Sustainability challenges typically occur across sectoral boundaries, calling the state, market, and civil society to action. Although consensus exists on the merits of cross-sector collaboration, our understanding of whether and how it can create value for various, collaborating stakeholders is still limited. This special issue focuses on how new combined knowledge on cross-sector collaboration and business models for sustainability can inform the academic and practitioner debates about sustainability challenges and solutions. We discuss how cross-sector collaboration can play an important role (...) for the transition to new and potentially sustainability-driven business models given that value creation, delivery, and capture of organizations are intimately related to the collaborative ties with their stakeholders. Sustainable alternatives to conventional business models tend to adopt a more holistic perspective of business by broadening the spectrum of solutions and stakeholders and, when aligned with cross-sector collaboration, can contribute new ways of addressing the wicked sustainability problems humanity faces. (shrink)

Background: Undergraduate nursing students have been documented to experience ethical distress during their clinical training and felt poorly supported in discussing the ethical issues they encountered. Research aims: This study was aimed at exploring nursing students’ perceived opportunity to discuss ethical issues that emerged during their clinical learning experience and associated factors. Research design: An Italian national cross-sectional study design was performed in 2015–2016. Participants were invited to answer a questionnaire composed of four sections regarding: socio-demographic data, previous clinical learning (...) experiences, current clinical learning experience quality and outcomes, and the opportunity to discuss ethical issues with nurses in the last clinical learning experience. Participants and research context: Participants were 9607 undergraduate nursing students who were attending 95 different three-year Italian baccalaureate nursing programmes, located at 27 universities in 15 Italian regions. Ethical considerations: This study was conducted in accordance with the Human Subject Research Ethics Committee guidelines after the research protocol was approved by an ethics committee. Findings: Overall, 4707 perceived to have discussed ethical issues ‘much’ or ‘very much’; among the remaining, 3683 and 1217 students reported the perception of having discussed, respectively, ‘enough’ or ‘never’ ethical issues emerged in the clinical practice. At the multivariate logistic regression analysis explaining 38.1% of the overall variance, the factors promoting ethical discussion were mainly set at the clinical learning environment levels. In contrast, being male was associated with a perception of less opportunity to discuss ethical issues. Conclusion: Nursing faculties should assess the clinical environment prerequisites of the settings as a context of student experience before deciding on their accreditation. Moreover, the nursing faculty and nurse managers should also enhance competence with regard to discussing ethical issues with students among clinical nurses by identifying factors that hinder this learning opportunity in daily practice. (shrink)

Drawing from field theory, Gestalt therapy conceives psychological suffering and psychotherapy as two intentional field phenomena, where unprocessed and chaotic experiences seek the opportunity to emerge and be assimilated through the contact between the patient and the therapist (i.e., the intentionality of contacting). This therapeutic approach is based on the therapist’s aesthetic experience of his/her embodied presence in the flow of the healing process because (1) the perception of beauty can provide the therapist with feedback on the assimilation of unprocessed (...) experiences; (2) the therapist’s attentional focus on intrinsic aesthetic diagnostic criteria can facilitate the modification of rigid psychopathological fields by supporting the openness to novel experiences. The aim of the present manuscript is to review recent evidence from psychophysiology, neuroaesthetic research, and neurocomputational models of cognition, such as the free energy principle (FEP), which support the notion of the therapeutic potential of aesthetic sensibility in Gestalt psychotherapy. Drawing from neuroimaging data, psychophysiology and recent neurocognitive accounts of aesthetic perception, we propose a novel interpretation of the sense of beauty as a self-generated reward motivating us to assimilate an ever-greater spectrum of sensory and affective states in our predictive representation of ourselves and the world and supporting the intentionality of contact. Expecting beauty, in the psychotherapeutic encounter, can help therapists tolerate uncertainty avoiding impulsive behaviours and to stay tuned to the process of change. (shrink)

