In the December 2006 edition of Harvard Business Review , Michael Porter and Mark Kramer argue that by approaching corporate social responsibility (CSR) based on corporate priorities, strengths and abilities, firms can develop socially and fiscally responsible solutions to current CSR issues, which will provide operational and competitive advantages. We agree that an effective approach to CSR includes a mapping of strategy, risk and opportunity. However, we also caution that the identification of these to the exclusion of societal input (...) may not be to the corporation's advantage. Instead, an investment in both strategic analysis and social capital can pay off from a social and an organizational standpoint. Compared with their larger counterparts, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) frequently have stronger relationships with their internal and external stakeholders that foster the development of social capital. As such, we believe that the sector offers a unique opportunity to identify additional models and frameworks in order to approach a strategic CSR model as espoused by Porter and Kramer. This paper explores a case study of one Canadian SME that uses a community development framework called Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) for its CSR programming. Because ABCD relies heavily on the development and maintenance of social capital and can be utilized to attain set objectives, we propose that it provides a supplementary framework through which the arguments of Porter and Kramer can be expanded. In applying the ABCD framework for CSR, we can begin to establish a programme that supports strategy, integrates employees and stakeholders towards a common vision, and creates unique and sustainable alternatives towards the resolution of social and corporate goals. (shrink)

ABSTRACT William Blake's poem Jerusalem, like all Perennial utopias, achieves a dialectical synthesis of the ideal and the actual through the narrative focalization of a religious experience at the level of character, one that is at once transhistorical and universal. By reading the poem through the lens of the Perennial paradigm, we discover that the temporal aspects of Jerusalem are intimately tied to the religious dimensions of Blake's utopian vision. In addition to giving us a new way to understand the (...) well-documented distinctiveness of Blake's religious message, the Perennial paradigm shows Blake's soteriology in Jerusalem to be utopian rather than salvationist. Because of the ultimately subjective nature of apprehension of the Divine Vision, Blake's utopian thought is not “clearly a forward-directed anticipatory and visionary concept,” as Magnus Ankarsjö has recently argued. Blake does not rally the reader towards some “ensuing peaceful millennium” but rather to find enlightenment in the eternal moment. In light of Blake's suspicion of ratiocination, combined with his deliberate use of narrative focalization of Albion's religious vision, reading Jerusalem as a Rational utopia grounded in Judeo-Christian of notions of Apocalypse is to miss Blake's core religious message. (shrink)

Sampson’s hypothesis that the entry of Western society into a post-modern era of “globalization” will necessitate a change in the conceptualization of the person is discussed in light of relevant group process research and current world events. While it does not seem likely that any fundamental change in the theory of the person will occur, it is plausible that the present form of individualism will adapt to the conditions of this new era. 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

Rousseau, I argue, held both the belief that humans are not naturally corrupt and the belief that humans do inevitably corrupt themselves. I explore these two outlooks by locating Rousseau at the crossroads of Enlightenment optimism and Augustinian pessimism -- a juncture from which Rousseau could remind us of our responsibility for ourselves and our powerlessness to transform ourselves radically. In opposition to the standard interpretations of Rousseau, I show that Rousseau held that human wickedness springs not solely from social (...) structures but from the human breast. Lodged within the human heart is a natural, fallen condition that makes our failures empirically inevitable, yet not ontologically necessary. (shrink)

A tension between the professions' pursuit of autonomy and the public's demand for accountability has led to the development of codes of ethics as both a foundation and guide for professional conduct in the face of morally ambiguous situations. The profession as an institution serves as a normative reference group for individual practitioners and through a code of ethics clarifies, for both its members and outsiders, the norms that ought to govern professional behavior. Three types of codes can be identified (...) — aspirational, educational and regulatory. All codes serve multiple interests and, as a consequence, perform many functions, eight of which are discussed. The process of developing a code of ethics is assessed because of the role it plays in gaining consensus on professional values and ethical norms. After discussing some of the weaknesses in current approaches to professional self-regulation, several new private and public initiatives are proposed. (shrink)

The study examines employee, managerial, and ethics officer perceptions regarding their companies codes of ethics. The study moves beyond examining the mere existence of a code of ethics to consider the role that code content and code process (i.e. creation, implementation, and administration) might play with respect to the effectiveness of codes in influencing behavior. Fifty-seven in-depth, semi-structured interviews of employees, managers, and ethics officers were conducted at four large Canadian companies. The factors viewed by respondents to be important with (...) respect to code effectiveness include: provisions of examples; readability; tone; relevance; realism; senior management support; training; reinforcement; living up to standards; reporting requirement; anonymous phone line; communicating violations; and enforcement. The factors found to be potentially important include: justification for provisions; employee involvement; and sign-off requirements. Factors found not to be important include: objectives for the code; prior distribution; testing; and relating ones performance review to compliance with the code. (shrink)

Political sociologists interested in corporate power have focused increasingly on the extent to which the business community is cohesive. Studies of cohesion, however, frequently contain either no definition or operational definitions with little theoretical rationale. This paper examines the uses of the term cohesion in the power structure literature as well as in classical and contemporary sociological theory. I argue that: (1) cohesion is most appropriately defined as an objective characteristic of a social structure; (2) to understand a group's power, (...) we should focus on the extent to which its members behave similarly; and (3) the concept of structural equivalence may be as likely to capture the processes of interest to power structure researchers as the concept of cohesion. Findings from a study of corporate political behavior are presented to illustrate this argument. (shrink)

Preface: help! my brainchild's been kidnapped! -- Intellectual misconduct: backwards, forward, and sideways -- The world of scholarship: rituals and rewards, norms and departures -- Structural and organizational causes of scholarly misconduct -- Cultural causes of scholarly misconduct -- Individual and situational causes of scholarly misconduct -- Scholarly misconduct as crime -- Criminological theory and scholarly crime -- Implications for theory and research -- Preventing and controlling scholarly crime -- Afterword: against all odds, a code is born.

