Employee attributions and emotional reactions to unethical behavior of top leaders in an organization recently involved in a highly publicized ethics scandal were examined. Participants (n = 76) from a large southern California government agency completed an ethical climate assessment. Secondary data analysis was performed on the written commentary to an open-ended question seeking employees' perceptions of the ethical climate. Employees attributed the organization's poor ethical leadership to a number of causes, including: lack of moral reasoning, breaches of trust, hypocrisy, (...) and poor ethical behavior role modeling. Emotional reactions to corruption included cynicism, optimism, pessimism, paranoia and fear, and were targeted at top leaders, organizational practices (i.e., the old boy network, nepotism, and cronyism) and ethics interventions. Implications for leadership training and other organizational ethics interventions are discussed. (shrink)

We examine the perceived importance of three organizational preconditions theorized to be critical for ethics program effectiveness. In addition, we examine the importance of ethical leadership and congruence between formal ethics codes and informal ethical norms in influencing employee perceptions. Participants from a large southern California government agency completed a survey on the perceived effectiveness of the organization’s ethics program. Results suggest that employee perceptions of organizational preconditions, ethical leadership and informal ethical norms were related to perceptions of ethics program (...) effectiveness. Based on these findings, organizations should evaluate the presence of essential preconditions and take steps to ensure that leaders model espoused organizational values to foster perceptions of effective ethics programs. (shrink)

This provocative work provides a radical reassessment of the emergence and nature of Christian sexual morality, the dominant moral paradigm in Western society since late antiquity. While many scholars, including Michel Foucault, have found the basis of early Christian sexual restrictions in Greek ethics and political philosophy, Kathy L. Gaca demonstrates on compelling new grounds that it is misguided to regard Greek ethics and political theory—with their proposed reforms of eroticism, the family, and civic order—as the foundation of Christian (...) sexual austerity. Rather, in this thoroughly informed and wide-ranging study, Gaca shows that early Christian goals to eradicate fornication were derived from the sexual rules and poetic norms of the Septuagint, or Greek Bible, and that early Christian writers adapted these rules and norms in ways that reveal fascinating insights into the distinctive and largely non-philosophical character of Christian sexual morality. Writing with an authoritative command of both Greek philosophy and early Christian writings, Gaca investigates Plato, the Stoics, the Pythagoreans, Philo of Alexandria, the apostle Paul, and the patristic Christians Clement of Alexandria, Tatian, and Epiphanes, freshly elucidating their ideas on sexual reform with precision, depth, and originality. Early Christian writers, she demonstrates, transformed all that they borrowed from Greek ethics and political philosophy to launch innovative programs against fornication that were inimical to Greek cultural mores, popular and philosophical alike. The Septuagint's mandate to worship the Lord alone among all gods led to a Christian program to revolutionize Gentile sexual practices, only for early Christians to find this virtually impossible to carry out without going to extremes of sexual renunciation. Knowledgeable and wide-ranging, this work of intellectual history and ethics cogently demonstrates why early Christian sexual restrictions took such repressive ascetic forms, and casts sobering light on what Christian sexual morality has meant for religious pluralism in Western culture, especially among women as its bearers. (shrink)

The purpose of this research was to discover and describe the economic contribution one group of women entrepreneurs. The research participants were lowresource and laid-off women who had graduated from a Microenterprise Assistance Program . There was no differentiation among women by age, race, or ethnicity. The theoretical landscape that underpins this research includes economic geography and women entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurship and economic development. This research provided a geographic representation of the dispersion and volume of the self-reported business expenses of (...) women entrepreneurs located in one geographic area. In addition, this research developed and examined the viability of an assessment tool that maps the business payments made by entrepreneurs. (shrink)

The food supply of the temperate lands of early-medieval western Europe, and the ways in which its peoples dealt with the central problem of feeding themselves, has been subjected to a variety of interpretations in recent years. Vern Bullough and Cameron Campbell's study of the medieval diet and female longevity concluded that early-medieval women suffered from iron deficiencies triggered jointly by poor nutrition and frequent childbearing and that these deficiencies contributed substantially to their average early age of death. Ann Hagen's (...) overview of Anglo-Saxon patterns of food production and consumption suggested that most of the early English population routinely lived at marginally adequate or outright substandard levels of nutrition. Similar conclusions were reached by Renée Doehaerd in her study of the early-medieval economy. Michel Rouche, on the other hand, asserted that the typical Carolingian—including the peasants—had access to a monotonous, but abundant, supply of foodstuffs and may have consumed an average of 6,000–9,000 calories per day. Richard Hodges likewise decided that Anglo-Saxon peasants were reasonably well fed, based on the heavy food rents per hide demanded during the reign of the West Saxon king Ina. (shrink)

