In this article I discuss the problem of how we can change our world into a _wiser world_ that is driven by a culture of wisdom inquiry (CWI), i.e., a world that frees humanity from a looming totalitarian catastrophe. How best can we interrogate the traditional wisdom of culture (TWC) that is responsible for the academic institutions of learning, among other kinds of institutions, dogmatically and solely aiming at the acquisition of knowledge and technological prowess (technologisches koennen), (...) instead of the promotion of wisdom and human well-being? What kind of strategic transformations of institutional design, policy and goals within diverse institutions, particularly academic institutions of learning, regionally and globally, are imperative? This article argues from the principle of universal interconnectedness across nature/universe and the fundamental asymmetry of human well-being interests and nature’s well-being interests. From this, the development of a _culture of wisdom inquiry_ as an overarching (allumfassend) methodology of institutional change from within at two levels of analysis is proposed, viz., (1) at the level of the ecological–economic analysis of safeguarding nature’s abundant ecosystems from human greed; and (2) at the level of the transformation of the educational, academic _and_ political–economic institutions, as well as international institutions, that must _be_ dedicated to human well-being. (shrink)

The prevailing model for encouraging innovation based on patents and market-oriented raises at least two economic and ethical issues: it imposes barriers on individuals and developing countries governments' access to medicines by defining prices that do not match their income, and the unavailability of new or appropriate products to address the health problems of these populations. In the last decade, this scenario has undergone some changes due to the emergence of new actors, the contribution of aid resources, the introduction (...) to the market of new products against neglected diseases, the development of new governmental healthcare policies and research programs, etc. One example of such initiatives is the Fixed-Dose Artesunate Combination Therapy (FACT) project consortium, which brought together institutions with different natures from both the North and the South, for the development of two antimalarial fixed-dose combinations recommended by the WHO – artesunate-amodiaquine (ASAQ) and artesunate-mefloquine (ASMQ). This paper proposes to describe and analyze the ASMQ consortium, which is the result of a new pharmaceutical development approach, based on a different paradigm – needs-driven instead of market-driven –, collaborative, with strategic participation of institutions from the South, funded by alternative resources (public and philanthropic). Thus, it represents an interesting object of study for bioethical debates on intellectual property and innovation, and its analysis is justified in light of the current debate on ways of stimulating needs-driven pharmaceutical innovation. (shrink)

This paper examines what managers ought to do when confronted with apparent moral conflicts between their managerial responsibilities and the general requirements of morality, specifically when those conflicts are driven by the institutional environment. I examine Google’s decision to enter the Chinese search engine market as an example of such a conflict. I consider the view that Google’s managers engaged in justifiable moral compromise in making the choice to engage in self-censorship and show how this view depends on (...) the idea of genuine moral dilemmas or irresolvable moral conflicts. I argue that there are serious reasons to doubt the existence of genuine moral dilemmas both in the abstract, as well as in the context of managerial responsibility. I propose an alternative account for what Google’s managers ought to do, as well as others who face relevantly similar situations. The account contains two conditions for permissibly contributing to another party’s failure to live up to their moral responsibilities. The first condition is that the manager must intend and act in such a way as to minimize the firm’s complicity in the other entity or actor’s failure, which in most cases will imply a duty for the manager to take actions that aim towards changing the institutional context. Under the second condition, managers ought to communicate to the firm’s constituents that they take seriously the importance of the interests at stake. (shrink)

Heterogeneous institutional investors' shareholding preferences have been driven to change by the deepening of ESG investment philosophy. Therefore, we examine the impact of corporate ESG performance on institutional investors' shareholding preferences and its mechanism of action. We conduct mixed OLS and mediation effect tests using data on ESG responsibility scores and institutional investors' shareholding ratios of A-share listed companies in China from 2010 to 2020 as samples. We find that corporate ESG performance can significantly and robustly increase institutional investors' (...) shareholdings; the mediation effect analysis shows that overall corporate ESG performance contributes to increases in corporate book and market values, thus encouraging institutional investors to increase their shareholdings. The heterogeneity analysis shows that independent institutional investors attach more importance to corporate ESG responsibility performance, and long-term institutional investors attach more importance to corporate environmental performance; moreover, institutional investors have more significant ESG shareholding preferences for Chinese SOEs. Our study can strengthen the encouragement of institutional investors to integrate ESG investment concepts from multiple perspectives, such as research and analysis, portfolio management, risk control, and due diligence management, to design and develop targeted ESG investment tools, give full play to the role of shareholders and guide the sound development of listed companies from the perspective of investment strategy objectives. (shrink)

Professional institutions are increasingly confronted by fiscal constraints and political pressures to improve and increase their accountability in a competitive consumer-driven market. Accordingly, the need to ensure efficiency and accountability is of strategic importance. This article reports on a qualitative study of medical professionals that assessed the utility of financial incentives and external control methods derived from agency theory to ensure accountability of professionals. The authors argue that approaches derived from stewardship and institutional theories can extend the (...) principal–agent perspective to sustain greater social and ethical accountability. (shrink)

