In vocational rehabilitation, empowerment is understood as the notion that people should make an active, autonomous choice to find their way back to the labour process. Following this line of reasoning, the concept of empowerment implicitly points to a specific kind of activation strategy, namely labour participation. This activation approach has received criticism for being paternalistic, disciplining and having a one-sided orientation on labour participation. Although we share this theoretical criticism, we want to go beyond it by paying attention to (...) the practical consequences of understanding empowerment as an activation strategy. Inspired by the field of Science and Technology Studies, we will explore the meaning of empowerment and activation in concrete practices of vocational rehabilitation in the Netherlands. Our analysis is based on the narratives of people with a work disability about their lives and the vocational rehabilitation programmes they participated in. We present five illustrative cases that how empowerment is ‘done’ in the practice of vocational rehabilitation and its unintended effects. Our analysis demonstrates that activation strategies seem to be caught in a paradox: instead of including people in society, they have excluding consequences. Vocational rehabilitation professionals can go beyond this paradox by learning from the ways in which empowerment is ‘done’ by clients in vocational rehabilitation programmes. (shrink)

Starting from Justus Lipsius's _Monita et exempla politica _, this book offers a collection of essays dealing with the disputed Macchiavellian, Tacitean or Neostoic character of Lipsius's political thought, and its impact on the dynamics of political discourse in Early Modern Europe.

This intervention study examined the effects of a career crafting training on physicians' perceptions of their job crafting behaviors, career self-management, and employability. A total of 154 physicians working in two hospitals in a large Dutch city were randomly assigned to a waitlist control group or an intervention group. Physicians in the intervention group received an accredited training on career crafting, including a mix of theory, self-reflection, and exercises. Participants developed four career crafting goals during the training, to work on (...) in the subsequent weeks, after which a coaching conversation took place over the phone. Physicians in the control group received no intervention. A pre- and post-test 8 weeks later measured changes in job crafting and career self-management and employability of 103 physicians that completed the pre- and post-test. RM ANOVAs showed that the intervention enhanced perceptions of career self-management and job crafting behavior to decrease hindering job demands. No support was found for the effect of the intervention on other types of job crafting and employability. This study offers novel insights into how career crafting can be enhanced through training, as this is the first empirical study to examine a career crafting intervention. HR managers can use the outcomes to develop tailored career policies and career development practices. (shrink)

Debt reduction for the poorest countries of the world has become a self-evident goal for all people who feel concerned about the problems of the Third World, about absolute poverty and misery. Also, right-minded people think it is a primary ethical requirement that rich countries and powerful financial institutions should loosen the constraints imposed upon the weakest regions of the world. However, a closer look reveals that this is not just a technical matter, but that this issue is ridden with (...) hard choices and difficult ethical dilemmas. Giving and helping are much more delicate matters than a naïve and benevolent observer might think. A contribution touching upon the ethical background of the debate about debt reduction is a good opportunity to tackle these sorts of problems.Ethics has become fashionable nowadays. Paradoxically, the more people are convinced that self-interest is the main motivating force for the rich and the poor, and the more they think that powerful interest groups are ruling the world, the greater the attraction and the authority of ethical arguments. At the same time ethics has become a rather vague point of reference, supposed to encompass all kinds of benevolent drives, neglecting the evidence that beneficence does not always yield good results. So we shall start with some very general remarks about the nature of ethics, with a reminder of the specificity of ethical arguments for helping the poor and with an analysis of some difficulties in reaching this objective. In the second part of this text, we tackle the more concrete ethical dilemmas related to the issue of debt reduction. (shrink)

