In lower-income countries, owner-managers of small businesses take on heavy social responsibilities toward members of their extended family. However, using business resources to answer family needs can harm business, hence contradict broader responsibilities toward business stakeholders and society at large. In contexts where jobs are scarce and unemployment means deep poverty, this conundrum often translates into an ethical choice between recruiting needy relatives or avoid nepotism. To study such ethically loaded recruitment decisions, I adopt a stakeholder salience perspective. Focusing on (...) Rwanda, a small East African country, I use interview data to examine how owner-managers articulate their social responsibilities toward family and toward other stakeholders, and how this influences recruitment. I observe that owner-managers either nest, balance, or separate social responsibilities toward family and nonfamily stakeholders and preferentially recruit relatives or strangers accordingly. This study suggests that stakeholder salience depends on a process of stakeholder categorization, which is influenced by the cultural and political context. (shrink)

In the last few years, researchers have begun to investigate the emergence of novel forms of human communication in the laboratory. I survey this growing line of research, which may be called experimental semiotics, from three distinct angles. First, I situate the new approach in its theoretical and historical context. Second, I review a sample of studies that exemplify experimental semiotics. Third, I present an empirical study that illustrates how the new approach can help us understand the socio‐cognitive underpinnings of (...) human communication. The main conclusion of the paper will be that, by reproducing micro samples of historical processes in the laboratory, experimental semiotics offers new powerful tools for investigating human communication as a form of joint action. (shrink)

Although rapidity of fading has been long identified as one of the crucial design features of language, little is known about its effects on the design of communication systems. To investigate such effects, we performed an experiment in which pairs of participants developed novel communication systems using media that had different degrees of rapidity of fading. The results of the experiment suggest that rapidity of fading does not affect the pace with which communication systems emerge or the communicative effi cacy (...) of the emerged systems. However, rapidity of fading seems to affect the design of these systems. In particular, communication systems implemented in the more rapidly fading medium exhibited a higher degree of combinatorial reuse of their forms than systems implemented in the medium that faded more slowly. These results suggest that the design of language might be constrained by subtle relations the presence of which can be ascertained only through direct experimental manipulation. Human communication systems crafted today in the laboratory can provide new insights into the design of natural languages. (shrink)

On the face of it, there is no connection between the social theory developed by Ulrich Beck under the name of `second modernization' and the post-ethnomethodological argument developed by Bruno Latour and his colleagues under the name of actor-network theory. Yet they are both concerned with empirical evidence of a major shift in modernity. Hence the idea of elaborating an empirical test to probe the extent to which `second modernization' is a real phenomenon, or rather, as is suggested here, (...) a shift in our interpretation of what modernity has always been about. (shrink)

Working on the assumption that ideas are embedded in socio-technical arrangements which actualize them, this essay sheds light on the way the Open Method of Co-ordination (OMC) achieves the Lisbon strategic goal: to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world . Rather than framing the issue in utilitarian terms, it focuses attention on quantified indicators, comparable statistics and common targets resulting from the increasing practice of intergovernmental benchmarking, in order to tackle the following questions: how does (...) the OMC go about co-ordinating Member States through the benchmarking of national policies? And to what extent does this managerial device impact the path of European construction? Beyond the ideological and discursive construction of the competitive imperative, this technology of government transforms it into an indefinite discipline (Foucault) which constantly urges decision-makers to hit the top of the charts. This contribution thus argues that the practice of intergovernmental benchmarking is far from being neutral in purpose and effect. On the contrary, it lays the foundation for building a competitive Europe which unites Member States through competition. (shrink)

Ανέκδοτα ψηφίσματα από τη Λάρισσα (3) Συνεχίζοντας τις δΰο προηγούμενες δημοσιεύσεις που αφορούσαν σε ψηφίσματα της Λάρισσας (BCH 128-129 (2005), p. 377-417 ; BCH 130 (2006) [20081, Ρ· 435-483), παρουσιάζουμε εδώ μια τρίτη στήλη, η οποία φέρει τρία κείμενα: δύο ψηφίσματα της Λάρισσας, που ψηφίστηκαν κατά τη διάρκεια της στρατηγείας του Παυσανία, υιού του Θρασυμήδη από τις Φέρες (περίπου 130/129 π. Χ.), το ένα για έναν Αθηναίο φιλόσοφο και το άλλο για τρεις πολίτες της Κω· ένα τρίτο ψήφισμα προέρχεται από (...) τη Συνομοσπονδία των Μολοσσών και ανταμοίβει δικαστές από τη Λάρισσα, οι οποίοι εστάλησαν στην Ήπειρο για να διαιτητεύσουν σε μια διαμάχη μεταξύ Μολοσσών και Ακαρνάνων. Τα κείμενα αυτά, γραμμένα σε θεσσαλική διάλεκτο, η οποία την εποχή εκείνη χρησίμευε στη μεταγραφή εγγράφων της καγκελλαρίας των ελληνιστικών πόλεων σε μια γλώσσα που χάνει προοδευτικά τη συνοχή και την ιδιομορφία της και καταλήγει να διατηρεί μόνο μια «θεσσαλίζουσα» απόχρωση, έχουν αξία για την ιστορία της Λάρισσας, αφού αναφέρονται στην πνευματική ζωή και σε ορισμένες εκφάνσεις των πολιτικών ή οικονομικών δραστηριοτήτων των Λαρισσαίων στο δεύτερο μισό του 2ου αι. π. Χ. (shrink)

