The success of India's democracy hinges on the pivotal role played by its auxiliary institutions in negotiating major challenges through slow and persistent transformation. However, an objective audit of the performance of these institutions in the recent past would indicate a decline in operations and an acute crisis of corruption. Key institutions responsible for governance have been put under the spotlight by an alert and mobilized civil society, urging immediate measures for ensuring their operational efficiency and integrity. This essay undertakes (...) a critical examination of the present performance and efficiency of major democratic institutions in India, in the light of their prescribed roles and the malaise of corruption that plagues them. It argues that in order to articulate a comprehensive institutional response to the problem, relevant measures of political reform and constant vigil by civil society would prove crucial. The article is divided into six sections; first, a brief outline of the structure and changing nature of the institutional political set-up in India is provided; the second section examines the existing literature on , and the third section highlights the increasing incidence of corruption in India at various politico-administrative tiers. The fourth section delineates the inception and role of anti-corruption institutions in India, signifying the early response to corruption. The fifth section critically reviews the theoretical and statistical evidence of performance-decline in the major institutions at present and gauges the potency of corruption; the sixth section explores the existing and prospective institutional responses for tackling corruption and the final section presents concluding observations. (shrink)

Compliance is a key concept in health care and affects all areas of health care including diabetes. Non-compliance has previously been a label attached to many patients without much thought having been given to the causes of poor compliance. Over the last few decades there has been a large volume of research focusing on compliance that has exposed the multitude of factors affecting compliance. Even the definition is not clear cut and so comparability between studies is not without difficulties. A (...) better understanding of the factors affecting compliance, including the doctor/patient relationship, has allowed the evolution of “concordance”. Concordance views the patient as being the equal of the healthcare provider and as having a right to make informed decisions. In a condition such as diabetes, which has many potential long term complications, it is vital that concordance is embraced in the healthcare system in order to improve care. (shrink)

Religion has in the past, it may be truefully admitted, done more than its share of fostering the spirit of ‘we’ over against ‘they’. Economic and political factors have unfortunately, throughout history, clogged the channels of communication between men of one faith and those of another. The most unhappy aspect of the relation between religion and society has been the way in which the former has fostered the distinction between the insider and the outsider. Typical of this is the fact (...) that most religious communities have a word which describes the religious outsider and the word is never a flattering one. That there should be religious diversity in the first place should occasion no surprise. Diversification is the order of things in the biological realm and we would not expect to find a sudden departure from this, that is, a move towards convergence, in the sphere of religion. But unless diversification is matched with understanding and with communication we face the future at our peril. It is for this reason that the question of inter-religious communication, the ground of its possibility, can be regarded not only as the most pressing of problems for the student of comparative religion but as a matter of pressing urgency for all. (shrink)

Advances in cognitive neuroscience make cosmetic neurology in some form inevitable and will give rise to extremely difficult ethical issuesConsider the following hypothetical case study. A well heeled executive walks into my cognitive neurology clinic because he is concerned that he is becoming forgetful. It turns out that he is going through a difficult divorce and my clinical impression is that his memory problems stem from the stress he is experiencing. I place him on a selective seratonin reuptake inhibitor, sertraline, (...) and in a few weeks he feels better. Around this time his 13 year old daughter has difficulty at school and is diagnosed by the school psychologist as having attention deficit disorder. I place her on adderall, a stimulant combination drug, which seems to help with her behaviour in school. My patient then comes to me because he is experiencing the “tip of the tongue” phenomena more frequently. He is concerned that his word finding difficulty interferes with his ability to function in high level meetings. I suggest we try a cholinesterase inhibitor to see if this helps. I am careful to explain that the Food and Drug Administration does not approve such a use for this medication. He wants to try it and is pleased with the results.A few months later, this patient visits me with his 16 year old son, a talented middle distance runner. His father thinks if he were just a bit better, among the elite high school runners in the state, he would be far more competitive as an applicant for selective colleges. We discuss various options. Because of a recent report that sildenafil, which is used conventionally for male impotence, may improve oxygen carrying capacity, I prescribe this medication. The son does not object.Encouraged by these pharmacologic successes, my patient …. (shrink)

