This paper reviews the relationship between organisational leadership, corporate governance and business ethics, and considers the implications for management. Business ethics is defined, and the causes and consequences of unethical behavior are discussed. Issues pertaining to leadership, subordinate and organisation responsibility for business ethics are considered. The changing role of business leaders and the new concept of ''corporate governance'' are examined, with an increasing importance being placed on ethical and socially responsible attitudes towards business. Organisational effectiveness and organisational efficiency, formerly (...) central issues for practising managers, with directors thinking in terms of goal achievement for their respective organisations, have now been augmented by an awareness of issues in business ethics, and a requirement for members of the corporate governance to behave in more socially responsible ways. A secondary aim of the paper is to introduce an approach which illustrates how corporate governance and management could deal with some of the moral dilemmas that they may have to face. (shrink)

In this work, our aim is to investigate the impact of a non-Kolmogorov predator-prey-subsidy model incorporating nonlinear prey refuge and the effect of fear with Holling type II functional response. The model arises from the study of a biological system involving arctic foxes, lemmings, and seal carcasses. The positivity and asymptotically uniform boundedness of the solutions of the system have been derived. Analytically, we have studied the criteria for the feasibility and stability of different equilibrium points. In addition, we have (...) derived sufficient conditions for the existence of local bifurcations of codimension 1. It is also observed that there is some time lag between the time of perceiving predator signals through vocal cues and the reduction of prey’s birth rate. So, we have analyzed the dynamical behaviour of the delayed predator-prey-subsidy model. Numerical computations have been performed using MATLAB to validate all the analytical findings. Numerically, it has been observed that the predator, prey, and subsidy can always exist at a nonzero subsidy input rate. But, at a high subsidy input rate, the prey population cannot persist and the predator population has a huge growth due to the availability of food sources. (shrink)

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended (...) to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one’s actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one’s actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhibiting greater cognitive reflection were more likely to view free will as incompatible with causal determinism. We discuss these findings in light of documented cultural differences in the tendency toward dispositional versus situational attributions. (shrink)

Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences—rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. Moreover, this apparent intersubjective validity has been taken to constitute one of the main explananda for philosophical accounts of aesthetic judgment. But is it really the case that most people (...) spontaneously treat aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity? In this paper, we report the results of a cross‐cultural study with over 2,000 respondents spanning 19 countries. Despite significant geographical variations, these results suggest that most people do not treat their own aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for theories of aesthetic judgment and the purpose of aesthetics in general. (shrink)

Compliance is a key concept in health care and affects all areas of health care including diabetes. Non-compliance has previously been a label attached to many patients without much thought having been given to the causes of poor compliance. Over the last few decades there has been a large volume of research focusing on compliance that has exposed the multitude of factors affecting compliance. Even the definition is not clear cut and so comparability between studies is not without difficulties. A (...) better understanding of the factors affecting compliance, including the doctor/patient relationship, has allowed the evolution of “concordance”. Concordance views the patient as being the equal of the healthcare provider and as having a right to make informed decisions. In a condition such as diabetes, which has many potential long term complications, it is vital that concordance is embraced in the healthcare system in order to improve care. (shrink)

The Indian film’s depiction of rape and sexual violence specifically on women, can provide a glimpse into the wider Indian cultural mores seeping into the thoughts and processes that are in play du...

The Indian film’s depiction of rape and sexual violence specifically on women, can provide a glimpse into the wider Indian cultural mores seeping into the thoughts and processes that are in play du...

The Indian film’s depiction of rape and sexual violence specifically on women, can provide a glimpse into the wider Indian cultural mores seeping into the thoughts and processes that are in play du...

How can a manager or an organization refine and enrich its global mindset orientation? A radically different frame of aligning people, strategy and purpose may be through the extension and enrichment of a global mindset rather than strategy or structure. This article explores the concept of global mindset from a new perspective and forwards a number of specific action frames for managers to reflect on. The article contends that the negative effects of contemporary globalization can only be overcome through the (...) enrichment of global vision of managers everywhere. As for applicability, the article argues that mindset development can only contribute to the sustainability of organizations and societies. (shrink)

How can a manager or an organization refine and enrich its global mindset orientation? A radically different frame of aligning people, strategy and purpose may be through the extension and enrichment of a global mindset rather than strategy or structure. This article explores the concept of global mindset from a new perspective and forwards a number of specific action frames for managers to reflect on. The article contends that the negative effects of contemporary globalization can only be overcome through the (...) enrichment of global vision of managers everywhere. As for applicability, the article argues that mindset development can only contribute to the sustainability of organizations and societies. (shrink)