We report the results of two studies that evaluated the perceptions of supervisor and top leader ethics. In our first study, we re-analyzed data from Pelletier and Bligh (J Bus Ethics 67:359–374, 2006) and found that the Perceptions of Ethical Leadership Scale from that study could be used to differentiate perceptions of supervisor and top leader ethics. In a second study with a different sample, we examined the relationships between (1) individual employees’ perceptions of top managers’ and immediate supervisors’ ethical (...) tendencies, and (2) organizational climate, confidence in top leadership direction, commitment, and citizenship behavior. Results indicated that employee perceptions of top managers’ and supervisors’ ethics were significantly related to climate, top leadership direction, organizational commitment and the OCB dimension, civic virtue. (shrink)

The minimally conscious state presents unique ethical, legal, and decision-making challenges because of the combination of diminished awareness, phenomenal experience, and diminished or absent comm...

Gramsci, An italian marxist intellectual politically active when fascism rose and later imprisoned by mussolini, Offers a sensitive and non-Stereotyped communist interpretation of fascism. He rejected the crude "fascism as last stage of capitalism thesis," the view that it was merely the "agent of the big bourgeoisie" and even the view that it reflected a particular set of class interests. He recognized that it was not merely reactionary, That it had complex internal divisions, That it exemplified the "relative autonomy of (...) politics," and that it was best understood as a response to a "hegemonic crisis.". (shrink)

Helmut Fleischer has distinguished three different approaches to history in the development of Marx's thinking: the "anthropological" , the "pragmatological" , and the "nomological" . However, these represent a less continuous and coherent development than Fleischer claims. The 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse can be instanced as a fourth view, more focused than the others on historiography, and at variance with what Marx says elsewhere. The sequence and overlapping of these four views call into question both the interpretation of Marx's (...) development as smoothly continuous and the interpretation of his development as "ruptured" into "early" and "late.". (shrink)

They envisioned a brave new world, and what they got was fascism. As vibrant as its counterparts in Paris, Munich, and Milan, the avant-garde of Florence rose on a wave of artistic, political, and social idealism that swept the world with the arrival of the twentieth century. How the movement flourished in its first heady years, only to flounder in the bloody wake of World War I, is a fascinating story, told here for the first time. It is the history (...) of a whole generation's extraordinary promise--and equally extraordinary failure. The "decadentism" of D'Annunzio, the philosophical ideals of Croce and Gentile, the politics of Italian socialism: all these strains flowed together to buoy the emerging avant-garde in Florence. Walter Adamson shows us the young artists and writers caught up in the intellectual ferment of their time, among them the poet Giovanni Papini, the painter Ardengo Soffici, and the cultural critic Giuseppe Prezzolini. He depicts a generation rejecting provincialism, seeking spiritual freedom in Paris, and ultimately blending the modernist style found there with their own sense of toscanità or "being Tuscan." In their journals--Leonardo, La Voce, Lacerba, and l'Italia futurista--and in their cafe life at the Giubbe Rosse, we see the avant-garde of Florence as citizens of an intellectual world peopled by the likes of Picasso, Bergson, Sorel, Unamuno, Pareto, Weininger, and William James. We witness their mounting commitment to the ideals of regenerative violence and watch their existence become increasingly frenzied as war approaches. Finally, Adamson shows us the ultimate betrayal of the movement's aspirations as its cultural politics help catapult Italy into war and prepare the way for Mussolini's rise to power. (shrink)

After a brief promenade on the several notions of translations that appear in the literature, we concentrate on three paradigms of translations between logics: ( conservative ) translations , transfers and contextual translations . Though independent, such approaches are here compared and assessed against questions about the meaning of a translation and about comparative strength and extensibility of a logic with respect to another.

Adamson argues that Marxism "teaches us how to interpret social and historical reality, and to relate that interpretation to our current political concerns.".