This paper brings about a conversation between Schumpeterian and Polanyian perspectives on markets and their central role in the capitalist economy. For Schumpeter, markets were critical to the process of selftransformation of economic activity, but in his vision, markets as such were largely taken for granted. Markets enabled the introduction of new processes and products equally as well as rendering economic activities obsolete, with the entrepreneur and firm as agents of change, generating new combinations of activities and driven by (...) the creative power of knowledge. Innovation and markets are jointly the engines of endogenous growth. For Karl Polanyi, by contrast, although markets were the central feature of the capitalist economy from the beginning of the nineteenth century, his main interest is the constant impulse for markets as institutions to expand into every aspect of social life and the countermovement of regulation to restrain what he sees as their essentially destructive nature. His focus is therefore on markets as instituted economic processes, driven by the double movement of regulation and de-regulation. He scarcely considers innovation in production or consumption, concentrating on institutions of exchange and distribution. The paper explores the two perspectives in order to ask the question that their confrontation raises: What is the relation between intra-market endogenous change and marketframework institutional change? To test out each perspective, a schematic “long-duration” empirical account of the United Kingdom food distribution markets is subjected to a Schumpeterian and Polanyian reading, and each is exposed for complementary deficits. A broader explanatory framework is sketched that proposes analysis of innovation in market institutions--especially processes exchange and distribution-- in combination with innovation in production and consumption. It is suggested that to explore the constant change of capitalist economies, these four economic domains each involve different orders of innovation and transformation that have complex feedbacks and interactions with each other. Rather than according primacy to one or other order of change, we require a complex causal account embracing multiple instituted economic processes.Cet article discute de la vision des marchés et de leur rôle central dans l’économie capitaliste selon Schumpeter et Polanyi. Pour Schumpeter, les marchés sont essentiels au processus d’auto transformation de l’activité économique, mais dans son approche il présuppose l’existence des marchés. Les marchés permettent l’introduction de nouveaux processus et produits et rendent en même temps les activités économiques obsolètes. Les marchés, avec l’entrepreneur et la firme comme agents du changement, créent de nouvelles combinaisons d’activités et sont dynamisés par le pouvoir créatif de la connaissance. L’innovation et les marchés sont conjointement les moteurs de la croissance endogène. Chez Karl Polanyi, en revanche, bien que les marchés soient un élément central de l’économie capitaliste dès le début du 19ème siècle, l’attention se porte sur le mouvement permament des marchés-institutions à s’étendre à tous les domaines de la vie sociale ainsi que sur le contre-mouvement de la régulation à limiter ce que Polanyi considère comme la nature destructrice des marchés. Son interêt se porte ainsi aux marchés comme des processus économiques établis, conduits par un double mouvement de régulation et de dérégulation. Il ne considère que rarement l’innovation de production ou de consommation, et se concentre sur les institutions de l’échange et de la distribution.L’article explore les deux visions afin de sinterroger sur ce que la confrontation des approches soulève comme question: Quelle est la relation entre les changements endogènes intra marché et les changements institutionnels de la structure de marché? Pour tester chacune des visions, un compte-rendu empirique sur longue période de la distribution alimentaire au Royaume-Uni est soumis à une lecture Schumpeterienne et Polanyienne.Un cadre explicatif plus large est esquissé et suggère une analyse de l’innovation des institutions de marché - particulièrement des processus d’échange et de distribution - conjointement à l’innovation de production et de consommation. Il est suggéré que pour analyser le changement permanent des économies capitalistes, il faut considérer les ordres d’innovation et de transformation de ces quatres domaines économiques qui connaissent des “effets de retour” ainsi des interactions. Au lieu d’accorder la primauté à un des ordres de changement, il est nécessaire de rendre compte d’une causalité complexe qui prend en compte des processus économiques multiples. (shrink)

Issues of institutional identity and integrity in Roman Catholic health care institutions have been addressed at the level of individual institutions as well as by organizations of Catholic health care providers and at various levels in the Church hierarchy. The papers by Carol Taylor, C.S.F.N, Thomas Shannon, Kevin O’Rourke, O.P., Gerard Magill in this volume provide a significant contribution to concerns of Roman Catholic health care institutions as they face the challenges of providing health care in a (...) secular, pluralistic, market-driven economy. One way to understand institutional integrity is as a measure of the coherence between what an institution identifies as its commitments (its stated moral character), what an institution does (its manifest moral character) and an institution’s fundamental moral commitments (its deep moral character). The essays in this volume support this model of integrity. Although it is not their explicit focus, the four essays together provide a vision of institutional integrity for Catholic health care institutions. Each author focuses on one of the three central aspects of integrity: what one identifies as one’s commitments (Taylor), how one's actions reflect one’s values (Shannon and Magill), and what one is or what one values at a deep level (O’Rourke). I will offer a brief overview of the ways in which the integrity of Catholic health care institutions has been addressed. Then I will consider the four essays and show how each offers an analysis of one of the three critical elements of integrity. (shrink)

The chapter sets forth a conceptual model of a comparative institutional approach to law and economics that can help make the meaningful alternatives known to society. The driving force behind such an approach is the need to come to grips with the interrelations between legal and economic processes. Consistent with the thrust of old and new institutional economics, institutional structure cannot merely be assumed away or taken as given; rather, institutions must be the subject of study involving a comparison (...) of the effects of institutional alternatives on our environment, natural resources, and use of land. The chapter includes a discussion of the i) constitutional, ii) institutional, and iii) economic-impact stages of choice, focusing on four different means of social control that serve to allocate society’s scarce resources, namely the market sector, the public sector, the communal sector, and the openaccess resource sector. Environmental, natural resource, and land-use examples are included in the analysis of each stage of choice in exploring the consequences of fashioning remedies within the market sector, the public sector, the communal sector, or leaving resources in the open-access resource sector. It presents a perspective that avoids the rhetorical policy stance of “government versus the market” by showing that economic performance is driven by i) law, ii) technology and iii) social norms. In this, the state stands as an essential complement to the market sector, the public sector, and the communal sector and not a substitute for them; each exists through the active role of government not by government forbearance.Ce chapitre présente un modèle conceptuel d’une approche institutionnelle comparative en analyse économique du droit, aidant à faire connaître d’autres alternatives à la société. Cette approche permettra d’approfondir, les interrelations entre les processus économiques et juridiques. Selon les principes de l’ancienne et de la nouvelle économie institutionnelle, la structure des institutions ne peut pas être supposée donnée ou absente de l’analyse. Plutôt, les institutions doivent être l’objet d’étude, et l’on doit s’attacher à comparer les effets des différentes alternatives sur l’environnement, les ressources naturelles et l’utilisation de la terre. Ce chapitre contient une discussion des étapes de choix constitutionnels, institutionnels et des impacts économiques. Il se concentre sur quatre moyens différents de contrôle social, qui servent à allouer des ressources rares de la société, notamment le marché, le secteur public, le secteur de communautés, le secteur des ressources d’accès libre. Les exemples environnementaux, ceux des ressources naturelles, et de l’utilisation des terres sont considérés dans l’analyse de chacune des étapes de choix, en analysant les conséquences de la confection de remèdes au sein respectivement, du secteur de marché, du secteur public, du secteur des communautés, ou lorsque l’on laisse libre les ressources du secteur d’accès libre. Il fournit une perspective qui évite les positions rhétoriques de politiques “Etat versus marché” en montrant que la performance économique est liée au droit, à la technologie et aux normes sociales. Dans cette perspective, l’Etat est considéré comme un complément essentiel du marché, du secteur public, du secteur communal et non comme un substitut; chacun de ces secteurs existe à travers le rôle actif de l’Etat. (shrink)

