In the current literature, institutional adoption of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) governance standards is mainly understood in a binary sense (adoption versus no adoption), and existing research has hitherto focused on inducements as well as on barriers of related organizational change. However, little is known about often invisible internal adoption patterns relating to institutional entrepreneurship in the field of CSR. At the same time, additional information about these processes is relevant in order to systematically assess the outcomes of institutional entrepreneurship (...) and to differentiate between substantive versus symbolic implementation. In this paper, we contribute a comparative intraorganizational differentiation of institutional adoption processes in the field of CSR, and we distinguish between broad and narrow organizational institutional adoption across different management functions relating to institutions of a similar type. Our study is based on a quantitative survey among members of the United Nations Global Compact Network Germany, as well as on qualitative interviews. We analyze different institutional adoption patterns and derive ten theoretical predictors of diverse institutional adoption choices and thereby inform the literatures on institutional entrepreneurship, CSR governance, and Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives. Besides our theoretical contributions, our findings serve as a source of information for practitioners engaged in CSR governance as they provide new insights into the managerial perception and assessment of different CSR standards and initiatives. (shrink)

In the following article, we propose an analytical framework for the analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Standards based on the paradigmatic nexus of voice and entitlement. We follow the theory of decentration and present the concept of Transnational Norm-Building Networks (TNNs), which — as we argue — comprise a new nexus of voice and entitlement beyond the nation—state level. Furthermore, we apply the analytical framework to the ISO 26000 initiative and the Global Compact. We conclude the article with remarks (...) on the legitimacy and the effectiveness of norms generated by TNNs. Through this, we aim to contribute a new theoretical foundation to the analysis of CSR standards, which enables us to undertake a more differentiated description of TNN structures which have hitherto been ignored in academic literature. Secondly, we will contribute to the practical debate on ISO 26000 and the Global Compact by proposing new perspectives on the conditions of their legitimacy and effectiveness based on the voice-entitlement nexus. (shrink)

Ten years after the Human Genome Project’s completion the life sciences stand in a moment of uncertainty, transition, and contestation. The postgenomic era has seen rapid shifts in research methodology, funding, scientific labor, and disciplinary structures. Postgenomics is transforming our understanding of disease and health, our environment, and the categories of race, class, and gender. At the same time, the gene retains its centrality and power in biological and popular discourse. The contributors to Postgenomics analyze these ruptures and continuities and (...) place them in historical, social, and political context. Postgenomics, they argue, forces a rethinking of the genome itself, and opens new territory for conversations between the social sciences, humanities, and life sciences. Contributors. Russ Altman, Rachel A. Ankeny, Catherine Bliss, John Dupré, Michael Fortun, Evelyn Fox Keller, Sabina Leonelli, Adrian Mackenzie, Margot Moinester, Aaron Panofsky, Sarah S. Richardson, Sara Shostak, Hallam Stevens. (shrink)

According to some authors, emotions can be unconscious when they are unfelt or unnoticed. According to others, emotions are always conscious because they always have a phenomenology. The aim of this paper is to resolve the ongoing debate about the possibility for emotions to be unfelt. To do so, I focus on the notion of “unconscious emotions”. While this notion appears paradoxical, by way of a distinction between two meanings of emotional consciousness I show that it is not so. These (...) meanings are both compatible with the leading views of consciousness and they do not require one to distinguish different senses of “emotions” or “consciousness”. This distinction is helpful to define how emotions can be unconscious. (shrink)

This paper suggests that autistic people relate to themselves via a third-person perspective, an objective and explicit mode of access, while neurotypical people tend to access the different dimensions of their self through a first-person perspective. This approach sheds light on autistic traits involving interactions with others, usage of narratives, sensitivity and interoception, and emotional consciousness. Autistic people seem to access these dimensions through comparatively indirect and effortful processes, while neurotypical development enables a more intuitive sense of self.

