Over the past two decades, Victor and Cullen's (Adm Sci Q 33:101-125, 1988) typology of ethical climates has been employed by many academics in research on issues of ethical climates. However, little is known about how managerial practices such as communication and empowerment influence ethical climates, especially from a functional perspective. The current study used a survey of employees from Taiwan's top 100 patent-owning companies to examine how communication and empowerment affect organizational ethical climates. The results confirm the relationship between (...) these two managerial practices and organizational ethical climates. We discuss our results and their implications for both future academic research and practice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Rethinking Knowledge: Reflections Across the DisciplinesAdriano P. PalmaRethinking Knowledge: Reflections Across the Disciplines, edited by Robert F. Goodman and Walter R. Fisher; 246 pp. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995, $59.50 cloth, $19.95 paper.The more disciplines talk about their methods, the less they do. Observe the scarcity of methodological problems for dentistry. This book collects papers, originally delivered as talks at a conference organized around a (...) loosely defined notion of epistemology in the social sciences, by economists, philosophers, ethnographers, and psychologists, either reflecting upon larger issues raised by their work or trying to explain why it is relevant in the first place.The papers belong to two gaggles of views. The first gaggle (including the economist Donald McCloskey, the philosopher Charles Taylor, George Marcus, and Michael Arbib) does something quite productive. They weigh the influence of certain rhetorical modes of thinking on their disciplines. In the second gaggle are those, including the literary critic Barbara Herrnstein Smith and Jane Flax, who offer no view of anything much, but engage in the peculiarly Anglo-Saxon sport of pseudo-philosophy. They babble about the “West” and indulge a tendency to sheer narcissism.On to the good parts. An important recent advance is the demise of the pretense of neutrality and purity of interest among social scientists. In her essay, for instance, Marcus traces how ethnographers have progressively relinquished narratives of the exotic intended to reinforce a smug superiority of white civilizations. There is a danger: no one would be too interested in reading dozens of dissertations on the subject of graduate students in anthropology departments. Nonetheless, it is a real gain to mark the limits of an excessive reliance on the rhetoric of the “white men’s burden” and all that. Similarly, McCloskey is good at pointing out that economics is not obvious at all, and that rhetorical devices, then, have helped to shape its present form. Taylor gives a quick though not trivial history of the birth in relatively recent times of a discourse of the self, distinguishing between reflexive consciousness and the discourse of the self. Arbib shows how recherché data about brain lesions can shed light on our cognitive structure.Now to the confusingly confused parts. There is the usual dogmatic nonsense backed by no evidence. I offer one example: “... the meanings or the existence of reason, science, knowledge, etc.,... have been subjected to increasingly corrosive attacks,” Flax says in his essay. “The challenge to Western political-economic hegemony by Japan and other countries, the rise of nationalist and anticolonialist movements in the Third World, women’s movements everywhere, and antiracist struggles have disrupted the order of things” (p. 151). What worries me is the lack of thinking: can an instance be shown in which, say, the antiapartheid movement in South Africa made an impact and changed or kicked out of existence the concept of knowledge?Herrnstein Smith is guilty of a more interesting form of bad reasoning. On [End Page 406] the one hand, we are told that all “value judgments” are relative, radically contingent, and blah blah. On the other, we are also told that this is not the same as relativism. The sloppiness is evident: it is a trivial point that lots of value judgments are relative to something else. That a dollar bill is worth a dollar is contingent upon the existence of federal reserve, a mint, and an immense set of background conditions, given all of which it is a dollar bill and not a simple piece of paper. If the contingency of judgments comes to nothing more, one is left to wonder why we need entire departments in top universities to discover it. The more insidious part is the claim that relativity is self-exemplified in discourse and that indeed all there is to assertions is the desire to satisfy one’s chosen audience (p. 36). If this is so, is there any interest in professors talking to other professors about the methodological problems of their disciplines?Adriano P. PalmaNational Chung Cheng University, TaiwanCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Academician Gerasimov devoted his presentation to the problem of improvement and protection of the environment. In his opinion, today, when there is a worldwide threat of exhaustion of natural resources, irreversible pollution, poisoning of the environment, and the impossibility of feeding a growing population, questions of environmental protection and rational use of natural resources are becoming not only an important problem for natural science but a serious social and political matter around which an acute ideological struggle is being waged. Certainly (...) it is a real fact that contemporary mankind is encountering a progressive impairment of the world's ecological situation, caused by the ever more intensive utilization of natural resources under the conditions of rapid scientific and technological progress. Therefore, issues of further rational use of natural resources and improvement and protection of the environment are now becoming problems affecting the everyday interests of the entire population of the earth. (shrink)

