Voluntary management standards for social and environmental performance ideally help to define and improve firms’ related capabilities. These standards, however, have largely failed to improve such performance as intended. Over-emphasis on institutional factors leading to adoption of these standards has neglected the role of firms’ existing capabilities. External pressures can drive firms to adopt standards more than their technical capacity to employ them. This can lead to problems of “fit” between institutional requirements and a firm’s existing capabilities . We describe (...) a conceptual model that considers the impact of an interaction between a firm’s institutional requirements and its existing capabilities on standards failure. We suggest solutions that align institutional requirements to appropriate governance forms as a means to improve standards success. We contribute to theory by describing the role of firms’ internal capabilities to the success of voluntary management standards and the reliability of self-regulation generally. (shrink)
Le socialisme n’est-il pas définitivement dépassé? Soumis au vertige de l’abandon par les tragédies qui se sont faites en son nom, n’est-il pas sans passé dignement revendicable pour une modernité elle-même désorbitée par les inégalités scandaleuses que génère la domination capitaliste?On osera ici une question iconoclaste : y a-t-il encore une actualité du socialisme à...
Qui suis-je? Que suis-je? Les réseaux numériques au sein desquels chacun de nous s’agrège pour communiquer et faire société avec ses semblables nous donnent une clé de ces questions dont nous apprenons à peine à mesurer la complexité. « Cyberespace » se dit métaphoriquement d’un lieu où nous laissons...
Les travaux rassemblés dans cet ouvrage concernent évidemment l'étude de ces thèmes dans l'œuvre de Bachelard, au niveau systématique comme au niveau historique, dans l'analyse comme dans la critique.
De « Star Academy » en « Nouvelle Star », en passant par « Popstars » et quelques autres émissions, promotionnelles de chaînes TV plutôt que de talents à découvrir, souvent entrelardées de prétendues télé-réalité, la chanson serait censée se bien porter si l’on en croit du moins l’inévitable sanction de l’audimat assaisonnée à la non moins incontournable participation..
Dans la galerie des monstres que l’histoire tératologique de la politique développera, une dimension constamment rémane : la sursexualisation du Prince, la déification de et par la puissance virile. Le membre dressé du Prince devient la métaphore euphorique de l’érection d’un pouvoir, son porte-bonheur. Symbole de sa toute-puissance, lieu privilégié de son affirmation, le sexe..
Psience Fiction: The Paranormal in Science Fiction Literature is a book that really needed to be written. In an abundance of hubris I once played with the idea myself. But now Damien Broderick has done it, and much better than I could have even approximated. Given his background as a science fiction literary critic and author himself, no other writer could be better-equipped. Psience Fiction is exactly the right title to encapsulate Broderick’s chosen topic. As he notes in one (...) passage, his purpose here is to explore “the varied representations of the paranormal in science fiction” –though by paranormal he refers neither to ghosts nor mediumship nor UFO-related phenomena, but strictly to “paranormal” as it relates to putative mental powers that transcend the scientifically-presumed, neuro-physical limits of our minds and brains. He refines that still further in noting that what he wants to consider is “...the give and take between the science fiction paranormal and the real-world kind, tested and tallied by psi researchers”. This book is probably most easily described as a book of book reviews. Authors covered run the gamut from Olaf Stapledon, E.E. “Doc” Smith, James Blish and Theodore Sturgeon to Zenna Henderson, John Wyndham, Robert Heinlein, Ann McCaffery, Octavia Butler, and John Brunner, plus many more. For a literary work to be included, it must incorporate some aspect of psi as an integral plot element; a mere mention of extrasensory perception or psychokinesis does not suffice. (shrink)
De beroemde Australische kunstcriticus Robert Hughes verdedigt het onschatbare in de kunst tegen commercie, hype en marketing. In deze Nexus-lezing van 2009 ontmaskert hij nietsontziend hedendaagse iconen als Damien Hirst, Jackson Pollack en Andy Warhol, en verguist hij een markt die de prijzen van kunstwerken tot absurde hoogten doen stijgen. Daartegenover stelt hij datgene wat kunst echt waardevol maakt: de vakmanschap, intensiteit en subtiliteit van waarlijk grote kunstenaars als Vermeer, Rembrandt en Goya.