Discussion of the role which religious experience can play in warranting theistic belief has received a great deal of attention within contemporary philosophy of religion. By contrast, the relationship between experience and atheistic belief has received relatively little focus. Our aim in this paper is to begin to remedy that neglect. In particular, we focus on the hitherto under-discussed question of whether experiences of God’s absence can provide positive epistemic status for a belief in God’s nonexistence. We argue that there (...) is good reason to accept an epistemic parity between experiences of God’s presence and experiences of God’s absence. (shrink)

I wish more books of philosophy were like this one. It is elegantly written. It is filled with provocative claims and ingenious arguments. It is a really good read, even while it forces us to rethink many of our assumptions about practical reason and practical reasoning, morality and agency.

Background During the pandemic, social and health care professionals operated in ‘crisis conditions’. Some existing rules/protocols were not operational, many services were closed/curtailed, and new ‘blanket’ rules often seemed inappropriate or unfair. These experiences provide fertile ground for exploring the role of virtues in professional life and considering lessons for professional ethics in the future. Research design and aim This article draws on an international qualitative survey conducted online in May 2020, which aimed to explore the ethical challenges experienced by (...) social workers during Covid-19. Participants and research context 607 social workers responded from 54 countries, giving written online responses. This article first summarises previously published findings from the survey regarding the range of ethical challenges experienced, then develops a new analysis of social workers’ accounts of ethically challenging situations from a virtue ethics perspective. This analysis took a narrative ethics approach, treating respondents’ accounts as stories featuring the tellers as moral agents, with implicit or explicit implications for their professional ethical identity and character. The article is illustrated with accounts from the 41 UK respondents, drawing particularly on two case examples. Ethical considerations Ethical approval was gained from Durham University and anonymity was ensured for participants. Findings/results This article explores the nature of the ethical space created during the pandemic showing how practitioners were able to draw more on ‘inner resources’ and professional discretion than usual, displaying virtues such as professional wisdom, care, respectfulness and courage as they took account of the specific contexts of their work, rather than simply adhering to blanket rules. Conclusion Exploring practice through a virtue ethical lens provides valuable lessons for ‘building back better’ in social and health care professions. (shrink)

Attributor contextualism and subject-sensitive invariantism both suggest ways in which our concept of knowledge depends on a context. Both offer approaches that incorporate traditionally non-epistemic elements into our standards for knowledge. But neither can account for the fact that the social role of a subject affects the standards that the subject must meet in order to warrant a knowledge attribution. I illustrate the dependence of the standards for knowledge on the social roles of the knower with three types of examplesand (...) show why neither attributor contextualism nor subject-sensitive invariantism can explain them. I then suggest that subject-sensitive invariantism should be supplemented with insights from virtue epistemology so that it can explain the dependence of the standards of knowledge on social roles. This supplementation of subject-sensitive invariantism helps to solve a persistent problem facing that theory: the case of knowledge attributions made by those in high-stakes contexts about subjects in low-stakes contexts. (shrink)

This article focuses on faculty members’ allocation of time to teaching and research, conceptualizing these—and the mismatch between preferred and actual time allocations—as examples of gender inequality in academic employment. Utilizing data from the 1999 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty, I find that women faculty members prefer to spend a greater percentage of their time on teaching, while men prefer to spend more time on research, although these preferences are themselves constrained; women faculty members spend a greater percentage of their (...) workweek on teaching and a smaller percentage on research than men, gaps that cannot be explained by preferences or educational and institutional attributes; and women faculty members have larger time allocation mismatches than men—that is, their actual time allocations to both teaching and research diverge more from their preferred time allocations than those of men. These findings shed light on how gender inequality is both produced and maintained in this aspect of academic employment and have implications for job satisfaction, productivity, and the recruitment and retention of current and future faculty members, especially women. (shrink)

