: This paper examines the ethical status of animals and nature within the thought of Mary Whiton Calkins. Though Calkins held that her self-psychology and absolute personalistic idealism were compatible in many ways, the two schools of thought offer different conceptions of personhood with respect to animals and nature. On the one hand, Calkins's self-psychology classified animals and nature as non-persons, due to the fact that self-psychology viewed animals and nature as physical entities bereft of the psychical qualities necessary for (...) personhood. On the other hand, Calkins's absolute personalistic idealism classified animals and nature as persons, due to the absolute personalistic idealist understanding of the universe as ultimately mental and personal. Because Calkins's ethics requires the ethical individual to will for the benefit of all human beings, an ethics that adopts Calkins's psychological conception of personhood promotes an anthropocentrism that views animals and nature as possessing merely instrumental value, while an ethics that adopts Calkins's philosophical conception of personhood views animals and nature as possessing intrinsic value. (shrink)

Political philosopher Noelle McAfee proposes a powerful new political theory for our post-9/11 world, in which an old pathology-the repetition compulsion-has manifested itself in a seemingly endless war on terror. McAfee argues that the quintessentially human desire to participate in a world with others is the key to understanding the public sphere and to creating a more democratic society, a world that all members can have a hand in shaping. But when some are effectively denied this participation, whether through (...) trauma or terror, instead of democratic politics, there arises a political unconscious, an effect of desires unarticulated, failures to sublimate, voices kept silent, and repression reenacted. Not only is this condition undemocratic and unjust, it may lead to further trauma. Unless its troubles are worked through, a political community risks continual repetition and even self-destruction. McAfee deftly weaves together her experience as an observer of democratic life with an array of intellectual schemas, from poststructural psychoanalysis to Rawlsian and Habermasian democratic theories, as well as semiotics, civic republicanism, and American pragmatism. She begins with an analysis of the traumatic effects of silencing members of a political community. Then she explores the potential of deliberative dialogue and other "talking cures" and public testimonies, such as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to help societies work through, rather than continually act out, their conflicts. _Democracy and the Political Unconscious_ is rich in theoretical insights, but it is also grounded in the practical problems of those who are trying to process the traumas of oppression, terror, and brutality and create more decent and democratic societies. Drawing on a breathtaking range of theoretical frameworks and empirical observations, _Democracy and the Political Unconscious_ charts a course for democratic transformation in a world sorely lacking in democratic practice. (shrink)

Tae Wan Kim, John Hooker, and Thomas Donaldson make an attempt, in recent articles, to solve the alignment problem. As they define the alignment problem, it is the issue of how to give AI systems moral intelligence. They contend that one might program machines with a version of Kantian ethics cast in deontic modal logic. On their view, machines can be aligned with human values if such machines obey principles of universalization and autonomy, as well as a deontic utilitarian principle. (...) Programming machines to do so might be useful, in their view, for applications such as future autonomous vehicles. Their proposal draws both on traditional logic-based and contemporary connectionist approaches, to fuse factual information with normative principles. I will argue that this approach makes demands of machines that go beyond what is currently feasible, and may extend past the limits of the possible for AI. I also argue that a deontological ethics for machines should place greater stress on the formula of humanity of the Kantian categorical imperative. On this principle, one ought never treat a person as a mere means. Recognition of what makes a person a person requires ethical insight. Similar insight is needed to tell treatment as a means from treatment as a mere means. The resources in Kim, Hooker, and Donaldson’s approach is insufficient for this reason. Hesitation regarding deployment of autonomous machines is warranted in light of these alignment concerns. (shrink)

Despite its cultural prominence, shaming has been neglected in moral philosophy. I develop an overdue account of shaming, which distinguishes it from both blaming and the mere production of shame. I distinguish between two kinds of shaming. Agential shaming is a form of blaming. It involves holding an individual morally responsible for some wrongdoing or flaw by expressing a negative reactive attitude towards her and inviting an audience to join in. Non-agential shaming also involves negatively evaluating a person and inviting (...) an audience to join in. Yet it is not a form of blaming, because the shamer does not hold the target morally responsible for anything. For example, we non-agentially shame people for their body shapes, for having periods, or for being victims of rape. Non-agential shaming involves the expression of an emotionally toned objective attitude, like disgust. While agential shaming enforces social norms, non-agential shaming enforces social standards. (shrink)