By now it has been pretty well established that the Flemish Jesuit Leonardus Lessius was an economist of the highest grade. Joseph A. Schumpeter, perhaps the 20th century’s most important historian of economics, afforded Lessius more than ample mention in his monumental work, History of Economic Analysis. In Interest and Usury, Schumpeter’s pupil, Bernard W. Dempsey, likewise gave Lessius generous attention. The Belgian historian Raymond de Roover, however, who considered Lessius to be primarily a deserving epigone of the famous ‘Salamanca (...) School’, did not completely share their enthusiasm, at least initially. De Roover’s somewhat lukewarm attitude was, nevertheless, drowned out by the laudatory contribution of Barry T. Gordon on the subject in his Economic Analysis Before Adam Smith. Robert Beutels brought respect to Lessius’ work in his bio-bibliographical essay published in 1987 and restored something of the honour due to Lessius which, according to Beutels, he had been unjustly denied, certainly in his own land.The image of Lessius presented by all these authors is uncommonly fresh, yet at the same time surprisingly familiar. In their works they have shown him to be a modern thinker who merits comparison with contemporary economists. His analyses give witness to his profound insight into the economy of his day and are still relevant, thought not directly applicable, for economists today. The market principle, portfolio theory, the quantity theory of money, and much more can, according to the authors we have mentioned, be found in Lessius. But does this rather trendy image of Lessius agree with the historical reality?An appropriate way to begin answering this question would be to examine his discussion on the lending of money and the taking of interest in his monumental tractate of 1605, On Justice and Law . Did Lessius endorse or reject the traditional proscription against usury? When did he consider it permissible to claim interest? To what extent did his moral judgment depend on an economic analysis of the phenomenon of interest? Perhaps the answers to these questions will enable us to judge Lessius as both economist and ethicist, as he rightly deserves. (shrink)

Workplace aggression has been established as a prevalent and detrimental issue in organizations. While numerous studies have documented the important role of leaders in inhibiting or accelerating workplace aggression, a systematic overview of the associations between different leadership styles and workplace aggression as well as its boundary conditions is still lacking. This study reports a meta-analysis investigating the associations between leadership and workplace aggression. Drawing on data from 165 samples, our results revealed that change-oriented, relational-oriented, and values-based and moral leadership (...) were associated with reduced workplace aggression. In contrast, passive and destructive leadership were associated with increased workplace aggression. Importantly, relative weights analyses revealed that ethical leadership was most strongly negatively associated with workplace aggression. Additionally, moderation analyses revealed that the associations between leadership and workplace aggression were, in some cases, moderated by power distance and rating sources, but independent of measurement time lag. Overall, the findings of this meta-analysis highlight the important associations between leadership and workplace aggression. Implications for future research and policy recommendations aiming to reduce workplace aggression are discussed. (shrink)

This essay sets up a dialogue between Lefort’s view on the relationship between the state and modern society and Foucault’s thesis of a governmental turn in the modern power regime, whereby the relations between state and society are thoroughly redrawn. What are the main results? 1) Whereas Lefort’s political ontology leaves room for divergent agencies from which the symbolic institution of the social may unfold, his preoccupation with democracy leans him to inseparably link the symbolic institution of modern society with (...) the functioning of the modern state. 2) By contrast, Foucault’s history of governmentality documents a shift from the political and legal power regime to the biopolitical regime. This shift seems to be accompanied by a turn in the regime of the symbolic institution of modern society. Where that institution hitherto relied on the state, today, a symbiosis of state and neoliberal governmentality seems to be taking over. 3) This shift in power regimes brings along major problems. In political respect, it leads to a re-adjustment of the instituting representations of contemporary society, to a depoliticization of political and social relations, and to the erosion of democracy. (shrink)

Ph. Van Parijs argues that there is no contradiction between his real-libertarian legitimation of the highest feasible basic income and his pragmatic plea for a low basic income as an appropriate policy to reduce involuntary unemployment. However, he concedes that some logically possible consequences of the introduction of a basic income — such as a massive withdrawal of women from the labour market — might prompt him to reconsider the view that social justice reduces to „real freedom for all”.

The author's purpose in writing this text was to illustrate the results obtained by jurisprudence within the recent times surrounding publication, to provide a guide for beginners in the study of jurisprudence, & also to present to the reader with the manner of collecting facts & verifying sources for defending their positions.

