model by considering program output for two examples previously discussed in the artificial intelligence and legal reasoning literature. (shrink)

Tulving posited that the capacity to remember is one facet of a more general capacity—autonoetic consciousness. Autonoetic consciousness was proposed to underlie the ability for “mental time travel” both into the past and into the future to envision potential future episodes . The current study examines whether individual differences can predict autonoetic experience. Specifically, the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory was administered to 133 undergraduate students, who also rated phenomenological experiences accompanying autobiographical remembering and episodic future thinking. Scores on two of (...) the five subscales of the ZTPI predicted the degree to which people reported feelings of mentally traveling backward in time and the degree to which they reported re- or pre-experiencing the event, but not ten other rated properties less related to autonoetic consciousness. (shrink)

One of the reasons for the disappearance of beauty in the artistic ideology of the late twentieth century has been the seeming similarity of beauty to certain kinds of kitsch. Beauty has also been associated with flawlessness and with glamour. I will content that the flawless and the glamorous are actually categories of kitsch, and that the dominance of these images in marketing has contributed to our societal tendency to confuse them with beauty. The quests for flawlessness and glamour are (...) both self-sabotaging, a premise on which the marketing of beauty depends. These false paradigms of beauty have ob cured the fact that human beauty manifests an ideal of balance and health that is neither self-conscious nor a consequence of deliberate effort. I will defend the relevance of this ideal to beauty to our personal and cultural well-being. (shrink)

This article is an attempt to develop a measure of ethical sensitivity to racial and gender intolerance that occurs in schools. Acts of intolerance that indicate ethically insensitive behaviors in American schools were identified and tied to existing professional ethical codes developed by school-based professional organizations. The Racial Ethical Sensitivity Test consists of 5 scenarios that portray acts of racial intolerance and ethical insensitivity. Participants viewed 2 videotaped scenarios and then responded to a semistructured interview protocol adapted from Bebeau and (...) Rest. After a 2-week interval, this procedure was repeated. Stability of the REST across time was determined by using the overall test-retest coefficient. Internal as well as interrater consistency was also calculated for each scenario. Overall findings indicate promise for the REST as a reliable measure to assess racial and ethnic sensitivity. (shrink)

Kathleen M. Squadrito - English Philosophy in the Age of Locke - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.2 264-265 Book Review English Philosophy in the Age of Locke M. A. Stewart, editor. English Philosophy in the Age of Locke. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. x + 326. Cloth, $60.00. Volume 3 in the Oxford Studies in the History of Philosophy, Stewart's anthology focuses on the philosophical, religious, and political thought (...) of the seventeenth century. The text includes nine articles. This volume is essential reading to anyone interested in the relationship between metaphysics, religion, and politics. Some articles are new, some previously published and revised. In "The Political Problem of Religion: Hobbes's Reading of the Bible," Paul Dumouchel finds the key to Hobbes's political philosophy in his religious,.. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Throughout the early modern period, the most widely read astronomical textbooks were Johannes de Sacrobosco's De sphaera and the Theorica planetarum, ultimately in the new form introduced by Georg Peurbach. This essay argues that the images in these texts were intended to develop an “intelligent eye.” Students were trained to transform representations of specific heavenly phenomena into moving mental images of the structure of the cosmos. Only by learning the techniques of mental visualization and manipulation could the student “see” (...) in the mind's eye the structure and motions of the cosmos. While anyone could look up at the heavens, only those who had acquired the intelligent eye could comprehend the divinely created order of the universe. Further, the essay demonstrates that the visual program of the Sphaera and Theorica texts played a significant and hitherto unrecognized role in later scientific work. Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler all utilized the same types of images in their own texts to explicate their ideas about the cosmos. (shrink)

In this article I show that although biological and neuropsychological factors enable and constrain the construction of music, culture is implicated on every level at which we can indicate an emotion-music connection. Nevertheless, music encourages an affective sense of human affiliation and security, facilitating feelings of transcultural solidarity.

