Corporate social responsibility is a recognised and common part of business activity. Some of the regularly cited motives behind CSR are employee morale, recruitment and retention, with employees acknowledged as a key organisational stakeholder. Despite the significance of employees in relation to CSR, relatively few studies have examined their engagement with CSR and the impediments relevant to this engagement. This exploratory case study-based research addresses this paucity of attention, drawing on one to one interviews and observation in a large UK (...) energy company. A diversity of engagement was found, ranging from employees who exhibited detachment from the CSR activities within the company, to those who were fully engaged with the CSR activities, and to others who were content with their own personal, but not organisational, engagement with CSR. A number of organisational context impediments, including poor communication, a perceived weak and low visibility of CSR culture, and lack of strategic alignment of CSR to business and personal objectives, served to explain this diversity of employee engagement. Social exchange theory is applied to help explore the volition that individual employees have towards their engagement with CSR activities, and to consider the implications of an implicit social, rather than explicit economic, contract between an organisation and its employees in their engagement with CSR. (shrink)

This distinction has sometimes been read as purely epistemic, resting not on things, but on our knowledge of them: there is one world, not two, though it may be apprehended in two ways. But this view is patently at odds with the text. Knowledge and opinion are δυνάμεις, "faculties," to be distinguished and defined by their objects, no less than by the state of mind they produce, and Plato clearly states that the fallibility and unclearness of opinion is rooted in (...) the relative unreality of opinables. (shrink)

A moving cultural biography of abolitionist martyr John Brown, by one of the most important African-American intellectuals of the twentieth century. In the history of slavery and its legacy, John Brown looms large as a hero whose deeds partly precipitated the Civil War. As Frederick Douglass wrote: "When John Brown stretched forth his arm... the clash of arms was at hand." DuBois's biography brings Brown stirringly to life and is a neglected classic.

The Sutra of Golden Light. Translated by R. E. Emmerick. Second revised edition, Pali Text Society, Oxford 1990. xvi, 116 pp. £10.00.

The development of virtue ethics in the contemporary philosophical world, as a reaction to various forms of consequentialism, deontology, and moral skepticism, has now brought forth translators determined to offer the wisdom of pre-moderns to contemporary readers. Here is a “small work” of Denis , the “last of the scholastics” and a contemporary of humanists like Ficino and Erasmus, who opened the modern age that is now rapidly closing. Educated in “the way of Thomas Aquinas” at the University of Cologne, (...) the Carthusian cloister allowed him leisure to become a prolific author, often cited by Catholics during the Protestant Reformation.He should be rescued from obscurity, for here he weaves together the vices and virtues in a way that eluded even Aquinas. In the spirit of the age, his audience was the ordinary layman. Denis brought Thomistic materials together with Scripture and the Fathers, using the Neoplatonic circle made famous by his namesake, Dionysius the Areopagite. Book One charts how sin pushes us ever deeper through the seven deadly sins. Then Book Two follows the workings of grace and nature in producing progress in virtue. Especially insightful is the way Denis uses Plotinus to. (shrink)

In 2014, the editorial board of BMC Medical Ethics came together to devise sections for the journal that would give structure to the journal help ensure that authors’ research is matched to the most appropriate editors and help readers to find the research most relevant to them. The editorial board decided to take a practical approach to devising sections that dealt with the challenges of content management. After that, we started thinking more theoretically about how one could go about classifying (...) the field of medical ethics. This editorial elaborates and reflects on the practical approach that we took at the journal, then considers an alternative theoretically derived approach, and reflects on the possibilities, challenges and value of classifying the field more broadly. (shrink)

Deputy Editor Richard Ashcroft introduces four papers on drugs and autonomyIn this symposium we bring together four papers which consider novel approaches to the use and response to what are popularly known as “drugs”. The language available here is not altogether helpful—the drugs discussed have very different pharmacological effects, social acceptability, long and short term psychological effects, medical uses, and legal status.1 Arguably, the way these three drugs are considered as constituting a unified medical field can only be understood as (...) a rather specific social and historical phenomenon, rather than being based on a coherent concept of “drugs”. Nevertheless a major part of international health and foreign policy turns on this social construction, and as doctors, ethicists, or policy makers we are obliged to work within this social reality, even as we criticise its basis.2A central consideration in all four papers is the role …. (shrink)