The theory of reflexive modernization plausibly advocates postnational cosmopolitanism. As the nation state is eroding today, we are becoming citizens of a ‘global risk society’ whose unity and cohesion is generated by the risk that is threatening us world-wide. By the same token, this world risk society is no longer unified in any political sense. There is no world state; its very idea is even rejected. In this sense, the cosmopolitanism argued for in the theory of reflexive modernization proves predominantly (...) to be an extrapolation of civil society on a global scale, while, strictly speaking, having no cosmo‘political’ counterpart. Building on Marcel Gauchet’s political philosophy, the article questions the cosmopolitanism-beyond-the-political position of the theory of reflexive modernization. To do so, it goes substantially into Gauchet’s view of the representational role of the political as an essential dimension in society formation. (shrink)

Populisme. Sinds extreem rechts recent een bepaald soort salonfähigkeit heeft weten te verwerven in het democratische bestel wordt de term door zelfverklaarde democraten te pas en te onpas gehanteerd om bijvoorkeur ‘rechtse’, maar bij uitbreiding ook alle andere tegenstanders te desavoueren die uit zijn op al te gemakkelijk politiek succes. Vanuit dat perspectief veroorzaakt de term ‘populisme’ geen enkel probleem: het is een dankbare politieke diskwalificatie die iedereen graag gebruikt, maar die niemand graag krijgt toebedeeld.

In his Law of Peoples, Rawls severely restricts our duties of justice towards the global poor. Many of his critics have replied that there actually exists a global basic structure and that hence the difference principle applies on a global scale.However the shipwrecked of globalization do not contribute in any substantial way to the creation of global wealth. We show that Martha Nussbaum’s cosmopolitan solution to this problem is unsatisfactory because it ignores scarcity as one of the circumstances of justice.If (...) the marginalized of progress want to raise a claim of justice rather than appeal to our beneficence, they can only do so on the basis of a principle of compensation: their fate has been deteriorated by the development of a global economy they did not ask for. Towards the end of the article we point at some typical blind spots in the treatment of these problems in the literature on international distributive justice: the idea that development problems can be solved merely by transfers of money and the presupposition that the gulf between rich and poor is growing all the time. (shrink)

Why do societies collapse? We use an individual-based evolutionary model to show that, in environmental conditions dominated by low-frequency variation (“red noise”), extirpation may be an outcome of the evolution of cultural capacity. Previous analytical models predicted an equilibrium between individual learners and social learners, or a contingent strategy in which individuals learn socially or individually depending on the circumstances. However, in red noise environments, whose main signature is that variation is concentrated in relatively large, relatively rare excursions, individual learning (...) may be selected from the population. If the social learning system comes to lack sufficient individual learning or cognitively costly adaptive biases, behavior ceases tracking environmental variation. Then, when the environment does change, fitness declines and the population may collapse or even be extirpated. The modeled scenario broadly fits some human population collapses and might also explain nonhuman extirpations. Varying model parameters showed that the fixation of social learning is less likely when individual learning is less costly, when the environment is less red or more variable, with larger population sizes, and when learning is not conformist or is from parents rather than from the general population. Once social learning is fixed, extirpation is likely except when social learning is biased towards successful models. Thus, the risk of population collapse may be reduced by promoting individual learning and innovation over cultural conformity, or by preferential selection of relatively fit individuals as models for social learning. © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Models as Make-Believe offers a new approach to scientific modelling by looking to an unlikely source of inspiration: the dolls and toy trucks of children's games of make-believe.

In this article, I explore what it means to “serve somebody,” drawing from my own experience as a full-time chaplain. Chaplains must serve many different parties, but are ultimately called to care for their patients via a covenental relationship of care.

For the past thirty years, Hal Foster has pushed the boundaries of cultural criticism, establishing a vantage point from which the seemingly disparate agendas of artists, patrons, and critics have a telling coherence. In The Anti-Aesthetic, preeminent critics such as Jean Baudrillard, Rosalind Krauss, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said consider the full range of postmodern cultural production, from the writing of John Cage, to Cindy Sherman's film stills, to Barbara Kruger's collages. With a redesigned cover and a new afterword that (...) situates the book in relation to contemporary criticism, The Anti-Aesthetic provides a strong introduction for newcomers and a point of reference for those already engaged in discussions of postmodern art, culture, and criticism. Includes a new afterword by Hal Foster and 12 black and white photographs. (shrink)

In all the arts a war is being waged between modernists and postmodernists. Radicals have tended to side with the modernists against the forces of conservatism. Postmodern Culture is a break with this tendency. Its contributors propose a postmodernism of resistance - an aesthetic that rejects hierarchy and celebrates diversity. Ranging from architecture, sculpture and painting to music, photography and film, this collection is now recognised as a seminal text on the postmodernism debate.The essays are by Hal Foster, Jürgen Habermas, (...) Kenneth Frampton, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp, Craig Owens, Gregory L. Ulmer, Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, and Edward W. Said. (shrink)