In developed countries, companies are now substantially reliant on the skills and abilities of their leaders to tackle a variety of complex issues. There is a growing consensus that leadership development training and assessment methods should adopt more holistic methodologies, including those associated with the emotional and neuroendocrine aspects of learning. Recent research into the assessment of leadership competencies has proposed the use of objective methods and measurements based on neuroscience. One of the challenges to be faced in the development (...) of a performance-based methodology to measure leadership skills is how to generate real-life situations with triggers that allow us to study management competencies under controlled laboratory conditions. A way to address this question is to take advantage of virtual environments to recreate real-life situations that might arise in performance-based assessments. We propose virtual reality (VR) as a very promising tool to observe various leadership related behavioral patterns during dynamic, complex and realistic situations. By seamlessly embedding assessment methods into virtual learning environments, VR can provide objective assessment methods with high ecological validity. VR also holds unlimited opportunities for leadership training providing subjects with intelligent tutoring systems that adapts situations in real time according to the observed behaviors. (shrink)

The ability to be creative is often considered a unique characteristic of conscious beings and many efforts have been directed at demonstrating a relationship between creativity and the personality construct of psychoticism. The present study sought to investigate this link explicitly by focusing on discrete facets of creative cognition, namely the originality/novelty dimension and the practicality/usefulness dimension. Based on Eysenck’s conceptualisation of psychoticism as being characterised by an overinclusive cognitive style, it was expected that higher levels of psychoticism would accompany (...) a greater degree of conceptual expansion and elevated levels of originality in creative imagery, but would be unrelated to the practicality/usefulness of an idea. These hypotheses were confirmed in 80 healthy participants who were contrasted based on their EPQ psychoticism scale scores. Our findings suggest that the link between psychoticism and creativity is based on associative thinking and broader but weak top-down activation patterns rather than on goal-related thinking. (shrink)

En un momento de gran efervescencia feminista, se entremezclan las reclamaciones políticas del movimiento con las peligrosas reapropiaciones que de sus núcleos de lucha hace el neoliberalismo. Las tensiones que se presentan en este contexto son muchas y variadas, algunas evidentes y otras invisibles, pero todas contribuyen a la torsión actual del feminismo. En el presente artículo se abordarán algunas de estas tensiones que nacen en la intersección entre feminismo y neoliberalismo: desde la publicidad como posible herramienta feminista hasta los (...) discursos sobre el emprendimiento y el empleo, pasando por el diseño de políticas públicas, y la mercantilización de los cuerpos femeninos. También se abordarán algunas de las posibles rearticulaciones y respuestas políticas feministas ante esta realidad, mostrando la complejidad de los retos a los que tienen que hacer frente los feminismos hoy.In times of great feminist effervescence, the political claims of the movement are intermingled with the dangerous reappropriations that neoliberalism makes of its struggle nuclei. The tensions that appear in this context are many and varied, some obvious and some invisible, but all of them contribute to the torsion of feminism. This article will address some of the tensions that arise from the intersection between feminism and neoliberalism: from advertising as a possible feminist tool, to speeches on entrepreneurship and employment, through the design of public policies, and the commodification of female bodies. Some of the possible re-articulations and feminist political responses to this reality will be addressed, showing the great complexity of the challenges that feminisms face today. (shrink)

In this conversation, Berkeley-based philosopher Judith Butler offers insights into her understanding of the public sphere and its current transformations as a core dimension of political subjectivity. Beginning with her own understanding of Habermas’ classic, the interview centers around its connection to other classical texts (e.g. of Hannah Arendt) and timely political debates.