Critiques of the ‘global’ have, in recent years, concerned the alleged implication of cultural dominance and secondly—and more philosophically—discerned therein foundationalism/essentialism. These charges will be examined. I next turn to the bearing of organizational/faculty matters on our theme, drawing on teaching experience in more than one country. The relocation of philosophy cannot but raise questions about how the subject itself is conceived. In the final section I suggest that the original humanist import of philosophical studies needs recovery, with ‘globality’ examined (...) critically not only over space but across time. This would involve not only due appreciation of argument (for no discipline lacks this) but of language, standpoint and attitude. (shrink)

Although the paradigm of problems and their solutions are vastly diverse in business organizations, yet this paper focuses on two specific but important issues relating employee empowerment to their efficiency that are tied to higher attrition rates in some companies that are of much concern to senior managements. The causes are modelled and explained. The causes often relate to faulty and inadequate employee empowerment and motivation systems in place. This paper attempts to address two unique problems associated with workforce learning (...) and organizational empowerment that could be solved using knowledge management approaches. These are: i. What causes high attrition and reduced performance? ii. What changes in organizational learning structures should be implemented to address these problems? A mathematical model has been designed based on which axiomatic inferences have been derived to explain the problems and seek strategic solutions for the same. Our findings suggest that organizations must do more to support and promote employee empowerment by looking categorically into the problem issues that affect overall organizational efficiency. We hope our model successfully helps to elucidate the problem explained insofar in this research by addressing the core issues that define such problem statements. Organizations should strive to develop strategic tools to handle problems of employee attrition that are often the result of lack of oversight, and implementation of poorly executed strategies. (shrink)

How can a manager or an organization refine and enrich its global mindset orientation? A radically different frame of aligning people, strategy and purpose may be through the extension and enrichment of a global mindset rather than strategy or structure. This article explores the concept of global mindset from a new perspective and forwards a number of specific action frames for managers to reflect on. The article contends that the negative effects of contemporary globalization can only be overcome through the (...) enrichment of global vision of managers everywhere. As for applicability, the article argues that mindset development can only contribute to the sustainability of organizations and societies. (shrink)

Description: The book is, so to say, a bouquet in two respects. It is, first, a presentation of academic tributes, in the form of a festschrift, to a well-known Indian philosopher Professor Margaret Chatterjee; and, second, a hand-picked collection of original essays of multifaceted reflection for serious students of philosophy. Areas of study covered are various-metaphilosophy, philosophy or religion, metaphysics, aesthetics, existentialism, and Indian and comparative philosophies; and so are the lands of the philosophers who have contributed to the (...) making of this volume: India, England, Greece, America, Canada, and Japan. The work is a signal product of international cooperation and philosophy-a cause which Professor Chatterjee has been actively pursuing for long and with great success. (shrink)

The Aesthetic Brain takes the reader on a wide-ranging journey addressing fundamental questions about aesthetics and art. Using neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, Chatterjee shows how beauty, pleasure, and art are grounded biologically, and offers explanations for why beauty, pleasure, and art exist at all.

In this paper, we discuss about what and how of data science and data analysis: i.e., the approach and the mechanism that analysts employ while working with data. A Philosophical approach to analysis of data and data science has been undertaken those peeks into the conceptual world of aspects of the epistemology of data science. The paper also highlights the role played by analysts, tools, and specialized techniques that analysts employ in data science to derive insights from data. The discussion (...) demonstrates the complexities associated with data science, and by what mechanism and how organizations and businesses draw insights that constitute the real value of data, and that which lay hidden deep within datasets constituting as a form of resource and asset for the organizations. (shrink)

Data from neuropsychology do not support the idea that the primary visual cortex necessarily displays internal visual images. However, the choice of formats used in human cognition is not restricted to depictive or descriptive representations. Nestled between pictures and propositions, primitive spatial schemas with simple analog features extracted from pictorial scenes may play a subtle but wide role in cognition.

