Cooperatives are facing the challenge to be competitive in the market, without losing their traditional values of mutuality and democracy. To do that, they need to re-construct open and participative dialogue with their employees and members based on more democratic forms of communication and engagement. From this point of view, the measurement and communication of sustainability aspects may allow a dialogue to be mobilized with shareholders and stakeholders without losing the attention on competitive factors. Based on these premises, the article (...) analyses the experience of a 5-year action research project , carried out within Unicoop Tirreno, an Italian consumers' cooperative, and aimed to implement different tools for sustainability accounting and to embrace a more open dialogue with stakeholders, in particular with employees and members. In this process of change, the tools implemented for sustainability accounting played a key role in supporting the cooperative to reinterpret its own values and in stimulating a new and participative management approach. The results indicate a virtuous circle between the management and measurement of cooperative principles and the management and measurement of sustainability issues. (shrink)

Context: Epistemologically, constructivism has reached its goals, particularly by emphasizing the idea of participatory observation, circularity, and the fact that construction is based on experience. However, rather than research, the main occupation of constructivists and second-order cyberneticians seems to lie in making the case for their epistemological idea, which has been exhausted in many aspects. Purpose: To counteract this exhaustion and an increasingly apparent lack of energy, it is argued that constructivism requires a dedicated field of research, a field where (...) it would be possible to test constructivist concepts empirically and thus go beyond mere theoretical discourse. Method: Based on a review of basic constructivist premises and a critical examination of the field of empirical phenomenological research, the article connects their respective findings. Results: The article proposes that empirical research on lived experience requires a constructivist epistemological foundation and might therefore be a logical continuation of constructivist endeavours. In such a way, both fields might benefit considerably. Not only would constructivism acquire an empirical tool for testing its ideas, such a partnership might also provide empirical phenomenology with a more suitable epistemological platform than the realism-based research framework of cognitive science (of which it has become an integral part. The possibilities and problems of introducing empirical research into constructivism are also discussed. Implications: The article presents an opportunity to re-think the role and future of constructivism. It suggests educating a new generation of constructivist researchers whose principal goal would be the attempt to study lived human experience. That could also open a path to the experimental grounding of many constructivist insights. (shrink)

In the most of existing cosmological investigations, the isotropic space–time models have been considered. In the present work, we focus on beyond this limitation and discuss the influence of anisotropy from thermodynamical perspective. The main goal of this study is to discuss the first and the generalized second laws of thermodynamics in an expanding anisotropic inhomogeneous model of the cosmos from the teleparallel gravity perspective, which is filled with the baryonic matter interacting with the dark energy and the cold dark (...) matter by assuming the cosmos as a thermodynamical system, which is bounded by a dynamical horizon. (shrink)

В работе ставится вопрос о роли изобразительного начала в абстрактном искусстве Франции периода после Второй мировой войны. Рассматривая творчество и теоретические суждения ведущих мастеров пейзажной абстракции, ташизма, оп-арта, автор приходит к заключению, что принцип мимесиса был не исключен из их искусства, но переосмыслен: задача правдоподобного воссоздания зримых форм сменилась поиском способов обобщенной передачи процессов и структур внешнего мира. Творчество таких мастеров, как Альберто Джакометти и Никола де Сталь, «вырастивших» фигуративные формы из нефигуративных, показывает, что между двумя системами нет непроходимой границы, (...) но существует множество переходных стадий. Заключительная глава посвящена направлению повествовательной фигуративности и роли абстрагирующих моделей реальности в нем. (shrink)