In this essay, I evoke and explore Butler's potential contribution, providing a broad framework for her work, and, at the same time, focusing on specific concepts from her writings - performativity, iteration, and foreclosure - that have profound implications for researchers. Furthermore, pointing out philosophers working in the phenomenological tradition in which Butler trained, including influential precursors, colleagues, and contemporaries, establishes how issues raised in various fields can be recognized and comprehended in relation to Butler's work more generally. Butler's work (...) - radical as it may seem - responds to classic questions of ontology, philosophy of language, and epistemology. A phenomenological description aimed at opening access to Butler’s notion of the tropological inauguration of the subject – that is, the ‘turning back’ induced by a limiting boundary that brings subjectivity into experience – attempts to place Butler’s central concepts before the reader. (shrink)

The literature acknowledges a distinction between immoral, amoral and moral management. This paper makes a case for the employee (at any level) as a moral agent, even though the paper begins by highlighting a body of evidence which suggests that individual moral agency is sacrificed at work and is compromised in deference to other pressures. This leads to a discussion about the notion of discretion and an examination of a separate, contrary body of literature which indicates that some individuals in (...) corporations may use their discretion to behave in a socially entrepreneurial manner. My underlying assumption is that CSR isn't solely driven by economics and that it may also be championed as a result of a personal morality, inspired by employees' own socially oriented personal values. A conceptual framework is put forward and it is suggested that individuals may be categorized as Active or Frustrated Corporate Social Entrepreneurs; Conformists or Apathetics, distinguished by their individualistic or collectivist personal values. In a discussion of the nature of values, this paper highlights how values may act as drivers of our behavior and pays particular attention to the values of the entrepreneur, thereby linking the existing debate on moral agency with the field of corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

The new mode of knowledge production is seen as a distinct form of economic organisation used for exchanging and creating knowledge. The emphasis is laid on the role of business services in innovative networks as carriers of knowledge and intermediates between science (knowledge creator) and their customers (knowledge user). The empirical analysis shows that knowledge-intensive business services are able to make existing knowledge useful for, their customers, improving the customer's performance and productivity and contributing to technological and structural change.

There is a theme running throughout Foucault’s analyses of governmentality, biopower, the changing nature of state and its relation to society, and neo-liberalism. The theme is particularly clear in the contrasts he makes between governmentality and the arts of government in previous centuries (the reason of state and the theory of police, etc.), biopower versus disciplinary power, and the modern state versus the early modern state (and medieval state). The theme is that of freedom, the nature of freedom, and its (...) relation to other notions such as power, rationality etc. Foucault wants to reject a certain notion of freedom. Let us call it a negative notion of freedom, which sees freedom in terms of absence of something else, something it is not: A way out. Specifically, negative freedom is seen as absence of repression and domination, notions which are in turn associated with power. Hence, negative freedom becomes absence of power, and the way to freedom is a way out of power relations. In this view, power is domination. The assumption is that where there is power there is no freedom and where there is freedom there is no power. Let’s call this the ‘exclusory’ hypothesis; power and freedom, according to this hypothesis, are mutually exclusive. But this, Foucault argues, is to misunderstand the nature of modern freedom and power, and the way they operate in modern societies. Such notions of freedom and power might have some relevance to early modern and medieval societies, but they are quite inadequate in understanding our contemporary societies. One of the insights of the analysis is that freedom is a great managing power (and not just a liberating force), and power is not necessarily something bad (it can lead to either domination or freedom). Freedom, and a particular positive notion of freedom, is the paradigm of the new techniques of government, the new art of government. Freedom is meant here not as an ideology (although that is important as well, even though much less important than is normally thought), but simultaneously as the principle (mechanism) through which the system works. Freedom in this sense is not to be understood primarily as the property of will (in the tradition of human rights and legal discourses), but as the freedom of movement and freedom of circulation – freedom to develop, grow, enhance – and is applied to both people and things (that is both to physical and human capital). The new art of government is not primarily based on prohibitions and exclusions, but is “carried out through and by reliance on freedom of each.” In this paper I will step aside from issues of interpretation and try to investigate the conceptual advances made by Foucault’s analyses; how some of his conceptual tools can be used in understanding capitalist rationality, and how this rationality can help deconstruct certain traditional myths about capitalism. (shrink)

Heidegger’s hermeneutic method and his account of pedagogy are useful in teaching students how to think and write. This paper interprets the method of thinking which Martin Heidegger taught to his students and indicates strategies that have been used to introduce that method to New Zealand students in an online course. The method appears to philosophers as a technique of conceptual analysis, although Heidegger may not have agreed with that characterisation or its use in this way. To tertiary teachers it (...) is one framework that they may use to teach a strategy and techniques under the rubric of critical thinking. The use of the method of procedure proposed is well within the capabilities of teachers in practical subjects such as business, management, medicine and law. Students in the author’s business analysis course say that a hermeneutic strategy forces them to struggle, but ultimately they report satisfaction at their increased abilities and believe that they have gained something efficacious. (shrink)

We describe an evaluation undertaken on contract for the New Zealand State Services Commission of a major project (the Administrative Decision-Making Skills Project) designed to produce a model of administrative decision making and an associated teaching/learning packagefor use by government officers. It describes the evaluation of a philosophical model of decision making and the associated teaching/learning package in the setting of the New Zealand Public Service, where a deliberate attempt has been initiated to improve the quality of decision making, especially (...) in relation to moral factors. (shrink)