In recent decades, the governance of food safety, food quality, on-farm environmental management and animal welfare has been shifting from the realm of ‘the government’ to that of the private sector. Corporate entities, especially the large supermarkets, have responded to neoliberal forms of governance and the resultant ‘hollowed-out’ state by instituting private standards for food, backed by processes of certification and policed through systems of third party auditing. Today’s food regime is one in which supermarkets impose ‘private standards’ along the (...) food supply chain to ensure compliance with a range of food safety goals—often above and beyond those prescribed by government. By examining regulatory governance in Australia, Norway and the United Kingdom we highlight emerging trajectories of food governance. We argue that the imposition of the new private forms of monitoring and compliance continue the project of agricultural restructuring that began with government support for structural adjustment schemes in agriculture and that these are most evident in the UK and Australia where neoliberalism is an entrenched philosophy. However, despite Norway’s identity as a social democracy, we also identify neoliberal ‘creep’ into the system of food governance. Small-scale producers in all three nations are finding themselves increasingly subject to governance through private, market-based mechanisms that, to varying degrees, are dominated by major supermarket chains. The result is agricultural restructuring not through the traditional avenues of elected governments, but via non-elected market operatives. (shrink)

This paper offers insights into corporate social responsibility (CSR) consulting in Greece. It sheds light on perspectives of how socially responsible business conduct is shaped by consultancies in a national business environment where such an essential aspect of organizational commitment and behavior exhibits comparatively little resonance among companies and is primarily induced by supranational and international policy schemes as well as foreign competitors. Drawing from long interviews with consulting professionals, we explore key topics: the domestic CSR (consulting) industry's characteristics, issues (...) pertaining to the engagement with clients, the endorsement of CSR standards and initiatives, along with the consultants' perspective on institutional dynamics and their prospects with respect to the future of CSR in Greece. In this context, we aim to indicate trends on CSR implementation, pressures exerted on consultants, and managerial attitudes towards corporate responsibility. Our findings illustrate an oligopolistically structured market that encourages consultancies to compete intensely, the consultants' limited capacity to influence the business behavior of their clients, with the latter to adopt a promotional communicative approach to CSR, as well as a lack of institutional coordination and mechanisms that will materially embed social responsibility in the strategic management of business. (shrink)

UK universities have gone through drastic changes driven by the marketization of higher education. From the perspective of critical discourse analysis, Fairclough hypothesizes that university discourse will be colonized by business discourse. While a number of studies have been conducted, to my knowledge no study has compared university discourse and business discourse both synchronically and diachronically. This article compares how employer organizations are discursively constructed synchronically and diachronically in 240 academic and business job advertisements. The analytical frameworks are transitivity (...) analysis and modality. The results indicate that academic job advertisements have changed from not mentioning organizations to discursively constructing organizations in a promotional manner like business job advertisements. In addition, universities reframe themselves as businesses, entrepreneurs and service providers. This article contends that universities should be selective in adopting business discourse and maintain their identity as educational institutions. (shrink)

The retirement village sector1 is one part of the increasingly marketized `aged-care' services in New Zealand and in many other parts of the industrialized world. While critical researchers have examined organizational and residents' representations of aging, retirement, and retirement communities in the context of `the market', there is no research that examines communication related to residents' enactment of participation within these settings with respect to these processes of marketization. We aim to refine, complicate, and extend what we might call (...) `the marketization thesis' through this study that examines resident participation within retirement communities. This essay is based on a comparative examination of two major New Zealand retirement community organizations. The rhetorical and critical discourse analysis reveals the complexity of what `participation' means for the residents within the context of an institution that is in transition from a medicalized to a marketized model of service delivery. Through a close examination of these meanings, we offer new insights into issues of individual action and freedom within the frame of a market-driven and avowedly `customer-centred' organization and consequently suggest a reconsideration of participation in organizations in which clients are also `insiders'. (shrink)

Environmental pollution has become a serious challenge in emerging markets. Using a unique survey of privately owned enterprises in China, this paper investigates how polluting firms respond to institutional pressures. We find that polluting firms conform to external pressures by combining relational activities and clean technology investments. However, some polluting firms alleviate regulative pressures by bribing government officials, which represents an unethical relational strategy to manage political relationship. We further analyze the contingency on firm-level political connection and local institutional conditions. (...) Political connection buffers firms from institutional demand and demotivates firms’ willingness to respond to institutional pressures; stronger local civic activism and better bureaucratic governance curb the pollution-driven bribery, but they are not strong enough to enhance environmentally friendly practices. Collectively, our study demonstrates how polluting firms navigate institutional pressures in emerging markets, and it particularly highlights the pollution-driven bribery as an obstacle to sustainability. (shrink)

