The systemic role of corruption and its link to low human development is explored. The extractive resource industry is presented as anarena where conditions for corruption—monopoly and discretion without accountability—are especially intense. Corruption is maintainedby a self-reinforcing cycle. Multiple stakeholders are involved in the maintenance of and/or opposition to the cycle: investing corporations, host country regimes and officials, inter-governmental bodies like the OECD, industry associations, non-governmental organization watchdogs like Transparency International, and international agencies facilitating global investment like the World Bank. (...) Complementarity of interests between the demand and supply sides provides strong incentives for entrenched players to maintain corruptive relationships, to protect past gains and sustain current ones. Compulsory international regulation, maximum transparency, effective detection, and enforcement are recommended to enhance accountability, thereby reversing the cycle. It is also necessary to create a corporate culture built on integrity, if regulation itself is to succeed. (shrink)

Abstract: The systemic role of corruption and its link to low human development is explored. The extractive resource industry is presented as an arena where conditions for corruption—monopoly and discretion without accountability—are especially intense. Corruption is maintained by a self-reinforcing cycle. Multiple stakeholders are involved in the maintenance of and/or opposition to the cycle: investing corporations, host country regimes and officials, inter-governmental bodies like the OECD, industry associations, non-governmental organization (NGO) watchdogs like Transparency International, and international agencies facilitating global investment (...) like the World Bank. Complementarity of interests between the demand and supply sides provides strong incentives for entrenched players to maintain corruptive relationships, to protect past gains and sustain current ones. Compulsory international regulation, maximum transparency, effective detection, and enforcement are recommended to enhance accountability, thereby reversing the cycle. It is also necessary to create a corporate culture built on integrity, if regulation itself is to succeed. (shrink)

This article presents a descriptive conceptual framework comprising four different company configurations with respect to orientations toward corporate social responsibility (CSR). The four types are Skeptical, Pragmatic, Engaged, and Idealistic. The framework is grounded in instrumental and normative stakeholder theory, and a company's configuration is based on its instrumental and/or normative stance toward stakeholders. Its configuration indicates what position a company adopts in relation to CSR. This article argues that there is no one formula to fit all companies, descriptively or (...) prescriptively, but the potential variety in approaches to CSR is not infinite, as it can be distilled logically into a few fundamental approaches, embodied in the four organizational configurations presented in the conceptual framework. Each configuration constitutes a middlerange theory of interlocking characteristics in terms of CSR, and so each type of company will assume responsibilities to civil society in ways consistent with its configurational characteristics. The framework incorporates previous empirical findings and theoretical explanations. It is intuitively clear and reasonable to managers, and thus, has practical value in organizational management. (shrink)

The systemic role of corruption and its link to low human development is explored. The extractive resource industry is presented as anarena where conditions for corruption—monopoly and discretion without accountability—are especially intense. Corruption is maintainedby a self-reinforcing cycle. Multiple stakeholders are involved in the maintenance of and/or opposition to the cycle: investing corporations, host country regimes and officials, inter-governmental bodies like the OECD, industry associations, non-governmental organization (NGO) watchdogs like Transparency International, and international agencies facilitating global investment like the World (...) Bank. Complementarity of interests between the demand and supply sides provides strong incentives for entrenched players to maintain corruptive relationships, to protect past gains and sustain current ones. Compulsory international regulation, maximum transparency, effective detection, and enforcement are recommended to enhance accountability, thereby reversing the cycle. It is also necessary to create a corporate culture built on integrity, if regulation itself is to succeed. (shrink)

Dispositional forgiveness is positively associated with many facets of wellbeing and has protective implications against depression and anxiety in adolescents. However, little work has been done to examine neurobiological aspects of forgiveness as they relate to clinical symptoms. In order to better understand the neural mechanisms supporting the protective role of forgiveness in adolescents, the current study examined the middle frontal gyrus, which comprises the majority of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and is associated with cognitive regulation, and its relationship to (...) forgiveness and clinical symptoms in a sample of healthy adolescents. In this cross-sectional study, larger MFG volume was significantly associated with higher self-reported dispositional forgiveness scores and lower levels of depressive and anxiety symptoms. Forgiveness mediated the relationship between MFG volume and both depressive and anxiety symptom levels. The mediating role of forgiveness in the relationship between MFG volume and clinical symptoms suggests that one way that cognitive regulation strategies supported by this brain region may improve adolescent mental health is via increasing a capacity for forgiveness. The present study highlights the relevance of forgiveness to neurobiology and their relevance to emotional health in adolescents. Future longitudinal studies should focus on the predictive quality of the relationship between forgiveness, brain volume and clinical symptoms and the effects of forgiveness interventions on these relationships. (shrink)

Higher plant nuclear genomes contain many families of dispersed repeats that change during evolution. Recent evidence from studies on genetically defined transposable elements raises the possibility that many of the dispersed repeats are remnants of such elements. Transposition of DNA has also occurred between mitochondria, chloroplasts and nuclei, a fact that underlines the major role played by DNA transposition in determining the structure of plant genomes.