Small GTPases in the Rho family act as major nodes with functions beyond cytoskeletal rearrangements shaping the Caenorhabditis elegans embryo during development. These small GTPases are key signal transducers that integrate diverse developmental signals to produce a coordinated response in the cell. In C. elegans, the best studied members of these highly conserved Rho family small GTPases, RHO‐1/RhoA, CED‐10/Rac, and CDC‐42, are crucial in several cellular processes dealing with cytoskeletal reorganization. In this review, we update the functions described for the (...) Rho family small GTPases in spindle orientation and cell division, engulfment, and cellular movements during C. elegans embryogenesis, focusing on the Rho subfamily Rac.Please also see the video abstract here. (shrink)

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, neurophilosophy appears as a branch of neurosciences. The aim of this article is to review critically some of the epistemological and anthropological debates which neurophilosophy is putting on question again. In this sense the philosophical research conducted by the UNESCO Chair of Philosophy for Peace will be used as the main thread of the analysis. To accomplish this critical review, the article has been organized into two parts: the first is of epistemological nature, (...) and the second has an anthropological perspective. This analysis will lead us to question the significance of the contributions of neurophilosophy to a better understanding of the human being. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe ‘Scientific Culture at Enterprises’ project aims to identify the different factors that characterize the image of science held by entrepreneurs and business managers, explore the relationships among these factors, and shed light on the role they play in defining this image and ultimately in developing a culture of science in the business sector. This article is based on the results of the SCe 2016 survey with a specially designed telephone survey questionnaire of a representative sample of Spanish companies. The (...) novelty of our approach lies in the application of a model developed in the fields of Social Studies of Science and Public Understanding of Science to the business sector, in order to obtain information on the dispositions of perception, interest, knowledge and action and their relationships with science and innovation in the business sector in Spain. Using the PIKA model of the image of science, we found this image in the business sector to be shaped by entrepreneurs... (shrink)

Los avances científico-tecnológicos han abierto una brecha en cuanto a los tratamientos médicos y los valores morales que deben sustentar la atención de salud. El profesional de enfermería no está exento de estos peligros, por lo que se ha generado un nuevo modelo ético que se integre al proceso de atención de enfermería. Con el objetivo de determinar los conocimientos y opiniones de estos profesionales, del área de cirugía de mínimo acceso, acerca de la aplicación del modelo en el contexto (...) de estos servicios, se diseñó una investigación de tipo observacional descriptiva con empleo de metodología cualitativa. Como técnica de exploración se usó la entrevista en profundidad, así como un panel de expertos para la construcción de la guía de entrevista. Se entrevistó a 34 enfermeras que laboraban en el Centro Nacional de Cirugía de Mínimo Acceso durante el período del estudio. Se concluye que la práctica de la cirugía de mínimo acceso es propicia para que médicos y enfermeras hagan una mayor observancia del derecho de autonomía de los pacientes. Se reconoce la capacidad de este personal para tomar decisiones independientes de los médicos en cuanto a las acciones de cuidado, lo que implica una mayor responsabilidad. Scientific and technological advances have opened a gap between medical treatments and the moral values that should support health care. The nurse is not exempt from these dangers. As such, a new ethical model that integrates to the process of nursing care has emerged. In order to determine the knowledge and opinions of the professionals who work in minimal access surgery services on the implementation of this model, a descriptive, observational study was designed utilizing qualitative methodology. In-depth interviewing was used as the primary testing technique. A panel of experts from the National Center of Minimal Access Surgery was consulted to develop the interview guide. Thirty-four nurses from the National Center for Minimal Access Surgery were interviewed over the course of the study period. Results suggest that the setting of minimal access surgery is conducive to medical professionals making greater observance of the right to patient autonomy. The ability of this staff to make independent decisions regarding medical care action is recognized, which implies greater responsibility. (shrink)

Written by two of the leading figures in the field, this is a lucid and systematic introduction to semantics as applied to transformational grammars of the ...