This essay is a response to Robert Scharff’s “Before Empirical Turns and Transcendental Inquiry: pre-philosophical Considerations”. Scharff digs beneath the empirico-transcendental debate between Ihde and Stiegler in order to critique this debate’s Cartesian presuppositions. He uses the work of Nietzsche and the early Heidegger to further his critique. There is much to like in Scharff’s rich and intricate analytic interpretation but this is also the crux of my critique. The detour into Nietzsche’s and the early Heidegger’s work is ultimately unnecessary. (...) If Scharff looks closer, he will see that Feenberg’s revised theory of instrumentalization already accomplishes the return to technical experience and the critique of Cartesian techno scientific rationality that Scharff desires. (shrink)

To describe phenomena that occur at different time scales, computational models of the brain must incorporate different levels of abstraction. At time scales of approximately 1/3 of a second, orienting movements of the body play a crucial role in cognition and form a useful computational level embodiment level,” the constraints of the physical system determine the nature of cognitive operations. The key synergy is that at time scales of about 1/3 of a second, the natural sequentiality of body movements can (...) be matched to the natural computational economies of sequential decision systems through a system of implicit reference called deictic in which pointing movements are used to bind objects in the world to cognitive programs. This target article focuses on how deictic bindings make it possible to perform natural tasks. Deictic computation provides a mechanism for representing the essential features that link external sensory data with internal cognitive programs and motor actions. One of the central features of cognition, working memory, can be related to moment-by-moment dispositions of body features such as eye movements and hand movements. (shrink)

In this paper, I endorse the idea that age is a defensible criterion for eligibility to vote, where age is itself a proxy for having a broad set of cognitive and motivational capacities. Given the current (and defeasible) state of developmental research, I suggest that the age of 16 is a good proxy for such capacities. In defending this thesis, I consider alternative and narrower capacity conditions while drawing on insights from a parallel debate about capacities and age requirements in (...) the criminal law. I also argue that the expansive capacity condition I adopt satisfies a number of powerful and complementary rationales for voting eligibility, and conclude by addressing challenging arguments that, on the one hand, capacity should not underlie voting eligibility in the first place, and, on the other, that capacity should do so directly and not via any sort of proxy, including age. (shrink)

I examine experiences of married couples to better understand whether economic shifts that push couples into gender-atypical work/family arrangements influence gender inequality. I draw on in-depth interviews conducted in 2008 with stay-at-home husbands and their wives in 21 married-couple families with children. I find that the decision to have a father stay home is heavily influenced by economic conditions, suggesting that men’s increased job instability and shifts in the relative employment conditions of husbands and wives push some men into at-home (...) fatherhood. However, this shift in family arrangements can promote change toward greater gender equality even in couples that initially hold entrenched, gendered beliefs. The data indicate that at-home fathers come to value their increased involvement in children’s care in ways that reduce gender differences in parenting and that have the potential to translate into institutional change, particularly when they reenter the labor force. Furthermore, at-home father arrangements generally appear to provide increased support for women’s employment and promote changes in women’s work behavior that may reduce inequities that stem from traditionally gendered divisions in work/family responsibilities. (shrink)

Many philosophers working on virtue theory have resisted the idea that the virtues are practical skills, apparently following Aristotle’s resistance to that idea. Bucking the trend, Matt Stichter defends a strong version of this idea in The Skillfulness of Virtue by marshaling a wide range of conceptual and empirical arguments to argue that the moral virtues are robust skills involving the cognitive-conative unification of Aristotelian phronêsis (‘practical intelligence’). Here I argue that Aristotle overlooks a more delimited kind of practical intelligence, (...) strongly analogous to his own account of phronêsis, that unifies complex forms of expertise such as medicine or even high-level sports. Insofar as the skill model of virtue is compelling, it must draw on a robust conception of practical expertise (technê) like the one developed here rather than the ordinary, anemic conception of practical skills. (shrink)