The latter half of the twentieth century witnessed a growing interest in Buddhism, and it continues to capture the imagination of many in the West who see it as either an alternative or a supplement to their own religious beliefs. Numerous introductory books have appeared in recent years to cater to this growing interest, but almost none devotes attention to the specifically ethical dimensions of the tradition. For various complex cultural and historical reasons, ethics has not received as much attention (...) in traditional Buddhist thought as it has in the West. Written by Damien Keown, one of the few experts worldwide who specializes in the area, Buddhist Ethics illustrates how Buddhism might approach a range of contemporary morals ranging from abortion to euthanasia, sexuality to cloning, and even war and economics. (shrink)
This paper considers the search for the best papers by the editors of an academic journal. At each period, each editor receives a set of submissions and has to decide which paper to accept. Some editors being more demanding than others, researchers choose the quality level of their papers taking as given the composition of the editorial board. According to the specific structures of the editorial board, various equilibria may appear. We show that the journal will publish a high number (...) of high quality papers only when the editorial board is composed by a homogeneous set of very demanding editors. (shrink)
This essay extends the observations made in E. Johanna Hartelius? The rhetoric of expertise about the nature of expertise in digital contexts. I argue that digital media introduce a scale of communication?many-to-many?that reshapes how the invention of knowledge occurs. By examining how knowledge production on Wikipedia occurs, I illustrate how many-to-many communication introduces a new model of ?participatory expertise.? This model of participatory expertise challenges traditional information routines by elevating procedural expertise over subject matter expertise and opening up knowledge production (...) to the many. Additionally, by hosting multiperspectival conversations on Wikipedia, the participatory model of expertise introduces epistemic turbulence into traditionally tranquil encyclopedia culture. (shrink)
‘Among the fine arts, I clearly see something to say only about architecture, sculpture, painting. As for music, dance […], I see nothing’. Tocqueville's observation in the Rubish for the second volume of Democracy in America is not only startling, but theoretically important: it ratifies the liberal separation between musical life and political constitution. This, however, should give us cause to wonder. While in America, Tocqueville and Beaumont had multiple occasions to hear music in public festivals and private spaces. Though (...) other European and highbrow observers also declared American music to be ‘in its infancy’, music nonetheless played a significant part in antebellum social and political life. Nor was Tocqueville insensitive to sound in his relation to others. Indeed, Tocqueville perhaps saw in the demise of music as the art of ‘making harmony’ a symptom of the democratic era. However, like Montesquieu, Tocqueville refused to consider music a constitutive principle of democratic regimes—including in the context of Ancient Greek political theory. In doing so, Tocqueville sharply dissociated himself from republican political theory, but failed to raise the question of music's contribution to the culture and exercise of freedom in the modern era. (shrink)
This article analyzes al-Fārābī's conception of the astronomical method by examining rarely studied texts such as the K. al-mūsīqā and K. al-burhān and by addressing key issues such as the subject matter of astronomy, the techniques used to derive the first principles of this science, the relation between astrology, astronomy, physics, and metaphysics, and the place of al-Fārābī in the Arabic astronomical tradition. The analysis indicates that al-Fārābī's theories combine material from the Greek astronomical tradition, especially Geminus, as well as (...) from the logical works of Aristotle, particularly the Posterior Analytics. Moreover, it enables us to view al-Fārābī as a link between the Greek astronomers on the one hand and Ibn Sīnā and Naşīr al-Dīn al-Tūsī on the other. (shrink)
[Robert Stalnaker] Saul Kripke made a convincing case that there are necessary truths that are knowable only a posteriori as well as contingent truths that are knowable a priori. A number of philosophers have used a two-dimensional model semantic apparatus to represent and clarify the phenomena that Kripke pointed to. According to this analysis, statements have truth-conditions in two different ways depending on whether one considers a possible world 'as actual' or 'as counterfactual' in determining the truth-value of the (...) statement relative to that possible world. There are no necessary a posteriori or contingent a priori propositions: rather, contingent a priori and necessary a posteriori statements are statements that are necessary when evaluated one way, and contingent when evaluated the other