Whether they realize it or not, most stakeholders in the debate about using animals for research agree on the common goal of seeking an end to research that causes animals harm. The central issues in the controversy are about how much effort should be devoted to that goal and when we might reasonably expect to achieve it. Some progress has already been made: The number of animals used for research is about half what it was in the 1970s, and biomedical (...) research has reached the point where we can reasonably begin to envision a time when it could advance without causing harm to animals. With some effort and aggressive development of new biomedical research technologies, full replacement of animals in harmful research is within our grasp. The goal will not be reached all at once, however, and phasing out invasive research on all nonhuman primates should be the priority. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Death and Dignity: Making Choices and Taking Charge. By Timothy E. Quill.

In this paper l examine the extent to which Locke’s reIigious and poIiticaI ideoIogy might be considered to exempIify values which have Ied to environmentaI deterioration. In the Two Treatises of Governlnent, Locke appears to hold a view of dominion which compromises humanitarian principles for economic gain. He often asserts that man has a right to accumulate property and to use land and animals for comfort and convenience. This right issues from God’s decree that men subdue the Earth and have (...) dominion over every living thing. Although abuse of the environment appears to be justified in Locke’s political works, I argue that there are many passages in this work that cast doubt on such an interpretation. Further, the view of dominion adopted in Locke's educational work is one of responsible stewardship. On the whole, his view stresses man’s duties and obligation towards all creation. (shrink)