Animate vision systems have gaze control mechanisms that can actively position the camera coordinate system in response to physical stimuli. Compared to passive systems, animate systems show that visual computation can be vastly less expensive when considered in the larger context of behavior. The most important visual behavior is the ability to control the direction of gaze. This allows the use of very low resolution imaging that has a high virtual resolution. Using such a system in a controlled way provides (...) additional constraints that dramatically simplify the computations of early vision. Another important behavior is the way the environment “behaves‘. Animate systems under real-time constraints can further reduce their computational burden by using environmental cues that are perspicuous in the local context. A third source of economy is introduced when behaviors are learned. Because errors are rarely fatal, systems using learning algorithms can amortize computational cost over extended periods. Further economies can be achieved when the learning system uses indexical reference, which is a form of dynamic variable binding. Animate vision is a natural way of implementing this dynamic binding. (shrink)

The cerebral cortex is a rich and diverse structure that is the basis of intelligent behavior. One of the deepest mysteries of the function of cortex is that neural processing times are only about one hundred times as fast as the fastest response times for complex behavior. At the very least, this would seem to indicate that the cortex does massive amounts of parallel computation.This paper explores the hypothesis that an important part of the cortex can be modeled as a (...) connectionist computer that is especially suited for parallel problem solving. The connectionist computer uses a special representation, termed value unit encoding, that represents small subsets of parameters in a way that allows parallel access to many different parameter values. This computer can be thought of as computing hierarchies of sensorimotor invariants. The neural substrate can be interpreted as a commitment to data structures and algorithms that compute invariants fast enough to explain the behavioral response times. A detailed consideration of this model has several implications for the underlying anatomy and physiology. (shrink)

Graham, Noelle Comparisons are drawn between media reporting of eating disorders and other.forms of self-harm. Proper understanding of these illnesses can protect sufferers from further harm caused by inaccurate and insensitive reporting.

The following article outlines spiritual formation as it occurs at His Mansion Ministries, a communal ministry centered on Jesus Christ that focuses on helping men and women struggling with life-controlling behaviors and attitudes. Spiritual formation is argued to be a beautiful movement from self to other, a movement that is rooted in a conversion of the self to God. This movement is displayed in the community of His Mansion and the relationships therein. This spiritual movement is also seen in the (...) work and learning that is accomplished at His Mansion. The experience of relationships, work, and learning in the world is typically oriented around the self. At His Mansion Ministries, we believe that spiritual formation happens as a person, in submission to God and his love, moving from being oriented around the self to being aware of and acting for the good of others. (shrink)

Since the 1970s, at least, and presumably under the influence of the later Wittgenstein, certain advocates of Aristotle’s ethics have insisted that a proper validation of the virtues of character must proceed only from within, or be internal to, the particular evaluative outlook provided by possession of the virtues themselves. The most influential advocate of this line of thinking is arguably John McDowell, although Rosalind Hursthouse and Daniel C. Russell have also more recently embraced it. Here I consider whether a (...) distinction between the ‘substantive virtues’ and the ‘virtues of will power’ ultimately threatens that way of thinking about Aristotle’s ethics. If so, it would encourage a different reading of Aristotle’s ethics, one that McDowell has described as a “historical monstrosity”. (shrink)

Due to the impact of biomedical technologies on human wellbeing, biomedical engineering presents discipline-specific ethical issues that can have global, economic, environmental, and societal consequences. Because ethics instruction is a component of accredited undergraduate engineering programs in the US, we developed an ethics assignment that provided biomedical engineering students with a framework for ethical decision-making and challenged them to critically reflect on ethical issues related to contemporary medical devices. Thematic analysis performed on student reflections (n = 73) addressed two research (...) questions: (i) what considerations do biomedical engineering undergraduates describe when asked to critically reflect on ethical issues related to contemporary medical devices; and (ii) how do students describe their participation in bioethical discussions? Students described design, economic factors, and empathy most frequently as considerations. Further, students reported confidence in their ability to engage in ethical discussion upon assignment completion. Overall, our analysis builds understanding of student attitudes and engagement to help inform future ethics curriculum development. (shrink)