Does the Ship of Theseus present a genuine puzzle about persistence due to conflicting intuitions based on “continuity of form” and “continuity of matter” pulling in opposite directions? Philosophers are divided. Some claim that it presents a genuine puzzle but disagree over whether there is a solution. Others claim that there is no puzzle at all since the case has an obvious solution. To assess these proposals, we conducted a cross-cultural study involving nearly 3,000 people across twenty-two countries, speaking eighteen (...) different languages. Our results speak against the proposal that there is no puzzle at all and against the proposal that there is a puzzle but one that has no solution. Our results suggest that there are two criteria—“continuity of form” and “continuity of matter”— that constitute our concept of persistence and these two criteria receive different weightings in settling matters concerning persistence. (shrink)

Is behavioral integration a necessary feature of belief in folk psychology? Our data from over 5,000 people across 26 samples, spanning 22 countries suggests that it is not. Given the surprising cross-cultural robustness of our findings, we argue that the types of evidence for the ascription of a belief are, at least in some circumstances, lexicographically ordered: assertions are first taken into account, and when an agent sincerely asserts that p, nonlinguistic behavioral evidence is disregarded. In light of this, we (...) take ourselves to have discovered a universal principle governing the ascription of beliefs in folk psychology. (shrink)

This book provides a detailed analysis of classical and modern Indian views on consciousness along with their related meditative methods. It offers a critical analysis of three distinct trends of Indian thought.

The relevance of the guna theory to applications of Western management practice is seen in this paper as an insight holding capacity to guide managerial behaviour. In its essence, the guna theory depicts values which constitute human personality into a sattwa-rajas delineation of deepened understanding, giving direction to action and which, in turn, illustrates negative values likely to cause obstruction. For managers to appreciate this level of understanding, while simultaneously sensing those values which inhibit purposeful action, may be regarded as (...) containing strength in a more intuitive, subjective way than values of moral judgement adopted to guide managerial action in the West. As such, the guna theory has deep relevance in the face of egotistical, contractual or legal values, so often defining the parameters of Western management. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Vague concepts are represented by L-fuzzy sets. It is argued that any vague concept carries with it an approximate identity which is a fuzzy equivalence relation. The relation also fulfills the criterion of ? indiscernibility of Identicals ?, which is called ? saturatedness ? in this context. An application in knowledge representation is indicated.

The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

Management of meaning inside organizations has been an enduring issue in organization studies. Issues relating to commitment and control through the meaning-making mechanisms have been studied by organization culture theorists for sometime now. However, rapidly changing dynamics of the business environment lend these issues a critical salience today. Two factors of this dynamic context are particularly noteworthy. Firstly, a redefinition of the long-standing employment relationship—loyalty no longer being traded for lifelong employment—has led management to look for alternative sources of gaining (...) commitment from their employees. Second, several factors—socio-cultural, organizational and individual—have led the employees today to explore issues relating to meaning and purpose in their workplaces. Labelled variously by different scholars, the most widely accepted term for this growing movement is ‘Spirituality at Work’. In this article we link the two factors to present a framework wherein the emergence of an issue from the private individual domain to the organizational is seen as having the potential of answering concerns of eliciting commitment from employees in a turbulent environment. However, the SAW movement is accompanied by vigorous debates about the concept itself and on how it is to be studied. In the course of this article we present the central conceptual debates that have characterized the SAW discourse to emerge with three definitional themes to understand and study SAW, and then argue for utilizing the person–organization fit lens to study SAW. We end with a conceptual framework that would enable researchers to make a comprehensive study of the elusive phenomenon of SAW. (shrink)

This book is a unique re-conceptualization of Marxism that brings together works by leading Marxist scholars across disciplines ' historical, philosophical, economic, political, social, literary and aesthetic ' in one comprehensive corpus for the first time. It argues that the works and philosophy of Marx and Engels continue to be relevant today.

The placenta invades the adjacent uterus and controls the maternal immune system, like a cancer invades surrounding organs and suppresses the local immune response. Intriguingly, placental and cancer cells are globally hypomethylated and share an epigenetic phenomenon that is not well understood – they fail to silence repetitive DNA sequences that are silenced in healthy somatic cells. In the placenta, hypomethylation of retrotransposons has facilitated the evolution of new genes essential for placental function. In cancer, hypomethylation is thought to contribute (...) to activation of oncogenes, genomic instability, and retrotransposon unsilencing; the latter, we postulate, is possibly the most important consequence. Activation of placental retrotransposon-derived genes in cancer underpins our hypothesis that hypomethylation of these genes drives cancer cell invasion. This alludes to an interesting paradox, that while placental retrotransposon-derived genes are essential for promoting early hominid life, the same genes promote disease-susceptibility and death through cancer. Placental and cancer cells fail to silence retrotransposons that are normally silenced in healthy tissues. This has created new genes that are essential for placental function, yet they are also expressed in cancer. We hypothesize that active retrotransposons are a double-edged sword, contributing both adaptive and deleterious functions to biology. (shrink)