This paper is going to explore the adverse effects of exposure to combat death on medics’ holistic well-being, which, if ignored could decrease individual readiness and negatively impact the mission. We rely on the experience of United States Air Force Special Operation Surgical Teams (AF SOST) whose exposure to mass casualty scenarios in austere environments could serve as approximations of conditions of future battlefields. Over the past two decades, the ability to deliver advanced medical care on and off the battlefield (...) along with a rapid casualty evacuation platform has allowed for unprecedented survival rates exceeding 90%. While laudable, these medical achievements have also set up a casualty management paradigm in which medical decision-making singularly focuses on life-saving care. Confronting peer-peer adversaries in large scale combat operations (LSCO) on a multi-domain battlefield will make casualty management frighteningly more complex by introducing major infrastructural, personnel, and resource constraints. When considering the high number of casualties expected in LSCO alongside enormous limitations in medical resource and resupply capability, the current casualty management paradigm will not be sustainable. The resource constrained environment in LSCO will shift medical decision-making away from a singular focus on life-saving care to triage, which hinges on the ability to determine futile medical interventions—a skill that has been lost in the past two generation of combat medics. As such, a broad ethical challenge that arises in preparation for LSCO is the need to set new expectations concerning dying and death. However, medical decision-making focused on death and dying has not been explicitly addressed in military medical training, research, or policy. Relying on a body of literature known as terror management theory (TMT) and ethnographic data from our study with AF SOST medics, we are going to argue that it is important to expose medics to death in mass casualty and triage training. (shrink)

Paul Grobstein, Eleanor A. Bliss Professor of Biology at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, USA passed away Tuesday, June 28, 2011. Since Paul came to Bryn Mawr in 1986, he taught courses ranging from "Introductory Biology" and "Philosophy of Science" to "Evolution of Stories" and "The Brain and Education." Paul founded the Summer Institutes for K-12 Teachers, which brought hundreds of local educators to campus to consider new ways of teaching science and math. He served as chair of the Biology (...) Department and was instrumental in the establishment and success of the Center for Science in Society at Bryn Mawr College. (shrink)

The issue of benefits in international clinical research is highly controversial. Against the background of wide recognition of the need to share benefits of research, the nature of benefits remains strongly contested. Little is known about the perspectives of research populations on this issue and the extent to which research ethics discourses and guidelines are salient to the expectations and aspirations existing on the ground. This exploratory study contributes to filling this void by examining perspectives of people in low-income South (...) African communities on benefits in international clinical research. Twenty-four individuals with and without experience of being involved in clinical research participated in in-depth interviews. Respondents felt that ancillary care should be provided to clinical research participants, while a clinical study conducted in particular community should bring better health to its members through post-trial benefits. Respondents' perspectives were grounded in the perception that the ultimate goal of international clinical research is to improve local health. We argue that perspectives and understandings of the respondents are shaped by local moral traditions rather than clinical research specificities and require attention as valid moral claims. It is necessary to acknowledge such claims and cultural worlds from which they emerge, thus building the foundation for equal and embracing dialogue to bridge different perspectives and handle contradicting expectations. (shrink)

Cristina Lafont's recent reading of Heidegger offers a powerful formulation of the widespread view that once one recognizes our `facticity' and the role of language in shaping it, there is no room left to talk about transcendental structures of meaning or experience. In this article I challenge this view. I argue that Lafont inaccurately conflates what Heidegger calls our `understanding of being' with that which language discloses. In order to show that the philosophical motivation for this conflation is unsound, I (...) also argue that Lafont's own positive theory of meaning itself tacitly assumes a distinction between factical and transcendental, and so rests on exactly what she finds problematic in Heidegger. This still leaves a puzzle as to how factical individuals are actually able to grasp anything transcendental, so I conclude by sketching Heidegger's method of `formal indication', which is meant to show precisely how this can be done. (shrink)