This article sets out to show that Wittgenstein and Freud have exerted a considerable - though narrow - influence on Bourdieu’s sociology. But their influence also pervades the theoretical development of two other currents that have emerged in French sociology in the last few years, and that were developed by L. Boltanski and L. Thévenot on the one hand, and B. Lahire on the other. Although they do not make it explicit, the advocates of these two currents have nevertheless been (...) influenced by Wittgenstein and Freud. Thus Boltanski has drawn on Wittgenstein to develop a sociology which gives primacy to the social actor’s interpretation of his or her situation through lay theorizing. Lahire’s work clearly pays a debt to Freud with his psychological sociology. It would therefore be interesting, in the first instance, to tease out how Wittgenstein and Freud, respectively, have influenced these two systems to demonstrate that they can indeed be used to generate new sociological currents, other than Bourdieu’s own. This would then allow us to explore how they could be used to fill any gaps in Bourdieu’s work, thus giving the latter renewed relevance and staunching its stagnating tendencies. Ultimately, this analysis aims to show how Wittgenstein’s and Freud’s theoretical influences can lead the way towards a theoretical synthesis between Bourdieu’s critical sociology, Boltanski’s social actor theory and Lahire’s psychological sociology. Currently, these three currents operate independently of each other, without any kind of dialogue. And yet, far from being incompatible, these sociologies offer opportunities for exploring how they might complement and mutually enrich each other. (shrink)

The goal of this study is to characterize observers’ abilities to discriminate between endogenous and exogenous changes. To do so, we developed a new experimental paradigm. On each trial, participants were shown a dot pattern on the screen. Next, the pattern disappeared and participants were to reproduce it. Changes were surreptuously introduced in the stimulus, either by presenting participants anew with the dot pattern they had themselves produced on the previous trial or by presenting participants with a slightly different dot (...) pattern . We analyzed awareness of the changes and behavioral adaptation to them in a dynamical manner. We observe signal attenuation in the presence of endogenous change, dissociation between self-attribution reports and behavioral effect of agency. We discuss the source of this sensitive attenuation as well as the relation between a minimal or core self and an extended, narrative or autobiographical self. (shrink)

This translated work is an example of the type of writing that characterized the radical school of Hegelianism in the late 1830s and 1840s in that it mirrors the arguments and irritable temper of both the liberal Hegelians and their conservative opponents during the period between the French Revolution of 1830 and the general revolutions of 1848. As such, it is a useful period piece that can enhance an appreciation of the Hegelian involvement in the theological and philosophical argumentation that (...) characterized the German Vorm rz.". (shrink)

Skepticism is one of the most enduring and profound of philosophical problems. With its roots in Plato and the Sceptics to Descartes, Hume, Kant and Wittgenstein, skepticism presents a challenge that every philosopher must reckon with. In this outstanding collection philosophers engage with skepticism in five clear sections: the philosophical history of skepticism in Greek, Cartesian and Kantian thought; the nature and limits of certainty; the possibility of knowledge and related problems such as perception and the debates between objective knowledge (...) and constructivism; the transcendental method as a response to skepticism and the challenge of naturalism; overcoming the skeptical challenge. (shrink)

We examined the updating of decisions made during visuo-motor processing when two sequentially presented stimuli, Prime1 and Prime2, primed discriminative responses to a following probe. In Experiment 1, the visibility of the two primes was suppressed or left intact by varying the stimulus onset asynchrony of the stimuli immediately following them. In Experiment 2, the visibility of Prime2 was suppressed or left intact by varying its spatial separation from the following probe. We found that Prime2 dominated the effects of Prime1; (...) that Prime2’s updating was stronger when the Prime2–probe SOA was 200 as compared to 53 ms; and that Prime2’s updating was weaker when the Prime2–probe spatial separation was 58 as compared to 0 minarc. We conclude that these effects are due to an interaction of spatial attention and the state of processing of Prime2. (shrink)

Summary André-Jacob Roubo, author of Art du menuisier (Art of the Woodworker), included in the famous series of the Descriptions des arts et métiers published by the Paris Academy of Sciences, was a true worker whose craft was based on first-hand experience of the trade. At the same time, he was a literate artist, who shared the ideas and values of the Enlightenment and dedicated himself to writing technical treatises. Roubo was on the fringe of the guild system by virtue (...) of his training and his first steps in the trade. From the start, his connections with the circle of the learned elite were much more developed than with the world of the Parisian ‘maîtres menuisiers’. Yet Roubo considered himself to be a member of the community of woodworkers, and he addressed his treatise to his fellow workers, as if it were the masterpiece required to be received into the guild. So, who was Roubo? By training and status, he was certainly an artisan. But at the same time, we can see him as a sort of member of the Republic of Letters, whose fame rested on his expertise in woodworking and joinery. His case illustrates the fact that the gulf between ‘gens de métiers’ and ‘gens de lettres’ in the eighteenth century was less wide than is usually asserted. (shrink)

Dès 1983, à l’occasion du colloque Une histoire des femmes est-elle possible? qui allait marquer le véritable départ de l’histoire des femmes en France, Alain Corbin soulignait la nécessité de se pencher aussi sur les « mentalités masculines », afin que puisse émerger une « histoire sexuée qui couple ses analyses ». L’auteur des Filles de noce resta longtemps peu entendu. Cette dernière décennie a pourtant vu une nette évolution s’amorcer, les masculinités françaises devenant peu à peu un ch...