This article studies the chronic and acute anomic social impacts of the development of market societies in Europe over the past few decades. Focusing on the firm but linking micro and macro levels, it argues that the passage from the welfare state to disembedded markets and neoliberal governance has generated individual and collective anomie by depriving social actors of agency and voice while caging them in the disciplinary constraints of an ideal competition society. Promoted by public and private governors animated (...) by visions of managerial omnipotence, this reconfiguration has hollowed out the cluster of rights that was the basis of democratic and social citizenship in Europe. The article discusses the manifestations of anomie, stressing the violence flowing from the radical uncertainty to which atomized employees and more broadly citizens are facing in the reification of collective goals, which have been reduced to participation in market society. Drawing on the classical literature (Durkheim, Parsons, Merton) but expanding upon it, the article examines exit solutions, at the individual and collective levels, involving violence against the self (suicide) and others (mobbing, xenophobia, fascism), and concludes that Europe seems to be heading towards a protracted period of danger-laden chronic and acute anomie. (shrink)

The most long-standing criticism of virtue ethics in its traditional, eudaimonistic variety centers on its apparently foundational appeal to nature in order to provide a source of normativity. This paper argues that a failure to appreciate both the giving and taking of reasons in sustaining an ethical outlook can distort a proper understanding of the available options for this traditional version of virtue ethics. To insist only on giving reasons, without also taking (maybe even considering) the reasons provided by others, (...) displays a sadly illiberal form of prejudice. The paper finds and criticizes such a distortion in Jesse Prinz’s recent discussion of the ‘Normativity Challenge’ to Aristotelian virtue ethics, thus highlighting a common tendency that we can helpfully move beyond. (shrink)

Trust in the doctor-patient relationship is an indispensable structural element for the medical profession. The discourse concerning trust and its importance in the healthcare context, although quite old, elicits increasingly more interest in research, especially for empirical approaches. The importance of trust in the doctor and in the medical profession can be demonstrated by starting from the Christian meaning of illness and medicine ; generally, the patristic sources see medicine and physicians as God’s gifts. T he perception of Christian physicians (...) as dedicated, unselfish and compassionate preservers or restorers of health, always committed to the good of their patients is well known. The model of the Christian physician is a Hippocratic model, of one who seeks the sick so that he may bring relief to them and strengthen them. When illness occurs, Christianity affirms an ethical duty to struggle against sickness, which if unaddressed can lead to death. The moral requirement to care for the health of the body indicates it is appropriate to use healing methods that will enhance health and maintain life. The aim of this paper is to explore the dimensions of the concept of trust in the doctor-patient relationship, by starting from the Christian meaning of illness and of the role of the doctor. The paper presents a number of essential theoretical elements related to trust, as presented in the literature dealing with the doctor-patient relationship: the meaning of trust, its dimensions, its stages of development, its impact, its sources, the patient’s perspectives on trust, the importance of trust for healthcare systems. (shrink)

Introduction -- Theory before theory, 1915-1960 -- French theory, 1949-1968 -- Screen theory, 1969-1996 -- Post-theory, 1996-2015 -- Summary.