This mixed-methods case study describes the experiences of a rural health organization in Canada that was a pioneer in undergoing institutionally driven radical change. This change was advocated by senior managers and physicians with the strong backing of the government. The senior managers and physicians made a strong case for the radical change and argued that a focus on efficiency and wellness would lead to improved service and quality of patient-care. However, this radical change initiative was resisted by nurses (...) and support staff who perceived that these changes were being driven by market-based institutional logics and questioned their ethical appropriateness in a public system. They also expressed a lack of trust given the large-scale layoffs in a prior restructuring. These findings run counter to extant theory by highlighting the role of agency despite institutional pressures. Specifically, change implementers not only face the burden of justifying ethical appropriateness of institutional logics, but also are required to engage in persuasive discourse that these institutional logics protect the interests of the members. (shrink)

This paper aims to contribute to a greater understanding of the theory of virtue ethics and its applications in the business arena. In contrast to other prominent approaches to ethics, virtue ethics provides a useful perspective in making sense of various business ethics issues with an emphasis on the moral character of the individuals and its transformational influences in driving ethical business conduct. Building on Geoff Moore’s :19–32, 2002; Bus Ethics Q 15:237–255, 2005; Bus Ethics Q 18:483–511, 2008) treatment of (...) Alasdair MacIntyre’s practice–institution schema, the paper discusses how individuals, as moral agents, can serve to promote virtuous business conduct and help foster a moral and ethical climate in the organization and in society at large. Using interview data from a broader study of the New Zealand wine industry as explanatory examples, the paper argues that while many companies’ sustainable practices are still largely market based, such excellent business practices are often driven by individuals’ moral and ethical pursuits. (shrink)

What role did women play in the pre-industrial European economy? Was it brought about by biology, culture, social institutions, or individual choices? And what were its consequences - for women, for men, for society at large? Women were key to the changes in the European economy between 1600 and 1800 that paved the way for industrialization. But we still know little about this female 'shadow economy' - and nothing quantitative or systematic.This book tackles these questions in a new way. (...) It uses a unique micro-level database and rich qualitative sources to illuminate women's contribution to a particular pre-industrial economy: the German state of Württemberg, which was in many ways typical of early modern Europe. Markets expanded here between 1600 and 1800, opening opportunities outside the household for both women and men. But they were circumscribed by strong 'social networks' - local communities and rural guilds with state support. Modern political scientists have praised social networks for generating 'social capital' - shared norms and collective sanctions which benefit network insiders, and sometimes the whole society. But this book reveals the dark side of 'social capital': insiders excluded and harmed outsiders, especially women, to the detriment of the economy at large.Early modern European economies differed widely in their restrictions on the role of women. But the monocausal approaches that dominate the existing literature cannot explain these differences. This book proposes an alternative approach driven by the decision individual women themselves made as they negotiated a wide array of constraints and pressures. We are not only brought closer to the 'bitter living' pre-industrial women scraped together, but find out how it came to be so bitter, and how restrictions on women inflicted a bitter living on everyone. (shrink)

It is believed in many studies that the servitization of manufactures is driven by internal economy, but the situation in China may be somewhat different. In this study, we consider the influence of external institutional environment on manufacturers’ servitization and the final performance, and discuss the moderating effect of organizational identity orientation on firms’ response to external institutional pressures. We conduct a survey where we collect responses from 312 manufacturers in China. Regression analyses are performed to test whether institutional (...) pressures coming from the external institutional environment have a positive effect on the level of manufacturing servitization or not. Moreover, we study if this positive effect is moderated by the individualistic identity orientation and the relational identity orientation. We also examine the impact of servitization strategy on manufacture’s market performance and financial performances. Furthermore, we separate out the influences comes from institutional pressures by using a new estimated method and try to explain the cause of “servitization paradox.” Our study is innovative in that it bridges the servitization and institutional theory, and provides practical guidance for the adoption of manufacturing servitization strategy. (shrink)

This article offers an institutional explanation for the conflicting trends in income inequality both across the Eurozone and within its member states. It argues that the euro’s introduction created different economic policy incentives for peripheral and core members. First, the euro’s design was a political choice skewed toward deflationary adjustment policies in hard times, leading to falling incomes and employment in the periphery. Second, the institutional incentives of the Eurozone are the opposite for export-driven coordinated market economies and (...) demand-led mixed market economies during booms and downturns, respectively. During the euro crisis, the Eurozone’s Northern countries gained at the expense of the Southern ones, while at the same time seeing lower domestic inequality compared to increased inequality in the periphery. This diverging pattern of European inequality was exacerbated by EU economic policy drift, the lack of any real national democratic choice in the periphery, and the growing importance of organized financial interests in Brussels. (shrink)

This paper explores a neglected normative dimension of algorithmic opacity in the workplace and the labor market. It argues that explanations of algorithms and algorithmic decisions are of noninstrumental value. That is because explanations of the structure and function of parts of the social world form the basis for reflective clarification of our practical orientation toward the institutions that play a central role in our life. Using this account of the noninstrumental value of explanations, the paper diagnoses distinctive (...) normative defects in the workplace and economic institutions which a reliance on AI can encourage, and which lead to alienation. (shrink)

Islamic Financial Institutions have recently witnessed remarkable growth driven by their holistic business model. The key differentiator of IFIs is their Shari’a-based business proposition which often requires some financial sacrifices, e.g. being ethical, responsible and philanthropic. It also requires them to refrain from investments in tobacco, alcohol, pornography or earning interest. For IFIs’ sponsors and managers, however, the key motivational factor for entering the Islamic financial market is not the achievement of Shari’a objectives through the holistic business (...) model, but rather the urge to tap this highly profitable market where customers are inclined to pay a premium for Shari’a compliance. In order for IFIs to be accepted by the market, their financial instruments need to be approved by Shari’a scholars, known for their integrity and expertise in Shari’a. One can therefore expect potential tensions between IFIs’ managers and Shari’a scholars. The purpose of this research is to probe the hidden struggle between managers and Shari’a scholars in pursuit of their respective objectives. The study investigates this phenomenon using grounded theory as a methodological framework based on data collected from three IFIs from two countries. The findings reveal that Shari’a scholars and managers of IFIs have divergent objectives, which creates incongruence of objectives at the strategic level. The findings illustrate the tension and latent struggle for Shari’a compliance, which has been termed as ‘Fatwa Repositioning’ resulting in four possible consequences: deep, reasonable, minimum and superficial Shari’a compliance. Fatwa Repositioning is the core category of this study, which exhibits how managers and Shari’a scholars struggle to position the Shari’a compliance of their institutions so as to best serve their respective objectives. Interestingly, Shari’a scholars are seemingly not always in control of what they are supposed to be controlling, i.e. Shari’a compliance. (shrink)