On the philosophy of Aurobindo Ghose, 1872-1950, Indian philosopher.

This article examines what the work of New Delhi-based artist Mithu Sen brings to thinking about being a postcolonial feminist. Using images from Sen's solo exhibit in New Delhi and New York titled Half Full, I theorize on the complexities that proliferate when thinking about postcolonial feminism. Sen's images play with “an” identity to showcase the hybrid and mobile configuration of postcolonial subjectivity. Sen's provocative aesthetic urges us to rethink defining a set of conditions or tenets for postcolonial feminism. Rather, (...) her aesthetic politics propels through humor and provides a prism to constantly reimagine postcolonial feminist subjectivity by urging a consideration of maps that intersect and overlap. (shrink)

Lecturers delivered by the author at Shimla in May 2004.

Biography of a philosopher and scholar from West Bengal, India.

This paper overviews the role of tradition in the structure, processes and behaviour of Chinese work organ izations. The traditional value frameworks combining Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist principles and prac tices had long been the surrogate of a well-defined legal structure in China. Social interaction based on the strong guanxi bonds dominates the managerial culture and such vehicles of social capital development are prerequisites of any substantive partnership building with China. The analysis presented in this overview attempts to explore the (...) reasons for relative underdevelopment of managerial autonomy and innovation, and the predominance of collective face and networking. It is suggested that there are a number of strengths in the Chinese traditions that may be helpful in the emerging managerial transitions, while pointing out areas where breaking with the past may be necessary. This paper signals the importance of more research in Asian management to alleviate the ethnocentric basis of Western-oriented mainstream management. (shrink)

Is there a corporate social work? Do business corporations as a part of their ‘social responsibility’ aim to socially empower the community by enhancing their basic ‘capability’ registers? While the newly acquired critical conscience has made social work ethics self-reflexive and thus interrogative about a lot of concept-metaphors taken for granted in traditional social work discourse, the language of ‘empowerment’ seems to have still bullied this apocalyptic, experimental eye. All the negative effects of power are lost in the blood of (...) positive nonchalance that seems to promise the granting of power to the people people’s empowerment)—as if. Corporate social responsibility leading to social empowerment which we term as—Corporate Social Work —thus is affirmed in more ways than one. This article—instead of an external disavowal—offers through a theoretical and an empirical problematic—an internal unpacking of the concept metaphor ‘empowerment’—where ‘empowerment’, ‘doing empowerment’ and ‘being empowered’ are demonstrated to be completely separate registers awaiting an ethical reckoning. Having completed this separation—however, the article proposes a discourse ethical monitoring of the capability approach where empowerment participates only as a fractured phrase in dispute. (shrink)

The rival claims of religion, philosophy and science as dispensers of light have come to the fore in successive periods of history. Betwixt and between them all is the discipline known as theology, a rational study of the concept of God and attendant concepts connected with theistic belief. The dominant period of the connection between religion and philosophy in the west extends from Neo-Platonic thought to the seventeenth century. Before that for the most part philosophy tried to steer clear of (...) ‘mysteries’, and after that philosophy made strenuous efforts to free itself from religion, and even more, from theology. Secular influences on religious language are legion. I mention only a few: governmental analogies , agricultural analogies , analogies from art , historical approaches of the early Romantic movement , and influences from science . Recent interest in religious language is part of the last of these influences in so far as the desire to find some empirical moorings for various types of discourse is one of the early springs of the analytical movement. This interest is symptomatic of the trend to rethink ontological matters in terms of epistemology, a trend for which Galileo and Kepler bear a considerable responsibility. Earlier interest in religious language, it must be remembered, was deeply rooted in ontological concern. I refer to the skilled use by Catholic theologians of the method of analogia entis . The basis of this method, and it was a method of argument, was specific beliefs concerning the distinction between finite and infinite being and the relation between them. (shrink)