Managing the interplay of private information within families creates challenges, especially when the information involves member identity, a complex and emotionally charged issue. Ravelingien and...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:René Girard and the Rhetoric of ConsumptionKathleen M. Vandenberg (bio)The work of René Girard, so productively applied in so many different fields—in theology, in anthropology, in literature, to name a few—has yet to be recognized or applied in the field of rhetorical studies. Yet there exists, I argue, a need precisely for Girard's theories as the over 2000 year-old discipline enters the twenty-first century.Girard's theory of mimetic or triangular (...) desire can be used as a model for understanding persuasion, because it is, among other things, an "expression of a basic set of ideas on... the dynamics of the self and human relations" (1996, vii). Girard's concern is with human relationships and, in a sense, with how individuals in these relationships act rhetorically upon themselves and others. Girard's mimetic theory hinges on the dynamics of imitation and explains how individuals relate through both the conscious and the unconscious sharing of behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs in certain situations. These situations are clearly rhetorical, as can be seen by examining the definition of the "rhetorical situation" set forth by Lloyd Bitzer, in his seminal 1968 article, "The Rhetorical Situation." Bitzer proposes three conditions that must be met for a rhetorical situation to exist: an exigency or imperfection marked by urgency; a rhetorical audience or an audience that can act; and constraints, or elements that have the power to constrain the decision and action needed to modify the exigency (7). In mass-mediated modern rhetoric, I argue that the exigencies exist externally (in the culture) and internally, the audience is both others and self, and the constraints are the alienation, mystification, and desire generated by hierarchies. Twentieth-century rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke advises that "we must often think of rhetoric not in terms of some one particular address, but as a general body of identifications that owe their convincingness much more to trivial repetition and dull daily reënforcement than to exceptional rhetorical skill" (1950, 26). Such is the case with this particular form of rhetoric, which is generated and propagated by mimetic contagion and thus is best more narrowly defined as sociological propaganda, a type of propaganda [End Page 259] theorized by Jacques Ellul in Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (1975).Ellul, the first to distinguish between political propaganda and sociological propaganda, proposes that the latter encompasses social behaviors "much more vast and less certain" than those of political propaganda (1975, 62). These social behaviors permit the penetration of an ideology in a society, a penetration that is achieved through the active participation of the masses. Sociological propaganda, as Ellul describes it, works from within; it is dependent on the individual's willingness and ability to persuade him- or herself and others. Sociological propaganda, Ellul posits, is created when members of a group behave in such a way as to influence the attitudes, actions, and lifestyles of others; often this behavior is unconscious, unintentional, and spontaneous.In these ways, the rhetoric of sociological propaganda operates in a markedly different fashion than more "traditional" rhetoric, which is largely understood to operate as a unilateral transaction in which an individual orator actively, openly, and orally works to move a relatively passive but physically present audience to act in accordance with the orator's own beliefs through a formally delivered speech. In its reliance on the interaction and cooperation of the many rather than the centrality and dominance of one speaker, in its acceptance of unintentional, spontaneous, and unconscious persuasion, in its dependence on the modern mass media, and in the limitless and nebulous nature of its boundaries in time and space, sociological propaganda constitutes a type of rhetoric heretofore insufficiently addressed by rhetorical studies. Although existing perspectives in rhetorical criticism have certainly addressed some aspects of this rhetoric, sociological propaganda is not easily explained with the terminology of traditional rhetorical criticism or easily approached from traditional rhetorical perspectives.This article asserts that the best way to approach and understand such propaganda is through the perspective of René Girard. Approaching this propaganda from a Girardian perspective permits us to look beyond the symbols of sociological propaganda and analyze our own responsibility in rhetorical... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rita Gross as Teacher, Mentor, FriendKathleen M. ErndlI have been asked to speak about the work of Rita Gross from the point of view of someone who was once her student. Not only was I her student, I was one of her very first students. She was my first teacher of religious studies during my first semester of college in the first semester of her first full-time academic position. (...) The year was 1971; the place was New College, a small, alternative liberal arts college in Sarasota, Florida. As the eldest child in the second generation of a working-class immigrant family, I was the first person in my family to pursue higher education. While none of my grandparents had completed high school, both of my parents were high school graduates and my father had risen to a professional level as an engineer through on-the-job training and his own diligence, so my attending college was perhaps the next logical step in achieving the "American dream." However, my choice of college was a bit unusual.New College, as might be expected by its name (though I later discovered was named after a college at Oxford), was new and relatively unknown, lacking a football team and an engineering school, which my parents, with their limited knowledge of higher education, considered essential. But by this time I was somewhat of an educational radical, having been influenced by Angela Davis and Paolo Freire.1 A local newspaper article of the time described New College students as "rich, radical, and hedonistic" (I can only attest to ever having been one of the above). The Underground Guide to the College of Your Choice2 described New College as a place where students taught the classes and where "chicks suffer from underwear famine." While this was somewhat of an overstatement, it was the kind of place where students initiated courses, were largely free from required courses, conducted unusual independent research, came to class barefoot, and sat on the floor. In any case, as the first in my working-class immigrant family to attend college and as an idealist who had chafed against a system that I felt, to paraphrase Henry David Thoreau, allowed schooling to interfere with education, I was excited to be in any college and especially in one with a reputation for experimental modes of learning.When I went to meet my assigned faculty advisor to figure out my schedule and negotiate a "contract" of study, I was told that I had been reassigned to a new faculty member who was "young and full of energy." This, of course, was Rita Gross. Asian religious and cultural traditions place a strong significance on the first meeting with [End Page 57] one's teacher. To be honest, I do not remember much about our first meeting, but I can say in retrospect that it was life changing. After meeting with her, I decided to take her course, Indian Religions I, as well as courses in philosophy, literature, and constitutional law. On my first day of college, my initial plan had been to major in philosophy, with a focus on legal philosophy, with the eventual goal of law school and practicing constitutional, civil rights, or public interest law. But my experience in that Indian Religions I course changed that plan forever. I subsequently took Indian Religions II, then Indian Religious III, and by that time I was hooked. I took several other courses with Rita, including East Asian Religions and a tutorial on Primal Religions. In January of my second year, at Rita's encouragement, I went to Sri Lanka on a study program, doing a project under Rita's direction on lay Buddhist practices. By the time I returned to New College for my third and final year, Rita had already left for the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, but that was not the end of our association. We have stayed in contact for almost forty years now, meeting at the AAR, visiting each other's homes, and talking about each other's work and lives. I have hosted lectures or workshops by Rita at all three institutions where I have taught. I... (shrink)

This article examines how women members of contemporary U.S. racist groups reconcile the male-oriented agendas of organized racism with understandings of themselves and their gendered self-interests. Using life history narratives and in-depth interviews, the author examines how women racial activists construct self-understandings that fit agendas of the racist movement and how they reshape understandings of movement goals to fit their own beliefs and life experiences. This analysis situates the political actions of women racists in rational, if deplorable, understandings of self (...) and society. (shrink)

Exploring the connections between autobiography and postmodernism, this book addresses self-representation in a variety of literatures - Native American, British, Chicana, immigrant, and lesbian, among others - in genres as diverse as poetry, naming, confession, photography, and the manifesto. The essays examine how different writers respond to the culturally specific pressures of genre, how these constraints are negotiated, and what self-representation reveals about the politics of identity.