This paper argues that the introduction of access agreements following the establishment of the Office for Fair Access (OFFA) has consolidated how English higher education institutions (HEIs) position themselves in the marketplace in relation to widening participation. However, the absence of a national bursary scheme has led to obfuscation rather than clarification from the perspective of the consumer. This paper analyses OFFA's 2008 monitoring report and a sample of twenty HEIs' original 2006 and revised or updated access agreements (2008) (...) to draw conclusions about the impact of these agreements on notions of 'fair access' and widening participation. The authors conclude that, unsurprisingly in an increasingly market-driven system, institutions use access agreements primarily to promote enrolment to their own programmes rather than to promote system-wide objectives. As a consequence of this marketing focus, previous differences between pre-1992 and post-1992 institutions in relation to widening participation and fair access are perpetuated, leading to both confusion for consumers and an inequitable distribution of bursary and other support mechanisms for the poorest applicants to HE. (shrink)

The past two decades have witnessed the emergence of corporateassociation- and standards-based forms of environmental selfregulation. Private environmental governance is commonly presented as being a market-driven phenomenon. Firms seek to manage their environmental impacts as a means of achieving cost-based or differentiation-based advantages. Yet, these innovations are necessarily embedded in the regulatory policies and institutions of nation states and thus subject to the dynamics of regulatory change. Historically, economic crises have stimulated significant regulatory changes that have, more (...) often than not, resulted in an expansion of public regulation and a diminution of self-regulation. This Article considers the ramifications of the global financial crisis for the development of private environmental governance. (shrink)

What explains Germany’s exceptional labor market performance during the Great Recession of 2008-09? Contrary to accounts that emphasize employment protection legislation or government policy, this article argues that actions by firms—embedded in ever-changing coordinative institutional structures—were crucial. Firms chose to keep rather than shed labor, a strategy induced by a “toolkit” of flexible labor market instruments that had evolved incrementally over the past thirty years; wage restraint and successful internal restructuring of firms during the past decade, which fueled (...) an export boom before the crisis. Firms thus had some margin for maneuver, using internal flexibility to protect their investment in skilled workers. These and other institutional changes driven by firms reflect a process of successful adaptation to external economic challenges, but did not fundamentally undermine Germany’s coordinated form of capitalism. The result is not a new German model that was purposefully designed; instead German firms slowly discovered new ways to cope with economic challenges. (shrink)

This essay analyzes neo-liberal economic agreements and legal and political frameworks or what has been called the “new constitutionalism,” a governance framework that empowers market forces to reshape economic and social development worldwide. The article highlights some consequences of new constitutionalism for caring institutions specifically, and for what feminists call social reproduction more generally: the biological reproduction of the species; the reproduction of labor power; and the reproduction of social institutions and processes associated with the creation and (...) maintenance of communities. New constitutional governance frameworks fundamentally reshape conditions under which the care of human beings takes place. Caring institutions once governed by enabling professions geared to universal care are now determined increasingly by market values and private forces, and driven directly by the profit motive. This is one of the reasons why neo-liberalism is increasingly contested in both the North and the global South. (shrink)

Technology transfer is a multi-level process of communication involving a variety of senders and receivers of ideas and materials. As a response to market failure, or as an effort to accelerate market-driven social change, technology transfer may combine public and private aparatus or rely solely on public institutional mechanisms to identify, develop, and deliver innovations and information. Technology transfer institutions include universities, government ministries, research institutes, and what may be termed the ‘project sector’. Four farm- and (...) village-level change models are considered: traditional community development, adoption-diffusion, training and Visit Extension, and Farming Systems Research. The challenges to technology transfer efforts center on developing indigenous capacity to generate and adapt agricultural technology to local conditions. This is the primary objective of technology transfer in agriculture and the basis for advancing rural development. (shrink)

Intelligence on mass media audiences was founded on representative statistical samples, analysed by statisticians at the market departments of media corporations. The techniques for aggregating user data in the age of pervasive and ubiquitous personal media build on large aggregates of information analysed by algorithms that transform data into commodities. While the former technologies were built on socio-economic variables such as age, gender, ethnicity, education, media preferences, Big Data technologies register consumer choice, geographical position, web movement, and behavioural information (...) in technologically complex ways that for most lay people are too abstract to appreciate the full consequences of. The data mined for pattern recognition privileges relational rather than demographic qualities. We argue that the agency of interpretation at the bottom of market decisions within media companies nevertheless introduces a ‘heuristics of the algorithm’, where the data inevitably becomes translated into social categories. In the paper we argue that although the promise of algorithmically generated data is often implemented in automated systems where human agency gets increasingly distanced from the data collected, one can observe a felt need among media users and among industry actors to ‘translate back’ the algorithmically produced relational statistics into ‘traditional’ social parameters. The tenacious social structures within the advertising industries work against the techno-economically driven tendencies within the Big Data economy. (shrink)

