The interdisciplinary framework for bringing humanistic management and service research together contained in “Humanistic Management of Social Innovation in Service : An Interdisciplinary Framework” is analyzed in this commentary. The humanistic management framework for social innovation in service that the authors propose is quite invigorating. The authors identify many new future service research opportunities.

Is work as we know it disappearing? And if so why should we care? These questions are explored by Raymond Geuss in this compact but sweeping survey which integrates conceptual analysis, historical reflection, autobiography and social commentary. Geuss explores our concept of work and its origins in industrial production, the incentives and compulsions which societies use to get us to work, and the powerful hold which the work ethic has over so many of us. He also looks at dissatisfaction (...) with work - which is as old as work itself - and at various radical proposals for doing away with it, and at the seemingly irreversible growth of unemployment as a result of mechanisation. His book will interest anyone who wishes to understand the place of work in our world. This new series offers short and personal perspectives by expert thinkers on topics that we all encounter in our everyday lives. (shrink)

There is a world-wide debate at the moment about the appropriate role for the state in modern societies in the light of the world financial crisis. This book provides a comprehensive analysis and critique of Neo-liberal or economic liberal ideas on this issue.

Professor Raymond Wacks breaks down the leading theories of justice and illustrates how present-day challenges, like terrorism and migration, affect our fundamental notions of fairness and democratic freedoms.

When people are asked “Do you have the time?” they can answer in a variety of ways, such as “It is almost 3”, “Yeah, it is quarter past two”, or more precisely as in “It is now 1:43”. We present the results of four experiments that examined people’s real-life answers to questions about the time. Our hypothesis, following previous research findings, was that people strive to make their answers optimally relevant for the addressee, which in many cases allows people to (...) give rounded, and not exact, time responses. Moreover, analyses of the non-numeral words, hesitations, and latencies of people’s verbal responses to time questions reveal important insights into the dynamics of speaking to achieve optimal relevance. People include discourse markers, hesitation marks, like “uh” and “um”, and pauses when answering time questions to maximize the cognitive effects (e.g., a rounded answer is adequate) listeners can infer while minimizing the cognitive effort required to infer these effects. This research provides new empirical evidence on how relevance considerations shape collaborative language use. (shrink)

Over the past 40 years, the sense of place concept has been well-established across a range of applications and settings; however, most theoretical developments have ‘privileged the slow’. Evidence suggests that place attachments and place meanings are slow to evolve, sometimes not matching material or social reality (lag effects), and also tending to inhibit change. Here we present some key blind spots in sense of place scholarship and then suggest how a reconsideration of sense of place as ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ (...) could fill them. By this, we mean how direct and immediate perception-action processes presented in affordance theory (resulting in immediately perceived place meanings) can complement slower forms of social construction presented in sense of place scholarship. Key blind spots are that sense of place scholarship: 1) rarely accounts for sensory or immediately perceived meanings; 2) pays little attention to how place meanings are the joint product of attributes of environmental features and the attributes of the individual; and; 3) assumes that the relationship between place attachment and behaviour is linear and not constituted in dynamic relations among mind, culture and environment.. We show how these blind spots can begin to be addressed by reviewing key insights from affordance theory, and through the presentation of applied examples. We discuss future empirical research directions in terms of: 1) how sense of place is both perceived and socially constructed; 2) whether perceived and socially constructed dimensions of place can relate to one another when perceived meanings become unsituated, and; 3) how place attachment may change over different stages of the life course based upon dynamic relationships between processes of perception-action and social construction. We conclude with insights into how processes of perception-action and social construction could be included in the design and management of urban landscapes. (shrink)

Abstract There has been a strong tendency in economic thought to try to take human wants, desires, and preferences as the basis for deciding how to act. This essay argues that ?needs? constitute a distinct category which cannot be reduced to preference. The reductive strategy is partly connected with a philosophical mistake about the relation between the subjective and the objective. The distinction between needs and wants must be central to any continuing form of human action, but it may also (...) not be understood in such a way as to posit some purely objective (perhaps biological) needs that can be specified independently of people's wishes and desires; nor can those desires be specified outside the context of an account of the various ways in which they arise out of, are embedded in, and are directed to ?objective? features of our world. (shrink)

When speakers utter metaphors, such as "Lawyers are also sharks," they often intend to communicate messages beyond those expressed by the metaphorical meaning of these expressions. For instance, in some circumstances, a speaker may state "Lawyers are also sharks" to strengthen a previous speaker's negative beliefs about lawyers, to add new information about lawyers to listeners to some context, or even to contradict a previous speaker's positive assertions about lawyers. In each case, speaking metaphorically communicates one of these three social (...) messages that are relevant to the ongoing discourse. At the same time, speaking metaphorically may express other social and affective information that is more difficult to convey using non-metaphorical speech, such as "Lawyers are also aggressive." We report the results of three experiments demonstrating that people infer different pragmatic messages from metaphors in varying social situations and that many metaphors can express additional pragmatic and rhetorical meanings beyond those conveyed by non-metaphorical language. These findings demonstrate the importance of trade-offs between cognitive effort and cognitive effects in pragmatic theories of metaphor use and understanding. (shrink)

Selected, expanded, refereed papers from the first international RLA Conference, University of Sydney/ACU, 1994.

A central task of schooling is to cultivate reasonableness in students. In this chapter we show how the teaching of reasonableness can be practiced successfully in secondary schools, using materials from the Western Australian curriculum. The discussion proceeds in four stages. We first defend the claim that the teaching of reasonable is a key aim of schooling. Here we offer an account of reasonableness, which we take to be both a skill and a disposition. Students learn reasonableness through the practice (...) of specific skills such as open and curious questioning, clarifying, and categorizing, and evaluating the merits of each contribution toward the problem or question under consideration. Reasonableness comes about as a joint commitment between the individual and the group to be honest in their views, to take care of those views, and for everyone to recognize that each member is a partial bearer of truth. Secondly, we discuss the pedagogies that cultivate reasonableness. The Philosophical Community of Inquiry is a natural pedagogy for this purpose. This can be supplemented with the thinking tools approach of Cam’s Twenty Thinking Tools or Harvard Project Zero’s Thinking Routines. In addition, we introduce our own two skill-building exercises, the Reasoning Game and the Argument Game. Thirdly, we show how this approach can be applied not just in Philosophy classes, but in the Humanities and Social Sciences. We argue that our approach brings these subjects to life, it develops understanding and reasonableness, and it bumps up student engagement. Fourthly, we discuss the assessment of reasonableness. In this type of learning environment, the way students perform in the philosophical community of inquiry is the focus of assessment. The desirable qualities of being reasonable become the assessment criteria for an on-balanced judgment about the student. (shrink)

This paper provides a model of the transition from hegemonic trade to contemporary (or fair) trade. Hegemonic trade is an instance of the two player game called Bully (Poundstone 1992) and Called Bluff (Snyder and Diesing 1977); contemporary trade is an instance of Prisoner's Dilemma (Krugman and Obstfeld 1991). In this paper, I show that a nation under the thumb of a hegemon, called the conciliatory nation, can induce fair trade. Further, I show that to induce fair trade, the conciliatory (...) nation must not be timied. (shrink)

The most distinctive activities of humankind and the source of its greatest achievements are the scientific investigation of the world and the creation of art. Newton's Sleep examines their complementary roles in contemporary life and defends both against those who assert that science is spiritually empty and inherently dangerous and that art is trivialised by a lack of social mission.