Academic women experience working in higher education differently to their male counterparts. This article argues that the unequal position of women academics is unethical, irrespective of whether one takes a consequentialist or deontological ethical position. By drawing on a range of international studies, the article explores the reasons for this inequity, suggesting that the ?cult of individual responsibility?, the positioning of women academics as ?other? and the impact of having a family are significant factors. Having identified the reasons why university (...) women experience the system differently, the article then reflects on how the ethical university can move towards bringing about greater equity between male and female colleagues. (shrink)

What role should the expertise of the autistic communities play in shaping the category of autism compared to the role played by science? This question led to a debate about the quantitative importance of science compared to first-person perspectives for the understanding of autism. I see this debate as lying on a false dichotomy between science and activism, according to which only scientific inquiry would reveal the empirical nature of autism, while the discourse of autistic communities would construct a socio-cultural (...) conception of autism. I consider the problems associated with such a dichotomy and show that first-person perspectives should be considered a necessary step in the scientific investigation of autism. (shrink)

“Ambivalence” is the key word in much of this book; “comic” [is the book’s] most obscure and I think absolutely without use value. I don’t know what B[urke] means by “comic,” as a matter of fact. I wonder if he does, and could define it briefly. Readers of Kenneth Burke are well aware of the importance of comedy and its associated cluster of concepts in his work: comic, comic frame, comic attitude, comic corrective. This cluster of terms figures prominently in (...) his 1937 book Attitudes Toward History, most notably in two key passages that scholars turn to time and again. In the first, from the “Poetic Categories” section of the book, Burke explains how different genres serve as guides for how to act in the... (shrink)

The work of Michel Foucault, the French philosopher who was interested in power relationships, has resonated with many nurses who seek a radically analytical view of nursing practice. The purpose of this article is to explore ‘ethics’ through a Foucauldian lens, in a conceptual and methodological sense. The intention is to provide a useful framework that will help researchers critically to explore aspects of nursing practice that relate to the construction of the self, morality and identity, be that nurse or (...) patient related. The fundamentals of the research method of genealogy and the methods of ethics are reviewed. Using an example taken from the sexual health practice area, advice is given on how to structure data collection, incorporate interview data, avoid discourse determinism and measure resistance. (shrink)

It has been consistently demonstrated that fear-relevant images capture attention preferentially over fear-irrelevant images. Current theory suggests that this faster processing could be mediated by an evolved module that allows certain stimulus features to attract attention automatically, prior to the detailed processing of the image. The present research investigated whether simplified images of fear-relevant stimuli would produce interference with target detection in a visual search task. In Experiment 1, silhouettes and degraded silhouettes of fear-relevant animals produced more interference than did (...) the fear-irrelevant images. Experiment 2, compared the effects of fear-relevant and fear-irrelevant distracters and confirmed that the interference produced by fear-relevant distracters was not an effect of novelty. Experiment 3 suggested that fear-relevant stimuli produced interference regardless of whether participants were instructed as to the content of the images. The three experiments indicate that even very simplistic images of fear-relevant animals can divert attention. (shrink)