La doctrine de l'État de Cari Schmitt, souvent délaissée au profit d'autres facettes de son œuvre, constitue pourtant le lieu où s'incarnent ses théories du politique et de la Constitution. Le juriste allemand y consigne les bouleversements institutionnels traversés par l'Allemagne au XXe siècle. En 1914, il pense encore l'État dans sa conformité à la légalité, alors qu'à la chute de l'Empire, il ne considère les organes étatiques que dans leur usage de la décision et leur aptitude à affronter les (...) situations d'exception. Dans une perspective inédite, à partir d'une étude systématique de ses écrits relatifs à l'État, cet ouvrage relie la théologie politique de Schmitt, son anti-individualisme, comme sa définition singulière du politique, à ses propositions de refonte des institutions. La reconstitution de sa doctrine de l'État éclaire d'un jour nouveau l'affrontement entre ses partisans et ses adversaires et explique, malgré les compromissions avérées de Cari Schmitt avec le nazisme, la persistance de sa pensée dans la vie intellectuelle après Nuremberg. (shrink)

The National Science Foundation's Second Merit Criterion, or Broader Impacts Criterion , was introduced in 1997 as the result of an earlier Congressional movement to enhance the accountability and responsibility as well as the effectiveness of federally funded projects. We demonstrate that a robust understanding and appreciation of NSF BIC argues for a broader conception of research ethics in the sciences than is currently offered in Responsible Conduct of Research training. This essay advocates augmenting RCR education with training regarding broader (...) impacts. We demonstrate that enhancing research ethics training in this way provides a more comprehensive understanding of the ethics relevant to scientific research and prepares scientists to think not only in terms of responsibly conducted science, but also of the role of science in responding to identified social needs and in adhering to principles of social justice. As universities respond to the mandate from America COMPETES to “provide training and oversight in the responsible and ethical conduct of research”, we urge institutions to embrace a more adequate conception of research ethics, what we call the Ethical Dimensions of Scientific Research, that addresses the full range of ethical issues relevant to scientific inquiry, including ethical issues related to the broader impacts of scientific research and practice. (shrink)

Psychiatry is rapidly adopting digital phenotyping and artificial intelligence/machine learning tools to study mental illness based on tracking participants’ locations, online activity, phone and text message usage, heart rate, sleep, physical activity, and more. Existing ethical frameworks for return of individual research results (IRRs) are inadequate to guide researchers for when, if, and how to return this unprecedented number of potentially sensitive results about each participant’s real-world behavior. To address this gap, we convened an interdisciplinary expert working group, supported by (...) a National Institute of Mental Health grant. Building on established guidelines and the emerging norm of returning results in participant-centered research, we present a novel framework specific to the ethical, legal, and social implications of returning IRRs in digital phenotyping research. Our framework offers researchers, clinicians, and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) urgently needed guidance, and the principles developed here in the context of psychiatry will be readily adaptable to other therapeutic areas. (shrink)

A major approach to the ethics of artificial intelligence is to use social choice, in which the AI is designed to act according to the aggregate views of society. This is found in the AI ethics of “coherent extrapolated volition” and “bottom–up ethics”. This paper shows that the normative basis of AI social choice ethics is weak due to the fact that there is no one single aggregate ethical view of society. Instead, the design of social choice AI faces three (...) sets of decisions: standing, concerning whose ethics views are included; measurement, concerning how their views are identified; and aggregation, concerning how individual views are combined to a single view that will guide AI behavior. These decisions must be made up front in the initial AI design—designers cannot “let the AI figure it out”. Each set of decisions poses difficult ethical dilemmas with major consequences for AI behavior, with some decision options yielding pathological or even catastrophic results. Furthermore, non-social choice ethics face similar issues, such as whether to count future generations or the AI itself. These issues can be more important than the question of whether or not to use social choice ethics. Attention should focus on these issues, not on social choice. (shrink)

Some institutional investors are exposed to social norms and public scrutiny. Prior research indicates that these norm-constrained institutions engage in negative screening and invest less in firms operating in ‘sin’ industries. We examine whether social norms also motivate these institutions to engage in positive screening—where they invest more in firms with better corporate social responsibility performance—and CSR-related activism—where they promote improvements in the CSR of existing investees. We find that firms with superior CSR performance have greater ownership by (...) norm-constrained institutions, consistent with positive screening, and we use a natural experiment to establish causality. We also find that increases in the shareholdings of norm-constrained institutions are associated with subsequent improvements in CSR, consistent with activism. Further, we rule out an alternative explanation for our results where the positive screening and activism are ‘profit-driven’ rather than driven by social pressure. Thus, our results suggest that the influence of social norms on stock markets is more pervasive than documented in the prior literature. (shrink)

At the centre of discussion lies the reception of Plato’s philosophy, particularly his theory of Ideas, in Kant’s moral philosophy, his ethics and his doctrine of right. Kant saw himself as a follower of Platonism insofar as its anti-empiri­cist principles of human conduct are concerned, although his own version of practical rationalism differs considerably from Plato’s. This is also true of Kant’s conception of freedom and of human rights. The greatest impact on Kant’s moral philosophy is due to the doctrine (...) of the two worlds, the mundus sensibilis and the mundus intelligibilis, which did not originate in Plato himself, but in the Jewish Platonist Philo of Alexandria. Kant reinterpreted this doctrine by taking the intelligible world as a moral world consisting of free rational agents who ought to transform the empirical world of human society and history according to the norms and standards of moral laws. This was meant to be a programme for a moral reform of the human world, both with regard to individual moral­ity and to the cosmopolitical task of the establishment of an international order of legal institutions. Kant’s practical Platonism insists on the creation of a moral world order through human actions that take their lead from pure practical reason. (shrink)