This essay is a review of Ronald Dworkin's recent essay on equality of resources. Many of the ideas discussed by Dworkin have also been examined by economists with, I believe, considerable insight. Unfortunately, economists tend to write for economists, not for philosophers, and their insights are seldom communicated properly to noneconomists. Of course, the same criticism can be levied on philosophers! But perhaps legal theorists are less subject to this criticism. One of the great contributions of Dworkin is that he (...) is very readable; and the quality of his exposition makes these ideas accessible to a wide audience of philosophers, lawyers, and social scientists in general. (shrink)

This article gives an overview of the nursing ethics arguments on euthanasia in general, and on nurses' involvement in euthanasia in particular, through an argument-based literature review. An in-depth study of these arguments in this literature will enable nurses to engage in the euthanasia debate. We critically appraised 41 publications published between January 1987 and June 2007. Nursing ethics arguments on (nurses' involvement in) euthanasia are guided primarily by the principles of respect for autonomy, nonmaleficence, beneficence and justice. Ethical arguments (...) related to the nursing profession are described. From a care perspective, we discuss arguments that evaluate to what degree euthanasia can be considered positively or negatively as a form of good nursing care. Most arguments in the principle-, profession- and care-orientated approaches to nursing ethics are used both pro and contra euthanasia in general, and nurses' involvement in euthanasia in particular. (shrink)

The human loss of the sense of sacred has been driven by a mechanization of the world that privileges the mundane and the material. Yet the earliest surviving history of the human mind reveals a widespread, embodied human faculty for perception of the cosmos and an intimate human relation to the cosmos. This history hints of an origin story that may be partly recovered by sacred relics of human prehistory.

Social insects show us very little about the evolution of complex human society. As more relevant literature demonstrates, ultrasociality is a cause rather than an effect of human social evolution.

In this paper I propose an account of representation for scientific models based on Kendall Walton’s ‘make-believe’ theory of representation in art. I first set out the problem of scientific representation and respond to a recent argument due to Craig Callender and Jonathan Cohen, which aims to show that the problem may be easily dismissed. I then introduce my account of models as props in games of make-believe and show how it offers a solution to the problem. Finally, I demonstrate (...) an important advantage my account has over other theories of scientific representation. All existing theories analyse scientific representation in terms of relations, such as similarity or denotation. By contrast, my account does not take representation in modelling to be essentially relational. For this reason, it can accommodate a group of models often ignored in discussions of scientific representation, namely models which are representational but which represent no actual object. (shrink)

This book develops a new approach to the mind called mental fictionalism. The key idea behind this approach is that the mind is a useful fiction. The book begins with our ordinary conception of the mind (known as folk psychology). At present, the dominant interpretation of folk psychology sees it as an attempt to describe our inner machinery (a view the author calls Cartesianism). The representational theory of mind (or representationalism) argues that our folk theory is true, and that our (...) thoughts (especially our propositional attitudes, such as beliefs and desires) are representations inside our heads. Mental fictionalism offers a new interpretation of folk psychology. According to mental fictionalism, when we attribute beliefs and desires, we do not claim that people have representations inside their heads; we merely pretend that they do. Our ordinary conception of the mind is fundamentally metaphorical: we project the ‘outer world’ of human culture (especially language) onto the ‘inner world’ of the mind. This is an enormously useful way of making sense of people and their behaviour. But we should not forget that this inner world is only a fiction. (shrink)

Mental fictionalism is the view that, even if mental states do not exist, it is useful to talk as if they do. Mental states are useful fictions. Recent philosophy of mind has seen a growing interest in mental fictionalism. To date, much of the discussion has concerned the general features of the approach. In this paper, I develop a specific form of mental fictionalism by drawing on Kendall Walton’s work on make-believe. According to the approach I propose, talk of mental (...) states is a useful pretence for describing people and their behaviour. I try to clarify and motivate this approach by comparing it to well-known alternatives, including behaviourism, instrumentalism and eliminativism. I also consider some of the challenges that it faces. (shrink)