I denne artikel undersøges kroniske patienters beslutninger om forsøgsdeltagelse og betydningen af deltagerinformation. På baggrund af et års feltarbejde på fire danske forskningsklinikker argumenterer jeg for, at de observerede patienter opererer efter andre logikker, når de tager beslutninger om at deltage i kliniske forsøg, end hvad der antages i den gældende forskningsetiske regulering. Feltarbejdet fulgte et klinisk lægemiddelforsøg og inkluderede observationer af forsøgskonsultationer; interviews med investigatorer, projektsygeplejersker, forsøgsdeltagere og virksomhedsrepræsentanter; samt en mindre spørgeskemaundersøgelse blandt de danske forsøgsdeltagere. Resultaterne indikerer, at (...) for en gruppe af erfarne forsøgsdeltagere handler beslutningerne om forsøgsdeltagelse ikke om forsøget i sig selv, men om at opretholde en nær relation til forskningspersonalet. Disse patienter orienterer sig ikke efter deltagerinformation, men i forhold til tillidsrelationer. De agerer ikke som autonome individer, men oplever, at de er afhængige af sundhedssystemet. De udtrykker altruistiske motiver, men håber samtidig, at forsøgsdeltagelse vil give dem bedre helbredskontrol. For dem er forsøgsdeltagelse blevet en måde at leve med kronisk sygdom. Mulige implikationer af denne situation diskuteres, idet det understreges, at tillidsfulde relationer er en forudsætning både for god behandling og god forskning, men at de tætte relationer samtidig kan bevirke, at patienter bliver mindre kritiske, i forhold til hvilke forsøg de accepterer at deltage i, og at en bevidsthed om forsøgsrelaterede risici fortrænges fra forsøgssituationen.Nøgleord: informeret samtykke, deltagerinformation, deltagermotivation, kliniske forsøg, kronisk sygdom, DanmarkEnglish summary: Informed consent in clinical trials: technicalities, trust and intimate relationshipsThis article explores decisions about clinical trial participation in a group of patients with chronic conditions, focusing especially on motivation for trial participation and trial information. Based on ethnographic research in four Danish hospitals in conjunction with a clinical drug trial, I argue that these patients’ decisions follow logics other than those anticipated in research ethics regulations. I build on observations, interviews with physician-investigators, project nurses, patient-participants and trial sponsors, and a survey of the participants. The results indicate that for a group of experienced trial participants, trial information plays a very limited role because their decisions do not concern the trial per se but the sustainment of a close relationship with the research staff. They do not act as autonomous individuals weighing pros and cons based on the written information they receive. Rather, they feel dependent on the healthcare system and navigate in trust relations. For them, trial participation has become a way of living with chronic disease. I discuss implications of this situation underlining that trustful relationships constitute a precondition for high quality chronic care and research, yet the social dynamics may also lead patients to pay less attention to risks associated with trial participation. (shrink)

Hume claims that judgment is the active device through which beliefs influence emotions. Without such a device, Hume reasons that beliefs and emotions would not in­teract at all, because beliefs are always about ideas while emotions are reactions to events in the world. Judgment is the link between the theoretical and the applied aspects of the human being, and is, if Hume is right, crucial for any system of philosophical counseling to be successful. No client would attempt to modify his (...) or her beliefs, or reflect on the thoughts of philosophers, without some expectation of an emotional payoff. The counseling process hinges on a link between reason and the emotions, but what is the nature of this link? Since judgment is itself (if we are lucky) a primarily rational process, the question of the connection between reason and the emotions seems to be left unanswered. The purpose of this paper is to examine the link between reason and the emotions by taking judgment to be judgment of truth or falsity. Once a belief is deemed to be true by the client, an assessment is made as to how this truth will affect the client’s well being. I argue that this is true even if the client is severely depressed or believes that he/she does not deserve good treatment or good fortune, or seems otherwise unconcerned with his/her well being. If the truth is judged to be a threat to the well being of the client, an emotional reaction ensues. Likewise, if the truth is judged to be a benefit to the client, an emotional reaction will occur. I argue further that even though different truths will be taken as either benefits or threats depending on the client, the ultimate interpretation of the true statement as either benefit or threat will automatically generate an emotional response. If this ontology is correct, then the philosophical counselor will take as his/her primary role 1) a practitioner of epistemology (determining when beliefs are justified and true) and 2) a trainer in interpretation (determining when beliefs are to be interpreted as blessings or threats.). (shrink)

La 4ème de couverture indique : « Le portrait de Dorian Gray, exhibé dès les premières pages du livre de Wilde auquel il donne son titre, fascine d’emblée le lecteur. La lecture proposée ici souligne que ce portrait, pour ainsi dire jeté en pâture, sert d’écran ou de paravent à un autre portrait encore plus séducteur et inquiétant, en général moins remarqué, celui de la mère morte, représentée en bacchante, qui le hante secrètement. Outre L’imposture de la beauté, ce recueil (...) comprend une étude sur Le Moïse de Michel-Ange de Freud : Un autre Moïse, ou la Force de la loi ; deux lectures consacrées à Nietzsche : Nietzsche et Wagner, Nietzsche et Voltaire (Et pourtant elle tremble!) ; Un battu imbattable, à propos de Larmes de clown, du cinéaste Victor Sjöström ainsi que Angoisse et catharsis, sur The Lady Vanishes, d’Alfred Hitchcock. ». (shrink)