The market changes sweeping the U.S. health care industry have a distinctive impact on communities that rely on religiously affiliated health care providers. When a sectarian sponsor subsumes multiple providers, its assertion of religious beliefs can preclude the provision of certain health care services to the entire community. In addition, the sectarian provider's refusal to offer certain services may violate state certificates of need, licensing, Medicaid managed care, or even professional liability law. This situation challenges both the provider and the (...) state: the provider seeks adherence to religious law, and the state seeks compliance with its law and citizens access to health care.I propose that the state attempt to ameliorate tensions between civil and religious laws through negotiated accomodation. This concept encourages the sectarian institution to reassess its mission in the current market and to identify alternative avenues of health care delivery that will preserve patients' access to care without excessively diluting religious identity or beliefs. (shrink)

In March 2000, President William Clinton signed Executive Order 13,147, establishing the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine, to develop public policy proposals geared toward maximizing “the benefits to Americans of complementary and alternative medicine.” Disconcertingly, the Commission's charge presumed the safety and efficacy of complementary and alternative medicine. In so doing, it placed the proverbial cart before the horse by setting the Commission on a mission to “address education and training of health care practitioners in CAM; [coordinate] (...) research to increase knowledge about CAM products; [provide] reliable and useful information on CAM to health care professions, and [provide] guidance on the appropriate access to and delivery of CAM.”The Commission's final report, issued in March 2002, similarly skirts the fundamental question of whether evidence exists that CAM interventions are safe or offer sufficient benefit to justify their proliferation. (shrink)

A fundamental aspect of human beings is that they learn. The process of learning and what is learned are impacted by a number of factors, both cognitive and social; that is, humans are boundedly rational. Cognitive and social limitations interact, making it difficult to reason about how to provide information to impact what humans know, believe, and do. Herein, we use a multi‐agent dynamic‐network simulation system, Construct, to conduct such reasoning. In particular, we ask, What media should be used to (...) provide information to most impact what people know, believe, and do, given diverse social structures? All simulated agents are boundedly rational both at the cognitive and social level, and so are subject to factors such as literacy, education, and the breadth of their social network. We find that there is no one most effective intervention; rather, to be effective, messages and the media used to spread the message need to be selected for the population being addressed. Typically, a multimedia campaign is critical. (shrink)

Testosterone fluctuates in response to competitive social interactions, with the direction of change typically depending on factors such as contest outcome. Watching a competition may be sufficient to activate T among fans and others who are invested in the outcome. This study explores the change in T associated with vicarious experiences of competition among combat sport athletes viewing a teammate win or lose and assesses how individual differences in social identification with one’s team relates to these patterns of T reactivity. (...) Twenty-six male combat athletes completed a social identity questionnaire on a neutral day. Later, salivary samples were obtained before and after athletes viewed a video of a teammate engaged in a formal contest. T reactivity to viewing a teammate compete varied among participants in both the magnitude and direction of change, independent of contest outcome. Individual differences in cognitive centrality, a core feature of social identification, showed a strong positive relationship with T reactivity, particularly if their teammate won. Initial findings suggest that dominance-linked androgen responses associated with watching a teammate win a competition might depend on the belief that team membership is central to one’s own identity. These exploratory results in a small sample of combat athletes should be interpreted with caution. Uncovering the role of social group dynamics in influencing T responses to competition is particularly important in light of the evolutionary history of coalitional combat in humans. (shrink)

This book is the first full-scale edition of the so-called Liber spectaculorum by Martial. A comprehensive introduction addresses the role of epigram in commemorating monuments and occasions, the connection between spectacle and imperial panegyric in Martial's oeuvre, characteristics of the collection, possible circumstances of composition and 'publication', transmission of the text, and related issues. Each epigram is followed by an apparatus criticus, an English translation, and a detailed commentary on linguistic, literary, and historical matters, adducing extensive evidence from epigraphy and (...) art as well as literary sources. The book is accompanied by four concordances, five tables, two maps, 30 plates, and an appendix. (shrink)