Plato and the Metaphysical Feminine offers a new interpretation of the role of the female and the feminine in Plato's political dialogues--the Republic, Laws, and Timaeus--informed by Deleuze's film theory and Irigaray's psychoanalytic feminism. Irene Han reads Plato against the grain in order to close the gap between the vitalists and Plato, instead of magnifying their differences. Han explores the ambivalence that the vitalist tradition, Irigaray, and Derrida have towards Platonism. The application of Deleuzian and Irigarayan concepts to the (...) ancient texts produces a new reading of Plato, focusing on the centrality and importance of motion, change, sensuality, and becoming to Platonic philosophy and, thereby, reinterprets Platonic philosophy in the direction of Heraclitus rather than Parmenides: as feminist rather than masculinist, and as mimetic. It therefore prioritizes Heraclitean principles of movement and flux over Form, the feminine over masculine, and materiality, feeling, or sensation over abstraction and universal essence. Han's exploration illustrates how, in Plato's thought, the feminine maps itself onto the plane of phenomena--a plane associated with vitalist themes such as motion, tactility, and change (metabolē). Platonic metaphysics is recontextualized by illustrating how Being expresses itself through processes of (feminine) becoming. With this reformulation, the resulting account of Platonic Being destabilizes any purported Platonic dualism. (shrink)

SCHOFIELD I, TOLSON D and FLEMING V. Nursing Inquiry 2012; 19: 165–176 [Epub ahead of print]How nurses understand and care for older people with delirium in the acute hospital: a Critical Discourse AnalysisDelirium is a common presentation of deteriorating health in older people. It is potentially deleterious in terms of patient experience and clinical outcomes. Much of what is known about delirium is through positivist research, which forms the evidence base for disease‐based classification systems and clinical guidelines. There is little (...) systematic study of nurses’ day‐to‐day practice of nursing patients with delirium. The aim was to uncover the kinds of knowledge that informs nurses’ care and to explicate the basis of that knowledge. Critical Discourse Analysis is underpinned by the premise that powerful interests within society mediate how social practices are constructed. Links were made between the grammatical and lexical features of nurses’ language about care in interviews and naturalistic settings, and the healthcare context. Care focused on the continuous surveillance of patients with delirium by nurses themselves or vicariously through other patients, and containment. Nurses influenced by major discourses of risk reduction and safety, constructed patients with delirium as risk objects. The philosophy of person‐centred and dignified care advocated in nursing literature and government policy is an emerging discourse, though little evident in the data. The current dominant discourses on safety must give space to discourses of dignity and compassion. (shrink)

There are several conceptions of truth, such as the classical correspondence conception, the coherence conception and the pragmatic conception. The classical correspondence conception, or Aristotelian conception, received a mathematical treatment in the hands of Tarski (cf. Tarski [1935] and [1944]), which was the starting point of a great progress in logic and in mathematics. In effect, Tarski's semantic ideas, especially his semantic characterization of truth, have exerted a major influence on various disciplines, besides logic and mathematics; for instance, linguistics, the (...) philosophy of science, and the theory of knowledge. The importance of the Tarskian investigations derives, among other things, from the fact that they constitute a mathematical, formal mark to serve as a reference for the philosophical (informal) conceptions of truth. Today the philosopher knows that the classical conception can be developed and that it is free from paradoxes and other difficulties, if certain precautions are taken. We believe that is not an exaggeration if we assert that Tarski's theory should be considered as one of the greatest accomplishments of logic and mathematics of our time, an accomplishment which is also of extraordinary relevance to philosophy, as we have already remarked. In this paper we show that the pragmatic conception of truth, at least in one of its possible interpretations, has also a mathematical formulation, similar in spirit to that given by Tarski to the classical correspondence conception. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

The concept of sustainability was developed in response to stakeholder demands. One of the key mechanisms for engaging stakeholders is sustainability disclosure, often in the form of a report. Yet, how reporting is used to engage stakeholders is understudied. Using resource dependence and stakeholder theories, we investigate how companies within the same industry address different dependencies on stakeholders for economic, natural environment, and social resources and thus engage stakeholders accordingly. To achieve this objective, we conducted our research using qualitative research (...) methods. Our findings suggest that the resource dependencies on different stakeholders lead to development of different stakeholder relationships and thus appropriate resources within the company to execute engagement strategies that are informing, responding, or involving. Our research explains why diversity exists in sustainability disclosure by studying how it is used to engage stakeholders. We find that five sustainability reporting characteristics are associated with the company’s stakeholder engagement strategy: directness of communication, clarity of stakeholder identity, deliberateness of collecting feedback, broadness of stakeholder inclusiveness, and utilization of stakeholder engagement for learning. Our study develops the literature by providing insight into companies’ choices of stakeholder engagement strategy thus explaining diversity in sustainability reporting based on the characteristics and relationships with specific stakeholders. (shrink)