Introduction: The humanities enrich and transform the practice of medicine. What remains to be seen, however, is how best to integrate humanities into the medical curriculum to optimize both educational and patient-related outcomes. The present study considers the structure of an innovative student-driven humanities curriculum and seeks to understand its strengths and limitations, as well as make recommendations for improvement. Methods: The Penn State College of Medicine, University Park Regional Campus uses an inquiry-based approach to education, whereby students are responsible (...) for creating learning objectives in four core pillars of exploration: Foundational Science, Clinical Science, Health Systems Science, and Health Humanities. This study explores student-derived humanities learning objectives (HLO) across four years of the curriculum. Results: 420 HLOs met criteria for analysis and were coded as instrumental (developing direct clinical skill), non-instrumental (non-skill based), or both. Of these, 125 (30%) were instrumental, 239 (57%) were non-instrumental, and 56 (13%) were coded as both. Most instrumental HLO centered around communication skills. Non-instrumental HLO most commonly focused on bearing witness and critiquing a particular experience within a social and/or political context. Conclusions: Findings from this study contribute to the development of a humanities curriculum in a student-directed learning program. Non-instrumental HLO lacked a theoretical framework to guide student’s investigations to a deeper level of analysis. Student-directed learning offers many strengths, but can be enhanced through external direction from humanities trained faculty, particularly given that many medical students have a limited humanities background. (shrink)

The study of emotional intelligence and its relationship with the dark triad has emerged as a popular research area. However, the complex nature of the dark triad and EI, including multiple me...

One winter morning, the two of us—both postdoctoral fellows in medical humanities and bioethics—gathered with a handful of reproductive science graduate students in the lab to watch a demonstration on making alginate beads. Due to their three-dimensional nature, the beads are capable of holding ovarian follicles—the beads act as though they were a small ovary. The scientists in the lab have managed to mature the follicles maintained in the beads into eggs, fertilize these eggs, and produce the birth of live (...) mice. This research was begun in an effort to develop a means of gathering ovarian follicles from young human cancer patients before they commence cancer treatment that may result in their infertility, thus .. (shrink)