Urban dwellers’ food and nutritional wellbeing are both dependent on infrastructure and can be indicative of wider wellbeing in urban contexts and societal health. This paper focuses on the multiple relationships that exist between food and infrastructure to provide a thorough theoretical and empirical grounding to urgent work on urban food security and nutrition in the context of rapid urban and nutrition transitions in the South. We argue that urban systems and food systems thinking have not been well aligned, but (...) that such alignment is not only timely and overdue but also fruitful for both thematic areas of research and policy. We draw in particular on work within wider urban political economy and political ecology that can be classified as part of the ‘infrastructural turn’ that is influential with urban studies but little acknowledged within food studies. Drawing on these literatures helps us to better understand the interrelationships between people, things and ideas that make up both infrastructure and food systems. Policy, planning and research relating to both food and urban systems cannot afford to ignore such interlinkages, though much policy still operates on the neat assumptions of progressive connectivity to ‘the grid’ and formal food retail. Instead we argue how in many urban governance systems, a variety of hybrid mechanisms—on and off the grid, public and private formal and informal—better represent how urban residents, particularly the most marginalised, meet their everyday food and infrastructural needs along a continuum of gridded and off-grid access. (shrink)

Henry Molaison, aged eighty-two, died at the end of 2008, and just after noon on exactly the first anniversary of his death, December 2, 2009, scientists began slicing his brain into 2,500 tissue samples. Known primarily in his lifetime as only H.M., he left his brain to science so that it could be dissected and digitally mapped – a gift much beloved by many scientists. An amnesiac in life, H.M. first rose to prominence in 1962 when Dr. Brenda Milner, a (...) pioneer in the field of neuropsychology, demonstrated that though H.M. was severely amnesic and could not remember past activities, he could nevertheless learn certain habits. The experiment involved the now famous mirror drawing. This article, written by a philosopher/artist and a neuroscientist/neuroaesthetician, argues that artists are unable to verbally articulate thoughts about their own art practice for reasons similar to why H.M. could not. All memories are not stored in the same part of the brain. Different categories of memories i.e., semantic memory or procedural memory, are stored in different parts of the brain. We argue that the procedural memory is not readily accessible to semantic memory. (shrink)

The Aesthetic Brain takes the reader on a wide-ranging journey addressing fundamental questions about aesthetics and art. Using neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, Chatterjee shows how beauty, pleasure, and art are grounded biologically, and offers explanations for why beauty, pleasure, and art exist at all.

This study integrates insights from stakeholder theory and the literature on competitive dynamics and incumbent responses to entry. While research in economics and strategy has examined how market incumbents respond to new entrants, little is known about the heterogeneity in these responses to the entry of a stakeholder-oriented firm; our study addresses this research gap. Findings from a novel, longitudinal dataset of 206 granularly defined pharmaceutical markets in India suggest that stakeholder-oriented firm entry in these markets is associated with an (...) impact on prices and product differentiation with heterogeneous responses from high-end and low-end incumbents. Specifically, entry by a stakeholder-oriented firm results in a reduction in prices and dosage sizes from high-end incumbents, whereas low-end incumbents respond in the opposite direction. (shrink)

In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some limitations of previous (...) research on stakes. Section 2 presents our study and concludes that there is little evidence for a substantial stakes effect. Section 3 responds to objections. The conclusion clears the way for classical invariantism. (shrink)

In this article, we present evidence that in four different cultural groups that speak quite different languages there are cases of justified true beliefs that are not judged to be cases of knowledge. We hypothesize that this intuitive judgment, which we call “the Gettier intuition,” may be a reflection of an underlying innate and universal core folk epistemology, and we highlight the philosophical significance of its universality.

Advances in cognitive neuroscience make cosmetic neurology in some form inevitable and will give rise to extremely difficult ethical issuesConsider the following hypothetical case study. A well heeled executive walks into my cognitive neurology clinic because he is concerned that he is becoming forgetful. It turns out that he is going through a difficult divorce and my clinical impression is that his memory problems stem from the stress he is experiencing. I place him on a selective seratonin reuptake inhibitor, sertraline, (...) and in a few weeks he feels better. Around this time his 13 year old daughter has difficulty at school and is diagnosed by the school psychologist as having attention deficit disorder. I place her on adderall, a stimulant combination drug, which seems to help with her behaviour in school. My patient then comes to me because he is experiencing the “tip of the tongue” phenomena more frequently. He is concerned that his word finding difficulty interferes with his ability to function in high level meetings. I suggest we try a cholinesterase inhibitor to see if this helps. I am careful to explain that the Food and Drug Administration does not approve such a use for this medication. He wants to try it and is pleased with the results.A few months later, this patient visits me with his 16 year old son, a talented middle distance runner. His father thinks if he were just a bit better, among the elite high school runners in the state, he would be far more competitive as an applicant for selective colleges. We discuss various options. Because of a recent report that sildenafil, which is used conventionally for male impotence, may improve oxygen carrying capacity, I prescribe this medication. The son does not object.Encouraged by these pharmacologic successes, my patient …. (shrink)