[ I ] Introduction: Paradigms, Theism, and the Parity Thesis Few claims are more controversial than that beliefs about God are rational. ...

In 2003, Ruth Faden and eighteen other colleagues argued that a.

There appears to be an implicit assumption by those connected with the ethical investment movement (e.g., ethical investment firms, individual investors, social investment organizations, academia, and the media), that ethical investment is in fact ethical. This paper will attempt to challenge the notion that the ethical mutual fund industry, as currently taking place, is acting in an ethical manner. Ethical issues such as the transparency of the funds and advertising are discussed. Ethical mutual fund screens such as tobacco, alcohol, gambling, (...) and the military are preliminarily examined to better determine whether they can actually be defined as "ethical" screens as opposed to merely social, political, or religious screens. A code of ethics for ethical investment is constructed by which ethical mutual fund firms can be audited for ethical compliance. (shrink)

When it comes to the establishment of an ethical corporate culture, there appear to be at least two inter-related foundational requirements: (1) the existence of an explicit set of core ethical values; and (2) the presence of ethical leadership, i.e., an ethical ‘tone at the top.’ Some companies appear, however, to have been more successful than others when it comes to establishing an appropriate ‘tone at the top’, i.e., leaders who behave according to an explicit set of core ethical values. (...) Building on previous values-based leadership research, this study examines the process of one Canadian-based firm’s initial efforts, following a series of embarrassing scandals and negative publicity, to inculcate values-based leadership via a set of core ethical values. (shrink)

The Beauty of Souls dialogues with scriptural, theological, and philosophical interlocutors to illuminate Marilynne Robinson's unique vision. It shows that Robinson's fiction does more than simply display and evoke beauty; it offers a philosophical-theological framework to discover and express the beauty of our own souls.

A basic thrust behind Alvin Plantinga's position that belief in God is properly basic is an analogy between certain non-religious beliefs such as ‘I see a tree’ and theistic beliefs such as ‘God made this flower’. Each kind of belief is justified for a believer, argues Plantinga, when she finds herself in a certain set of conditions. Richard Grigg challenges this claim by arguing that while the non-religious beliefs are confirmed, beliefs about God are not. I wish to explore this (...) challenge, clarify it and suggest that on one understanding it is irrelevant and on another it is false. (shrink)

What is the relation between democracy and second nature? What, that is, is the relation between a form of government that places a premium on a people shaping their shared destiny and a people who have been shaped by their past inheritance—an assortment of traditions, customs, perspectives, and practices? Does democracy fundamentally seek to escape custom and practice—the oppressive yoke of tradition—or does it, in fact, depend on a cultural inheritance, a second nature?In many standard accounts, Romanticism frees itself from (...) the encumbrance of tradition and discipline and thereby soars, unshackled, to the lofty heights of subjective expression, unrestrained imagination, and self-creation.1 In this view... (shrink)

The article by Wiggins and Wilbanks in this issue (2019) provides an important overview of the some of the forms and challenges of citizen involvement in health and biomedical research. Many such r...

Rumelhart and McClelland's chapter about learning the past tense created a degree of controversy extraordinary even in the adversarial culture of modern science. It also stimulated a vast amount of research that advanced the understanding of the past tense, inflectional morphology in English and other languages, the nature of linguistic representations, relations between language and other phenomena such as reading and object recognition, the properties of artificial neural networks, and other topics. We examine the impact of the Rumelhart and McClelland (...) model with the benefit of 25 years of hindsight. It is not clear who “won” the debate. It is clear, however, that the core ideas that the model instantiated have been assimilated into many areas in the study of language, changing the focus of research from abstract characterizations of linguistic competence to an emphasis on the role of the statistical structure of language in acquisition and processing. (shrink)

Along with concerns about the deleterious effects of politically driven government intervention on science are the intrusion of private sector interests into the conduct of research and the reporting of its results. Scientists are generally unprepared for the challenges posed by private interests seeking to advance their economic, political, or ideological agendas. They must educate and prepare themselves for assaults on scientific freedom, not because it is a legal right, but rather because social progress depends on it.

Can or should God be considered a managerial stakeholder? While at first glance such a proposition might seem beyond the norms of stakeholder management theory or traditional management practice, further investigation suggests that there might be both theoretical and practical support for such a notion. This paper will make the argument that God both is and should be considered a managerial stakeholder for those businesspeople and business firms that accept that God exists and can affect the world. In doing so, (...) part one of the paper first discusses the growth of religion and spirituality within the business and academic communities. Part two raises several arguments based on stakeholder theory and business reality to support the notion of God as a managerial stakeholder. Part three addresses the arguments against God as a managerial stakeholder. Part four discusses the managerial implications of considering God as a managerial stakeholder. The paper concludes with its limitations. (shrink)