We argue for an example of based on Diamond and Carey's (1986) work on expertise and recognition, which is not made use of in The Origin of Concepts. This mechanism for perceptual learning seems to have all the necessary characteristics in that it is innate, domain-specific (requires stimulus sets possessing a certain structure), and demonstrably affects categorisation in a way that strongly suggests it will influence concept formation as well.

Socio-cultural and political transformations that are taking place in the modern world under the influence of globalization, predetermine the growth of scientific interest in the history and the theory of shaping the group unity.The coverage of various aspects of this problem is found in the works of foreign philosophers (M. Gibernau, S. Huntington, E. Hiddens, B. Yak, et al.), which focus their primary attention on studying the factors, contributing to the emergence of communities in the modern world, while distancing from (...) the development of universal explanatory schemes for the process of forming the collective unity at various stages of the historical development of society.Some Ukrainian researchers (Y. Hrytsak, V. Kravchenko, H. Kasyanov, et al.), who, in contrast to foreign scholars, pay more attention to studying the various aspects of Ukrainian nation-building, are approaching the above problems from a bit different angle of view to solve them. Undoubtedly, the work of these researchers thoroughly and fully covers the history of the formation of the Ukrainian nation, explains the reasons or factors that contributed to its appearance. Meanwhile, they do not have sufficient potential to explain the causes of the cultural fragmentation of modern Ukrainian society, which, in our opinion, has become a logical consequence of the undivided domination in the Ukrainian intellectual discourse of the paradigm of perennialism, within which the cultural identity of the community appears to be a kind of “entity or reality.” Proponents of this position believe that the cultural diversity of nations emerged in the early stages of social development. Within this outlook, Ukrainians, as a mentally and culturally distinct community, have always existed. Of course, their culture has been developing and enriching in the process of historical development and intercultural communication, while its original spiritual and symbolic core remaining unchanged.Despite the fact, that renaissance has a rational grain and can become themethodological basis for very effective national consolidation strategies, one should not ignore its failure to explain the causes of the cultural and civilizational fragmentation of modern Ukrainian society. In our opinion, the solution of this issue requires a comprehensive understanding of the origins, mechanisms and factors, and the formation of a culturally homogeneous Ukrainian cultural space. In view of this, the purpose of our work is to uncover the theoretical preconditions and mechanisms for shaping the cultural identity of Ukrainians in the XIX and early XX centuries. Instead, the task of the work is to highlight the ideological foundations of the growth of scientific interest in folk culture in foreign and Ukrainian intellectual discourse and to reveal their significance in the process of thematizing the modern Ukrainian identity.Methods.The interdisciplinary approach and the principle of unity of the historical and logical have become a methodological basis of scientific research. Methods of historical and philosophical reconstruction, cultural analysis, and extrapolation have been also widely used in the process of research, as well as the fundamental principles of hermeneutics, which have been taken into account.Results. The dominance of the educational enlightenment-cognitive paradigm has contributed to the growth of scientific interest in the cultural identity of peoples, which, according to the prevailing beliefs, has been most clearly preserved in folk poetry and ancient literature. The study of the latter has resulted in the outbreak of ethnographic and linguistic exploration, which facilitated the gradual introduction of the Ukrainian language to literary use, thereby contributing to the thematization of modern Ukrainian identity. (shrink)

В монографии представлены результаты фундаментального междисциплинарного исследования проблемы смысла жизни, выполненного на стыке общей и управленческой акмеологии, социальной, возрастной, педагогической психологии, психологии управления и труда.

I argue that the dual-process account of human learning rejected by Mitchell et al. in the target article is informative and predictive with respect to human behaviour in a way that the authors' purely propositional account is not. Experiments that reveal different patterns of results under conditions that favour either associative or rule-based performance are the way forward.

Монография посвящена анализу дискурсов и всех сторон взаимодействия реальности с человеком и особенностями его жизнедеятельности. Адресуется специалистам-языковедам, студентам старших курсов и магистрантам.