This book takes apart and problematises the whole process of identifying and explaining the patterning of words in sentences. It brings together two concepts - syntax and text - that are normally treated separately, and shows how they can best be understood in relation to each other. Part 1, Processing the text, concentrates on getting texts ready for syntactic analysis. Since the data needs to be mediated through the processing of the text, the nature of that processing and its effects (...) on subsequent analysis need to be made explicit. Part 2, Analysing the clause, introduces the relevant syntactic phenomena and the sorts of concepts normally used to explain them. It shows how many of the assumptions of traditional syntactic analysis derive from the languages which form the basis of the European tradition, and that different languages require the so-called basic categories of syntactic analysis to be rethought. Part 3, Theorising syntax, sketches the range of syntactic theories available for the consumer. It gives a sense of developments in the field over the last 50 years not just in terms of the usual schools, but by picking up on concepts such as the key complementarity between syntagmatic and paradigmatic to characterise the emphases and biases of different theories. (shrink)

On 10 December 2003, a German civil court sitting in Bonn denied the victims of a NATO air raid the right to sue Germany and claim compensation for alleged violations of international humanitarian...

Socrates engages his audience in Phaedrus with speeches that include revised or newly composed myths that express his theory of philosophical eros. The aim of the speeches is to generate a love for truth that spills over into dialogue. Speeches are a starting point for dialogue, just like physical attraction is the beginning of love. In the case of Phaedrus, the beginning of philosophy is portrayed using playful and rhetorically rich speeches that serve as "love potions" awakening the novice's soul, (...) and ultimately leading Phaedrus to higher rungs on the ladder of love through the palinode, a medicinal speech. It is thinking about speeches, not the speeches themselves, which moves Socrates' student Phaedrus from the love of speeches to the love of Beauty itself. This is a stark contrast to the purpose of speechmaking for the sophist. The sophist seeks to enchant the soul, while the philosopher seeks to charm the soul into loving wisdom through stimulating discussions. Socrates also uses role reversals in the lover-beloved relationship to model the soul's ascent, contrasting the traditional roles with the way the lover and beloved are presented in Socrates' speeches. The novice must actively recollect Beauty itself in order to ascend, rather than passively listening to speeches that provide an image of beauty. Socrates' interlocutors must move themselves up the ladder of love from their own philosophical eros; wisdom is not attained by merely being pushed all the way up the ladder of love. (shrink)

The author, President of the Corsican antiracist collective Avà Basta, presents the specific forms taken by immigration and by its integration in a Corsican society deeply marked by its insularity and its unique history. She describes an immigrant population mostly of Moroccan origins, and analyses the role played by the identitary-nationalist Corsican reference in the racist discourse as well as in the anti-immigrant violence of the last months. She stresses the necessity, for Avà Basta, beyond its struggle against injustice and (...) discrimination on a universal basis, to demand that the nationalist movement position itself in favor of a definition of the Corsican nation based on a « community of fate s, ruling out any ethnicist temptation. (shrink)

This book treats values as the basis for all of philosophy, an approach distinct from critiquing theories of value and far rarer. “First Philosophy,” the effort to justify the foundations for a system of philosophy, is one of the main issues that divide philosophers today. McDonald’s philosophy of values is a comprehensive attempt to replace philosophies of “existence,” “being,” “experience,” the “subject,” or “language,” with a philosophy that locates value as most basic. This transformation is a radical move within (...) Western philosophy as a whole, since it has never been done in such a thoroughgoing way. Hugh P. McDonald makes a comprehensive case against first philosophy as metaphysical, by mounting a case against all metaphysical systems of philosophy. _Radical Axiology: A First Philosophy of Values _is a fresh start for a rebirth of philosophy. While other movements debate the “death of philosophy,” this book radically re-evaluates the direction of philosophy by discovering values at the basis of all philosophy. This reorientation addresses the question of what the love of wisdom can mean for us today. (shrink)

What is behind the upsurge of virulent nationalism and intransigent politics across the globe today? In Fear of Breakdown, Noëlle McAfee contends that politics needs something that only psychoanalysis has been able to offer: an understanding of how to work through anxieties, ambiguity, fragility, and loss.

