Online research in philosophy

In the wake of the current financial crises triggered by risky mortgage-backed securities, the question of ethics and risk-taking is once again at the front and center for both practitioners and academics. Although risk-taking is considered an integral part of strategic decision-making, sometimes firms could be propelled to take risks driven by reasons other than calculated strategic choices. The authors argue that a firm's risk-taking propensity is impacted by its ethical climate (egoistic or benevolent) and its emphasis on output control to manage its marketing function. The firm's long-term orientation is argued to moderate the control–risk propensity relationship. The authors also extend research on risk and performance and argue that the association of risk-taking propensity and firm performance is contingent on the ownership (publicly traded versus privately held) structure of the firm. Based on survey data from a sample of manufacturing industries in the United States, the results show significant impact of ethical climate and marketing output control on a firm's risk-taking propensity; also risk-taking propensity shows a stronger association with firm performance in privately held firms than in publicly traded firms.

This study proposed a novel construct – green core competence – to explore its positive effects on green innovation and green images of firms. The results showed that green core competences of firms were positively correlated to their green innovation performance and green images. In addition, this research also verified two types of green innovation performance had partial mediation effects between green core competences and green images of firms. Therefore, investment in the development of green core competence was helpful to businesses for the enhancement of their green innovation and green images. Furthermore, this study found that green core competence, two types of green innovation performance, and green images of medium & small enterprises (SMEs) were all significantly less than those of large enterprises in the information and electronics industry in Taiwan. Therefore, there was the advantage of firm size for the green core competence in this industry, and it was imperative for SMEs to develop and create their green core competences to strengthen their green innovation performance, and green images.

Mere possession of generic professional credentials cannot be used as justification of necessary and sufficient skill to perform in a forensic role. Case examples are used to illustrate problems of both competence and quality that sometimes accompany mental health clinicians to the witness stand.

Abstract Twenty?four second? and third?grade children were given two cognitively?based role?taking tests developed by Flavell et al. (1968). The children's social behaviour was observed over a two?month period. It was coded according to a scheme introduced by the anthropologists Whiting and Whiting (1975) which produces composite scores of egoism and altruism. Teachers rated the children's social behaviour and role?taking ability. IQ scores were obtained from school records. Tests of the reliability and validity of the measures of role?taking and altruism were positive. Role?taking ability was positively correlated with naturally?occurring altruistic behaviour and teacher's ratings of altruism. IQ was positively correlated with role?taking ability, and tended to be positively correlated with altruism. The correlation between role?taking and altruism was marginally significant with IQ partialled out. The results were consistent with the conclusion that role?taking ability increases the disposition to behave altruistically in third?grade children.

This article begins with an explanation of how moral development for organizations has parallels to Kohlberg's categorization of the levels of individual moral development. Then the levels of organizational moral development are integrated into the literature on corporate social performance by relating them to different stakeholder orientations. Finally, the authors propose a model of organizational moral development that emphasizes the role of top management in creating organizational processes that shape the organizational and institutional components of corporate social performance. This article represents one approach to linking the distinct streams of business ethics and business-and-society research into a more complete understanding of how managers and firms address complex ethical and social issues.

In the principles of informed consent we state that each person ought to be free to make his or her own decisions regarding his or her life and health — provided that he or she is mentally competent to do so. Here, the concept of competence plays a crucial role. Where one is competent our moral goal is to promote his or her freedom; if he or she is not, our priority must be to protect and help him or her. In this paper I discuss three different notions of patient competence. The first, rational competence, concerns the basic ability to make a decision. The second, performance competence, concerns one's ability to make decisions and perform skills in ways that measure up to certain external standards. The third, reflective competence, concerns one's ability to identify and critically to scrutinize one's own values — one's ability, that is, to formulate and to evaluate one's own internal standards of decision and action. This richer analysis of the concept of competence enables us to formulate more precisely the moral difficulties we face when competence is impaired.

Contemporary work-related education and training policy represents occupational competence as the outcome of individual performance at work. This paper presents a critique of this neo-liberal assumption, arguing that in many cases competence should be regarded as an attribute of groups, teams and communities. It proposes a theory of collective competence in terms of (1) making collective sense of events in the workplace, (2) developing and using a collective knowledge base and (3) developing a sense of interdependency. It suggests that the language of competence would become a more effective tool for understanding performance at work if the collectivistic sense of the term 'competence' were used in conjunction with the more established individualistic sense.

Social externalism implies that many competences are not personal assets separable from social and cultural environments but complex states of affairs involving individuals and persisting features of social reality. The paper explores the consequences for competence identity over time and across contexts, and hence for the predictive role usually accorded to competences.

Clahsen's view on language is intimately linked with the Chomskian distinction between competence and performance. He uses performance to verify theoretical assumptions about the underlying structure of competence. Using mostly off-line tasks, he may fail to answer the question of how language is generated and perceived in natural situations.