The lesion and transplantation data cited by Sinden et al., when considered in tandem, seem to harbor an internal inconsistency, raising questions of false localization of function. The extrapolation of such data to cognitive impairment and potential treatment strategies in Alzheimer's disease is problematic. Patients with focal basal forebrain lesions (e.g., anterior communicating artery aneurysm rupture) might be a more appropriate target population.

This is an excerpt of a crucial dialogue engaged in by a Hindu and an Orthodox Roman Catholic. The excerpt touches on evil and the supernatural.

This is part of a proposed monograph on the Law, and jurisprudence and is to be used for understanding punishment through wergild to the early Modern and to even the post-modern. The paper is just a draft and in the future will be published as a monograph.

This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to (...) engage in “reflective” thinking. (shrink)

Abstract: Each affective state has distinct motor-expressions, sensory perceptions, autonomic, and cognitive patterns. Panksepp (1998) proposed seven neural affective systems of which the SEEKING system, a generalized approach-seeking system, motivates organisms to pursue resources needed for survival. When an organism is presented with a novel stimulus, the dopamine (DA) in the nucleus accumbens septi (NAS) is released. The DA circuit outlines the generalized mesolimbic dopamine-centered SEEKING system and is especially responsive when there is an element of unpredictability in forthcoming rewards. (...) We propose that when the outcome of this interaction is unexpected or unanticipated then Panksepp’s “cognitive or expectancy reset” mechanism involving the cognitive dissonance would yield the subjective emotion of surprise. In order to appropriately react to the environment’s stimuli one needs fundamental processes that would enable one to distinguish between what is novel and what has been already experienced, as well as the different degrees of novelty. Novel events are those whose essential features of the representation (visceral and perceptual) are altered and being discrepant provoke more sustained attention. Novelty arises from salient and arousing events and the organism experiences surprise, as coming out of a habitual state. In this framework, we shall look at established theories of emotions and propose a different approach to their taxonomy. (shrink)

Is behavioral integration (i.e., which occurs when a subjects assertion that p matches her non-verbal behavior) a necessary feature of belief in folk psychology? Our data from nearly 6,000 people across twenty-six samples, spanning twenty-two countries suggests that it is not. Given the surprising cross-cultural robustness of our findings, we suggest that the types of evidence for the ascription of a belief are, at least in some circumstances, lexicographically ordered: assertions are first taken into account, and when an agent sincerely (...) asserts that p, non-linguistic behavioral evidence is disregarded. In light of this, we take ourselves to have discovered a universal principle governing the ascription of beliefs in folk psychology. (shrink)

Firms strive hard to achieve a high degree of efficiency on the production frontier, and it is where they compete to excel with their competitors. It is observed from previous studies that standardizing some policies and developing strategies could bring efficiency in production of manufacturing firms. New approaches to the measurement of productive efficiencies are being developed, and analysis of the subject is growing exponentially, since firms are now more concerned about the productivity frontier, besides others. This paper analyzes the (...) necessary factors that contribute to the productive efficiency of an organization. A simple model of production function is constructed to understand its essence and thus contributes to the development of a new ratio that defines productive efficiency in terms of maximization of the efficiency factor that is a common issue in industrial and manufacturing organizations. (shrink)

The act of killing self contradicts the central purpose of human evolution, that is, survival and propagation of one’s genetic material. Yet, it continues to be one of the leading causes of human death. A handful of theories in the realm of evolutionary psychology have attempted to explain human suicide. The current article analyses the major components of certain prominent viewpoints, namely, Inclusive fitness, Bargaining model, Pain-Brain model, Psychological aposematism, and few other perspectives. The article argues that relatively more weightage (...) has been given to understanding ultimate (the “why”) rather than proximate (the “how”) functionality of suicidal acts. Evolutionary theorists have consistently pointed out that to comprehensively understand a trait or behavior, one needs to delineate not only how it supports survival but also the evolution of the mechanisms underlying the trait or behavior. Existing theories on suicide have primarily focused on its fitness benefits on surviving kin instead of providing evolutionary explanations of the more complex mechanisms leading up to such self-destructive motivations. Thus, the current paper attempts to highlight this gap in theorizing while suggesting probable proximate explanations of suicide which stresses the need to diffuse attention paid to fitness consequences of the act alone. We speculate that such explorations are needed in order to build a robust and comprehensive evolutionary theory of human suicide. (shrink)