The forms of liberal government that emerged after World War II are in the midst of a profound crisis. In I Am the People, Partha Chatterjee reconsiders the concept of popular sovereignty in order to explain today’s dramatic outburst of movements claiming to speak for “the people.” To uncover the roots of populism, Chatterjee traces the twentieth-century trajectory of the welfare state and neoliberal reforms. Mobilizing ideals of popular sovereignty and the emotional appeal of nationalism, anticolonial movements ushered (...) in a world of nation-states while liberal democracies in Europe guaranteed social rights to their citizens. But as neoliberal techniques shrank the scope of government, politics gave way to technical administration by experts. Once the state could no longer claim an emotional bond with the people, the ruling bloc lost the consent of the governed. To fill the void, a proliferation of populist leaders have mobilized disaffected groups into a battle that they define as the authentic people against entrenched oligarchy. Once politics enters a spiral of competitive populism, Chatterjee cautions, there is no easy return to pristine liberalism. Only a counter-hegemonic social force that challenges global capital and facilitates the equal participation of all peoples in democratic governance can achieve significant transformation. Drawing on thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and Ernesto Laclau and with a particular focus on the history of populism in India, I Am the People is a sweeping, theoretically rich account of the origins of today’s tempests. (shrink)

Presents the ideas of some of the leading moral and political philosophers on this important topic.

Epistemologies and research methods are not free of metaphysics. This is to say that they are both, supported by (or presumed by), and support (or presume) fundamental ontologies. A discussion of the epistemological foundations of "multimethod" research in the social sciences—in as much as such research claims to unearth "causal" relations—therefore cannot avoid the ontological presuppositions or implications of such a discussion. But though there isn’t necessarily a perfect correspondence between ontology, epistemology, and methodology, they do constrain each other. As (...) such it is possible to make methodological choices that are at odds with one’s (implicit) ontology or argue from an ontology that is inconsistent one’s choice of methods.Yet lack of recognition of this fact has hampered methodological discussions in political science, especially with respect to the discussion on the merits of multimethod research. The ontology implicitly accepted in such discussions is "reductionist" and "regularist," that is, one that respectively defines causes in terms of noncausal relations and states of affair and affirms that such noncausal relations are regularities in nature. This article will argue that any attempt to fit "multimethod" research (where "multimethod" signifies some combination of inferential statistics and case studies) within this narrow ontology is destined to fail since such a metaphysics logically cannot accord case studies a necessary or sufficient role in the in the establishment of causal relations. However, there are metaphysical positions within the ambit of an empiricist philosophy of science that can accommodate multiple methods without contradiction. The article discusses two such ontologies and suggests ways in which they might allow the establishment of a coherent epistemological foundation for multimethod research, however, within a decidedly empiricist philosophy of science. (shrink)

This study integrates insights from stakeholder theory and the literature on competitive dynamics and incumbent responses to entry. While research in economics and strategy has examined how market incumbents respond to new entrants, little is known about the heterogeneity in these responses to the entry of a stakeholder-oriented firm; our study addresses this research gap. Findings from a novel, longitudinal dataset of 206 granularly defined pharmaceutical markets in India suggest that stakeholder-oriented firm entry in these markets is associated with an (...) impact on prices and product differentiation with heterogeneous responses from high-end and low-end incumbents. Specifically, entry by a stakeholder-oriented firm results in a reduction in prices and dosage sizes from high-end incumbents, whereas low-end incumbents respond in the opposite direction. (shrink)

Two pronounced features of modern globalization are an emerging global human rights culture and the growing trend toward democratization. In her new book, Carol Gould integrates these two features to construct an interactive approach to the core democratic values of justice and political participation meant for an interconnected global world.