Based on a reading of Basil’s Ad Adulescentes and the epistles, it is clear that Basil finds moral value in Homer and Hesiod. The trickier issue is to what extent Basil uses Homer and Hesiod in his homilies. It seems that Basil does not abandon his respect for the utility of Hellenic paideia for the Christian in his homilies. Rather, he must approach Homer and Hesiod more gingerly because he fears that his uncultivated audience will have difficulty with reading texts (...) allegorically; at the literal level, Homer and Hesiod can potentially corrupt the unsophisticated listener. What we have in the homilies are less explicit references to Homer and Hesiod—they are the source of literary flourish, the origins of which probably went over the heads of Basil’s audience. As seen above, Basil also uses the poets—when read at the literary level—as counter-examples to Christian conduct. Basil in no way, then ‘lies’ or ‘changes his view’ on Greek paideia, as is oftentimes argued by scholars, but, rather, he adjusts his use of paideia depending on what his audience can handle at any given time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Let’s Start AgainSarah Wood (bio)Nicholas Royle. After Derrida. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1995.Robert Smith. Derrida and Autobiography. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.start... v. i. to shoot, dart, move suddenly forth, or out: to spring up or forward: to strain forward: to break away: to make a sudden or involuntary movement as of surprise or becoming aware: to spring open, out of place, or loose: to begin to move: of a car, (...) engine, etc. to begin to work, to fire, combust: to set forth on a journey, race, career.—v. t. to begin: to set going: to set on foot: to set up: to drive from lair or hiding place: to cause or undergo displacement or loosening of: to startle (obs.): to pour out or shoot.—n. a sudden movement: a sudden involuntary motion of the body: a startled feeling: a spurt: an outburst or fit: a beginning of movement, esp. of a journey, race, or career: a beginning: a setting in motion: a help in or opportunity of beginning: an advantage in being early or ahead: the extent of such advantage in time or distance: a beginning of building work on a new house-site....—Chambers DictionaryAh, did you once see Shelley plain, And did he stop and speak to you And did you speak to him again? How strange it seems and new!But you were living before that, And also you are living after; And the memory I started at— My starting moves your laughter.—Robert Browning, “Memorabilia”The Shelley whose appearance regularly shocks Browning is, of course, a ghost. The bare fact of talking with a ghost is bound to be curious and impressive—enough to make one start. But at the same time it’s not unusual to converse with ghosts, and this generalization can be taken beyond the sphere of literature, beyond the notion of writers struggling with the mighty dead for imaginative priority, as it is conceived in Harold Bloom’s readings of Browning, for instance. Derrida insists that relationship in general requires the spectral: “[w]hat happens between two, and between all the ‘two’s’ one likes, such as between life and death, can only maintain itself with some ghost, can only talk with or about some ghost [s’entretenir de quelque fantôme]” [Derrida, Specters of Marx xviii]. Perhaps, then, what happens in and between the two books reviewed here needs to be approached in terms of ghosts and the psychoanalysis of ghosts, so powerfully thematized by Nicholas Royle. [End Page 4] Both his After Derrida and Robert Smith’s Derrida and Autobiography seek to make contact with something in writing that gets things going and produces breaks, that displaces and startles. Although each volume could still be called a monograph on Derrida, it responds to something other than a corpus.The sense of shock, wonder, and discontinuity that makes the imagined interlocutor in “Memorabilia” laugh illuminates also something playing itself out across the reception of Derrida’s work. Part of that reception could be conceived in familiar terms—the development of a canon of what could be called Derrida commentaries, the establishment of a set of themes readily associated with Derrida studies (charlatanism, the deconstruction of a metaphysics of presence, and so on). Yet to speak with or about ghosts entails having to start reading, listening, and thinking again, in order to broach familiarity anew without innocent recourse to sheer intuition. These books also, despite their scholarly knowledge of the field, share a sense of responsibility to discuss an aspect of writing—hard to ignore in Derrida—that has begun without commentary, that gets commentary started and that subjects the movement of thought to something like fits. Whether these fits are of phobia, laughter, melancholy, delirium, or anger, their irruption marks interesting gaps in thought’s continuity. More than moods, these strange outbursts might be understood better in terms of the theory of metapsychological “phantoms.” The phantom, according to Nicolas Abraham, is “sustained by secreted words, invisible gnomes whose aim is to wreak havoc, from within the unconscious, in the coherence of logical progression” [“Notes on the Phantom” 175]. The phantom is also “alien to the subject... (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: What Is a Woman? “I Am a Viper Pilot” But Aren't Men and Women Different? Crossroads Notes.

With attractive and scantily clad female characters, Zeus as a philandering womanizer, the First Born as a hyper‐masculine war monger, and Hera as a jealous wife blaming other women for her husband's infidelities, Wonder Woman (the New 52 series) confirms some age old stereotypes about men and women. But, Wonder Woman (the New 52) also challenges some traditional gender stereotypes. The end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty‐first century have witnessed great strides in gender equality for, among others, (...) heterosexual women and members of the LGBTQ community. In one of the most important early books in twentieth‐century feminist philosophy, The Second Sex, philosopher and novelist Simone de Beauvoir explores women's inequality to men. The chapter considers the transformation of Hera throughout Wonder Woman (the New 52) as an existential movement from immanence to transcendence. (shrink)