Institutional religious structures are the most damaged in an industrialized society, and in postmodern times, instead of rectifying these harms in religious structures, the individual’s quest for meaning is becoming more and more unstable by various religious groups, new religious movements, or the blows of an aggressively and persistently secularist world. Even instability or the possibility of reduction in their field of power has given institutional religions sufficient reason to intensify their efforts to preserve their normative measurements and to protect (...) their existing allies with an attempt to return to their old glorious days, driven by utopian optimism. However, among these movements which are institutional religions with their normative structures, settled organizations, experiences dating back to ancient times and followers reaching up to billions, pure and non-political religious and energetic groups that claim to meet the expectations of millennium or the phenomenon of deism and atheism claiming secular and superficial answers to individual’s postmodern search of meaning. The question of which one will be victorious in this field of battle has not been able to be answered yet. Probably, it will be the correct analysis of target group, convenience of methods to reach the receiver and the opponents’ relative endurance in this global war in a market, which is liable to the capitalist market conditions to the end to determine the result. It is essential that Islamic societies prepare for a healthy future with their own and objective evaluations in order to survive in this struggle. The study, using literature review and meta-synthesis methods, aims to make inferences about the future of perceptions of religiosity in Islamic societies. (shrink)

Fernand Dumont (1927-1997) was a sociologist, philosopher, theologian, and poet. A prominent intellectual in Quebec, he is recognized for his research on the sociology of knowledge and the foundations of modern culture. Dumont's work conceives of culture in terms of both memory and distance, arguing that without culture, man would be immersed in the monotony of his present actions, never achieving the distance necessary to create a past or a future. In Fernand Dumont: A Sociologist Turns to Theology, Gregory (...) class='Hi'>Baum interprets Dumont's L'institution de la théologie, which studies the assumptions and commitments implicit in the rational reflection of Catholic thinkers on the meaning of their faith. Baum shows that while Dumont's book is preoccupied with the theoretical, its methodology is informed by the cognitive presuppositions of the social sciences, and its contents - dealing with the spiritual, personal, and social struggles that constitute daily life - are concrete. For Dumont religious truth is insufficient, and may have no impact on everyday life. What counts is relevance, insights that reply to urgent questions and unresolved conflicts. He offers an innovative interpretation of Catholicism that is faithful to the Gospel and relevant to the problems of modern life and the serious questions Quebecers are asking themselves. In Fernand Dumont: A Sociologist Turns to Theology, Baum elucidates Dumont's main ideas and connects the concerns of the Christian gospel with those of contemporary society. (shrink)

Delaware’s famous corporate law and its highly respected specialized Court of Chancery attract entrepreneurs from all over the world, who choose the small state as their locus of incorporation and litigation forum, and global investors who choose Delaware law as the law governing their corporate investments and mergers and acquisitions. Other jurisdictions vie with Delaware in regard to these choices. This interjurisdictional competition makes Delaware a significant global norm exporter in the field of corporate law because jurisdictions emulate some of (...) its corporate law. Israel leads the global pack. For two decades, it has been approximating its corporate law to Delaware’s and emulating its principal institutions, including by establishing a specialized Chancery-like court whose judges seek guidance in Delaware’s case law in deciding open corporate law questions. This Article employs qualitative methods—interviews with M&A practitioners from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel. We use the interviews to assess whether the project of approximating Delaware corporate law has succeeded in shifting incorporation decision preferences away from Delaware to Israel and watering down the natural reluctance of global investors to accepting an unfamiliar corporate law when engaging in cross-border corporate M&A transactions involving an Israeli party. Our findings indicate that the approximation project has countervailing effects, opinions about its success being polarized and nuanced; that approximation increases the familiarity of domestic practitioners with the foreign law being emulated, making the emulated law easier to implement; and that approximation creates more room for other aspects of interjurisdictional competition to influence private choices. (shrink)

The modern slavery literature engages with history in an extremely limited fashion. Our paper demonstrates to the utility of historical research to modern slavery researchers by explaining the rise and fall of the ethics-driven market category of “free-grown sugar” in nineteenth-century Britain. In the first decades of the century, the market category of “free-grown sugar” enabled consumers who were opposed to slavery to pay a premium for a more ethical product. After circa 1840, this market category (...) disappeared, even though considerable quantities of slave-grown sugar continued to arrive into the UK. We explain the disappearance of the market category. Our paper contributes to the on-going debates about slavery in management by historicizing and thus problematizing the concept of “slavery”. The paper challenges those modern slavery scholars who argue that lack of consumer knowledge about product provenance is the main barrier to the elimination of slavery from today’s international supply chains. The historical research presented in this paper suggests that consumer indifference, rather than simply ignorance, may be the more fundamental problem. The paper challenges the optimistic historical metanarrative that pervades much of the research on ethical consumption. It highlights the fragility of ethics-driven market categories, offering lessons for researchers and practitioners seeking to tackle modern slavery. (shrink)

Recent work in AI ethics often calls for AI to advance human values and interests. The concept of “AI for people” is one notable example. Though commendable in some respects, this work falls short by excluding the moral significance of nonhumans. This paper calls for a shift in AI ethics to more inclusive paradigms such as “AI for the world” and “AI for the universe”. The paper outlines the case for more inclusive paradigms and presents implications for moral philosophy and (...) computer science work on AI ethics. (shrink)

In a recent editorial, Raymond Spier expresses skepticism over claims that climate change is driven by human actions and that humanity should act to avoid climate change. This paper responds to this skepticism as part of a broader review of the science and ethics of climate change. While much remains uncertain about the climate, research indicates that observed temperature increases are human-driven. Although opinions vary regarding what should be done, prominent arguments against action are based on dubious factual (...) and ethical positions. Thus, the skepticisms in the recent editorial are unwarranted. This does not diminish the general merits of skeptical intellectual inquiry. (shrink)

Buddhist Manuscripts from Central Asia: The British Library Sanskrit Fragments, vol. II. Edited by Seishi Karashima and Klaus Wille. Tokyo: International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology, 2009. Vol. II.1: pp. 668. Vol. II.2: 382 plates.