way. This paper distinguishes two ways that the two-dimensional framework can be interpreted, and argues that one of them gives the better account of what it means to 'consider a world as actual', but that it provides no support for any notion of purely conceptual a priori truth. /// [Thomas Baldwin] Two-dimensional possible world semantic theory suggests that Kripke's examples of the necessary a posteriori and contingent a priori should be handled by interpreting names as implicitly indexical. Like Stalnaker, I reject this account of names and accept that Kripke's examples have to be accommodated within a metasemantic theory. But whereas Stalnaker maintains that a metasemantic approach undermines the conception of a priori truth, I argue that it offers the opportunity to develop a conception of the a priori aspect of stipulations, conceived as linguistic performances. The resulting position accommodates Kripke's examples in a way which is both intrinsically plausible and fits with Kripke's actual discussion of them. (shrink)
This paper reports on a rhetorical analysis of interviews with fifteen white Australian citizens who had undertaken offshore commercial surrogacy in India. Extending previous research, the findings suggest that genetic relatedness was valorized, and surrogacy constructed as a less tenuous route to family formation. The paper concludes with a discussion of the need for further research on 1) how the contentious nature of offshore commercial surrogacy may prevent full consideration of its ethical implications, 2) the differing belief systems between India (...) and Australia in terms of children as alienable objects, and 3) ongoing consideration of how and when genetic-relatedness is made to matter. (shrink)
In recent years, considerable scholarly attention has been devoted to investigating the influence of Lucretius’ De rerum natura on Vergil. At the same time, the Aeneid has become a central text for the study of the presentation of the emotions in Latin poetry. The author attempts to bring together these two trends in Vergilian scholarship by trying to see if the depiction of emotions in Vergilian epic owes anything to Lucretian precedent. He focuses on the term animus and its use (...) in the opening scenes of the Aeneid. It is an important word in both epics, but it is also notoriously hard to translate accurately. La question de l’influence de la De rerum natura de Lucrèce sur Virgile a depuis quelques années occupé une place importante dans les recherches sur le poète de Mantoue. Parallèlement, l’Enéide est devenu un texte central pour les recherches sur la représentation des émotions dans la poésie latine. Cet article tente, à partir de ces deux approches, de voir si la description des émotions chez Virgile a subi l’influence de Lucrèce. L’emploi du mot ‘animus’ et ses différents emplois au début du premier livre de l’Enéide seront au centre de cette étude. Il s’agit là d’un mot qui, s’il est très important dans les deux épopées, est aussi notoirement très difficile à traduire avec précision. (shrink)
Drawing on Aristotle’s notion of “ultimate responsibility,” Robert Kane argues that to be exercising a free will an agent must have taken some character forming decisions for which there were no sufficient conditions or decisive reasons.<sup>1</sup> That is, an agent whose will is free not only had the ability to develop other dispositions, but could have exercised that ability without being irrational. To say it again, a person has a free will just in case her character is the product (...) of decisions that she could have rationally avoided making. That one’s character is the product of such decisions entails ultimate responsibility for its manifestations, engendering a free will. (shrink)
Among moral attributes true virtue alone is sublime. … [I]t is only by means of this idea [of virtue] that any judgment as to moral worth or its opposite is possible. … Everything good that is not based on a morally good disposition … is nothing but pretence and glittering misery. 1.
This paper argues that econometricians' explicit adoption of identification conditions in structural equation modelling commits them to read the functional form of their equations in a strong, nonmathematical way. This content, which is implicitly attributed to the functional form of structural equations, is part of what makes equation structural. Unfortunately, econometricians are not explicit about the role functional form plays in signifying structural content. In order to remedy this, the second part of this paper presents an interpretation of the functional (...) form based on Herbert Simon 's definition of causal order. This begins to set out just what the functional form of structural equations represents. ‡I would like to thank Nancy Cartwright and attendants at UCSD Graduate Seminar 2006 for helpful comments. I also want to thank the AHRC for supporting the research for this paper. †To contact the author, please write to: Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, London School of Economics, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom; e-mail: d.j.fennell@lse.ac.uk. (shrink)