Seit Ende der 70er Jahre, eine graduelle Erosion der Sozialrechte, hervorgehend aus den sukzessiven Restrukturierungen der auf der EU-Ebene geförderten nationalen Arbeitsmärkte, sowie das nachfolgende Vordringen der Wettbewerbsgesellschaft, brachten die soziale Anomie mit sich, indem sie gleichlaufend der neuen normativen disziplinarischen Ordnung den Weg ebneten. Diese neuartige Ordnung heißt Gestaltung oder Umgestaltung der individuellen und kollektiven Identität durch Einsperrung der Menschen in die Beziehungsschemas, die Angst, Gleichgültigkeit, Intoleranz gegenüber anderen oder eben Schamempfindungen und Gefühle des Selbstachtungsverlusts begünstigen. In den Extremstfällen (...) läuft dies auf Selbstvernichtung hinaus. (shrink)

Depuis la fin des années 70, l’érosion croissante des droits sociaux, résultat des restructurations successives des marchés du travail nationaux encouragées au niveau de l’Union européenne, ainsi que l’émergence consécutive d’une société de compétition, ont mené à l’anomie sociale tout en ouvrant la porte à un nouvel ordre normatif disciplinaire. Ce nouvel ordre forme et refaçonne l’identité individuelle et collective en enfermant les gens dans des modèles de relations favorisant la peur, l’indifférence, l’intolérance envers l’autrui, ou encore le sentiment de (...) honte et la perte de l’estime de soi. Dans les cas les plus extrêmes, cela mène à l’auto-annihilation. (shrink)

Od kraja ‘70-ih, rastuća erozija socijalnih prava, kao rezultat uzastopnih restrukturiranja nacionalnih tržišta rada poticanih na nivou Europske unije, i posljedična pojava društva natjecanja dovele su do socijalne anomije istovremeno otvarajući prostor za novi disciplinarni normativni poredak. Taj novi poredak je formiranje i reformiranje individualnog i kolektivnog identiteta zatvaranjem ljudi u obrasce odnosâ koji promoviraju strah, ravnodušnost, netrpeljivost prema drugima, ili osjećaje srama i gubitka samopouzdanja. U najekstremnijim slučajevima ovo dovodi do samouništenja.

Since the end of the 1970s, an incremental erosion of social rights, resulting from successive restructurings of national labour markets that have been encouraged at European Union level, and the consequent emergence of a society of competition, has led to social anomie while at the same time opening the way for a new disciplinary normative order. That new order is shaping or reshaping individual and collective identity by caging people into patterns of relations that promote fear, indifference, intolerance towards others, (...) or feelings of shame and a loss of self esteem. In the most extreme cases, this leads to self-annihilation. (shrink)

In De Anima III.3 Aristotle presents his official discussion of phantasia (“imagination” in most translations). At the very outset of the discussion Aristotle offers as an endoxon that “phantasia is that in virtue of which we say that a phantasma occurs to us” (428a1-2). Now a natural reading of this claim, taken up by many commentators, can pose a problem for Aristotle’s overall account of perception. Here I argue that, although it would be silly to deny that Aristotle considers phantasia (...) to be that in virtue of which a phantasma occurs to someone, it is not silly to deny that phantasmata are present in every case in which phantasia is operative. This suggestion bolsters the idea that, according to Aristotle’s account of veridical perception, we can understand the world as making itself perceptually manifest to the perceiver. (shrink)

Winner of the American Philosophical Association’s 2019 Essay Prize in Latin American Thought | Western imperialism has received many different types of moral-political justifications, but one of the most historically influential justifications appeals to an allegedly universal form of human nature. In the early modern period this traditional conception of human nature—based on a Western archetype, e.g. Spanish, Dutch, British, French, German—opens up a logical space for considering the inhabitants of previously unknown lands as having a ‘less-than-human’ nature. This appeal (...) to human nature originally found its inspiration in the philosophy of Aristotle, whose ethical thought pervaded the work of European philosophers at the outset of the early modern period and the modern age of empire. Indeed some Spanish writers—most famously, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (b. 1494)—explicitly appealed to Aristotle’s moral-political philosophy in order to justify the conquest of the Americas in the early sixteenth century, for instance to justify war against the Aztecs and other indigenous peoples. At the time of European arrival, the Aztec civilization was easily the greatest in Mesoamerica—and yet the Europeans generally considered the Aztec people to be ‘barbaric,’ i.e. less-than-fully-human. (shrink)