This article contributes to the literature on legitimacy by highlighting its paradox and constraints. While an optimal level of legitimacy-seeking behaviours may be necessary for organizational effectiveness, an excessive focus on legitimacy may lead to stakeholder mismanagement and have the opposite effect. These insights emerged from a longitudinal qualitative study of large-scale changes in public-sector health care in a Canadian province (1994-2002). In 1994, subordinate health care organizations underwent government-driven reforms to promote market-based logics of efficiency and cost (...) reduction. Initial years post reforms were characterized by a singular focus on government-driven priorities and inattention to other stakeholders. However, instead of giving benefits of legitimacy, these behaviours led to anger and activism from non-institutional stakeholders such as staff and community due to a decline in quality and patient satisfaction. Eventually, greater attention to stakeholder concerns ended the stand-off. These findings also elaborate Suchman's (Academy of Management Review 20(3), 571-610, 1995) framework on legitimacy and explain that legitimacy may occur for reasons other than institutionalization of values and be temporary in nature. (shrink)

This book provides an interdisciplinary examination of the relationship between compromise and democracy. Compromises have played a significant role in our representative democracies and yet the nature of the relationship between compromise and democracy has generally raised tricky theoretical questions and generated ambiguous evaluations. This book focuses on the relationship between compromise and liberal democracies from both a cultural and institutional perspective and addresses new and lesser-explored aspects of the relationship. It explores a variety of topics including: compromise and in-commensurable (...) values, antagonist paradigms, compromise and majority decisions, compromise and publicity, compromise and post-conflict societies, compromise and anti-system political parties, and compromise and the understanding of political representation. Compromises in Democracy offers an original perspective on the topic by assembling contributions from the fields of philosophy, sociology, political theory, political science and history of ideas. (shrink)

Mill's conception of economic freedom extends his broader view of freedom to economic institutions in ways that have previously been overlooked. In his view, economic freedom involves not merely the absence of burdensome constraints on economic activities, but also the power of individuals to direct the course of their lives with respect to their economic activities and relationships. It encompasses opportunities and resources for individuals, acting independently of others, effectively to pursue their own life plans as well as participation (...) by associated individuals in governing economic enterprises. Accordingly, he is critical of the ‘restraints’ that existing capitalism imposes on the economic freedom of individuals and he favours significant reforms of existing capitalism to achieve greater economic freedom. This understanding of Mill's conception of economic freedom sheds new light on his place in the liberal tradition and on an important point of contact between the liberal and socialist traditions. (shrink)

This book looks at why labour market institutions such as those evident in continental Europe - more specifically, employment protection, unemployment benefits, and relative wage rigidities - exist, what role they play in society, why they seem so persistent, where the pressure to reform them comes from, and whether reform can be politically viable or not. It studies the economic conditions under which we expect a given set of institutions to arise and remain stable, and provides theoretical (...) guidelines about the gainers and losers from given institutions. (shrink)

An important part of what it means for agents to be situated in the everyday world of human affairs includes their engagement with economic practices. In this paper we employ the concept of cognitive institutions in order to provide an enactive and interactive interpretation of market and economic reasoning. We challenge traditional views that understand markets in terms of market structures or as processors of distributed information. The alternative conception builds upon the notion of the market (...) as a ‘scaffolding institution’. Introducing the concept of market as a ‘socially extended’ cognitive institution we go beyond the notion of scaffolding to provide an enactive view of economic reasoning that understands the market participant in terms of social interactive processes and relational autonomy. Markets are more than inert devices for information processing; they can be viewed as ‘highly scaffolded’, where strong constraints and incentives predictably direct agents’ behavior. Building on this idea we argue that markets emerge from (a) the economic interaction of both supply and demand sides, in continual and mutual interplay, and (b) more basic social interactions. Consumer behavior in the marketplace is complex, not only determining the market price, but also extending the consumer’s cognitive processes to reliably attain a correct evaluation of the good. Moreover, this economic reasoning is socially situated and not something done in isolation from other consumers From a socially situated, interactive point of view buying or not buying a good is something that enacts the market. This shifts the status of markets from external institutions that merely causally affect participants’ cognitive processes to social institutions that constitutively extend these cognitive processes. On this view the constraints imposed by social interactions, as well as the possibilities enabled by such interactions, are such that economic reasoning is never just an individual process carried out by an autonomous individual, classically understood. In this regard, understanding the concept of relational autonomy allows us to see how economic reasoning is always embodied, embedded in, and scaffolded by intersubjective interactions, and how such interactions make the market what it is. (shrink)

Under the innovation-driven development strategy, the improvement of the core competitiveness of enterprises demonstrates increasing dependence on the ability of technological innovation. In this article, data of A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets from 2008 to 2018 were selected as research samples for the analysis of the influencing factors and mechanism of enterprise technological innovation from the dual perspectives of the external economic environment and internal management system based on the use of the fixed-effect model. The (...) results show that government intervention significantly hinders enterprises' investment in resources for technological innovation, and less government intervention can improve the innovation investment of enterprises. The intervention of internal control fails to bring institutional advantages; rather, it aggravates the negative effect of government intervention on enterprise technological innovation. The research enriches the existing academic research results on government intervention, internal control quality, and enterprise technological innovation. The findings provide experience for accelerating the marketization process in China, enterprise governance, and improving the level of enterprise technological innovation. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that global forces of technology and trade have caused a profound shift in labor demand toward the most highly skilled, generating sharply rising earnings inequality in flexible labor markets and persistently high unemployment in rigid labor markets. This article critically assesses the evidence for this “Unified Theory.” It finds little compelling empirical support for either the skill-biased demand-shift explanation for high U.S. earnings inequality or the rigid labor markets explanation for high unemployment in Europe. This assessment (...) challenges the policy orthodoxy of the 1990s that developed economies feature a strict inequality-unemployment trade-off and that policy options are therefore limited to skills enhancement in the United States and labor market deregulation in Europe. It is suggested that the theoretical dominance of the textbook supply/demand model has contributed to the neglect of labor market institutions for U.S. wage outcomes and tight macroeconomic policy for European unemployment. (shrink)