Caspar David Friedrich was the quintessential Romantic figure, portraying the Sublime in his landscape paintings. The Romantic period, particularly in Germany, England, and France, was characterized by the full development of aesthetics as a separate branch of philosophy. The terrible Sublime was contrasted with the more formal elements of Beauty. In this paper, Dr. dela Cruz similarly compares the inarticulable aesthetic sensibility and the more formal method of logical analysis, underscoring her own transition from philosophy to creative writing. She provides (...) a philosophical analysis of what picture theorists call the “visual metaphor” in Friedrich’s key works, in particular “The Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog” and “On the Sailingboat.” Her engagement with these works takes the form of a creative piece—an ekphrastic poem—integrated in a philosophical paper, which is also simultaneously about the aesthetics of that literary form. (shrink)

This article discusses which barriers hamper access to, and participation in, cultural life for members of vulnerable groups, in particular persons belonging to old and new minorities and persons with disabilities in the context of digitization. It then examines what role public authorities can play in addressing and dismantling these barriers. The article adopts a bottom-up approach, in that it is based on a qualitative study, which gives voice to vulnerable groups. The qualitative research involved interviews with different organisations representing, (...) or working with, vulnerable groups in 12 European Union Member States (Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Malta and Spain). In that regard, the article approaches vulnerability from a distinct conceptual standpoint, identifying vulnerability as a condition caused by structural barriers. On the whole, the article shows that, while digitization of cultural content, goods and services, offers increased opportunities for culture to be democratised and for its consumption by wider and more varied audiences to be enhanced, it also engenders structural barriers and creates additional challenges. Furthermore, while digitisation has ensured more diverse representation in cultural content, vulnerable groups still face stereotypical and negative portrayals within mainstream cultural content. The thematic analysis of the qualitative interviews also captures different dimensions of access to digital cultural and supports the identification of effective policy measures to bridge the ‘digital divide’ and assist in the fulfilment of cultural rights of vulnerable groups. (shrink)

The concept of community of persons, which focuses on both persons and the whole, helps understand solidarity. The latter is based on the social nature of persons. Community of persons and solidarity seems to be able to move away from the individualist perspective or the individualism-collectivism dichotomy. Using autopraxeography in a pragmatic constructivism epistemological paradigm, this article aims to explore how organizations can develop solidarity in a workplace. The experience presented takes place in a bank. It shows that communities of (...) persons with employees and customers are both ethical and financially efficient. These communities build a dialogue between persons and organizations. Nevertheless, it is impossible to force solidarity because it could generate derision that is contrary to the wished goal. Finally, while this model is based on solidarity, it focuses solely on internal solidarity. (shrink)

Followership and leadership provide two distinct but complementary sets of behaviors that jointly contribute to positive team dynamics. Yet, followership is rarely measured in shared leadership research. Using a prospective design with a sample of leaderless project teams, we examined the interdependence of leadership and followership and how these leader-follower dynamics relate to relationship conflict at the dyadic and team level. Supporting the reciprocity of leader-follower dynamics, social relations analyses revealed that uniquely rating a teammate higher on effective leadership was (...) associated with being rated higher by that same person on effective followership. Additionally, team members with a reputation as an effective leader also tended to be viewed as an effective follower. As expected, team levels of leadership were tightly linked to team levels of followership. Connecting these results to relationship conflict at the dyadic level, we found that uniquely rating someone as an effective follower or an effective leader would decrease the likelihood of experiencing interpersonal conflict with that person and that having a reputation for effective followership or effective leadership relates negatively to being viewed as a conflict hub within the team. Finally, effective followership was significantly negatively related to team levels of conflict, but we did not find a significant relation between effective leadership and relationship conflict at the team level. Our results highlight that followership is not only a necessary ingredient for high levels of shared leadership to exist within a team, but it underpins more functional team interactions. (shrink)