This essay is a critical review of two recent collections, Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, edited by Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby and Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender, edited by Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell. While the collections differ in their manner of addressing the critical sources that have inspired them-the former relying upon a single theorist, the latter attempting to move through some of the philosophical history that constitutes our present theoretical terrain-both attempt to (...) think through and thus revisualize some of the categories of difference which we have inherited. Though the best essays from these collections are celebrated for demonstrating how "feminism as critique" can work to move us toward a clearer and more inclusive feminist theory, questions are raised about what the inattention to race in these volumes suggests about our own role in the construction of power and knowledge, and the erasures that help to secure them both. (shrink)

Recent attempts to explain why modesty should be considered a virtue have failed. A more adequate account is that modesty involves understanding how far one's accomplishments ought to be taken as definitive of one's value. Modest people communicate this self-understanding through behaviour motivated by the desire to ensure that their accomplishments do not cause pain to others. This virtuous mode of self-awareness involves recognizing that one is both defined by social standards of success and irreducible to these assessments. Modest agents (...) do not think themselves ‘better’ than others, but recognize that they rank higher on the particular social standard in question. They thus both avoid causing pain and serve as exemplars of virtuous self-responsibility. (shrink)

The influence of stakeholders, organisational commitment, personal values, goals of the organisation and socio-demographic characteristics of individuals on the ethical dimension of behavioural intentions of employees in various organisations are investigated. The research results show that employees working for the public sector or in educational institutions take more ethical aspects into account than employees working in the "private" sector. The influence of stakeholders and organisational commitment do not significantly affect the ethical behaviour of employees, and only some personal values and (...) goals of the organisation have a significant influence on ethical behaviour. The most significant explanatory factor of ethical decision making seems to be what may be called "stage in the career of the employee": "ethical" employees can be described as young, with a relatively low income, limited work experience and a low level of responsibility in the company. (shrink)

This paper explores whether MacIntyrean virtue ethics concepts are applicable in non-Western business contexts, specifically in SMEs in Taiwan, a country strongly influenced by the Confucian tradition. It also explores what differences exist between different polities in this respect, and specifically interprets observed differences between the Taiwanese study and previous studies conducted in Europe and Asia. Based on case study research, the findings support the generalizability of the MacIntyrean framework. Drawing on the institutional logics perspective and synthesizing this with MacIntyrean (...) concepts, the paper explains the differences between the studies largely by reference to the Confucian tradition operating at both the micro-level within firms and at the macro-level as a means of harmonizing the potentially competing institutional logics to which firms are subject. The recent weakening of this tradition, however, suggests that increased conflict may characterize the future. (shrink)

Background The aim was to explore how the clinical ethics committees in Norway have worked and functioned within mental health care and addiction treatment services. Methods Analysis of 256 annual reports from clinical ethics committees from 2003 to 2012 and a survey to clinicians who had used a clinical ethics committee. Results Dilemmas related to coercion, confidentiality, information, and patient autonomy dominated. The committees established only for psychiatric hospitals, had received more cases from mental health and addiction services than the (...) committees also serving somatic services. Many of the case discussions involved both somatic and mental health care, complicated legal issues as well as ethical dilemmas. Mental health care professionals that have used the clinical ethics committees evaluated the clinical ethics committees deliberation as useful. Conclusion Given the many difficult ethical dilemmas in mental health care ethics work need to be strengthened. The complexity of the cases requires varied and interdisciplinary competence and training among the clinical ethics committee members. (shrink)

Primeramente, haremos un repaso por la noción de diálogo, relación o encuentro en las artes y el pensamiento que se desarrollan durante los años sesenta del pasado siglo y fuertemente a partir del episodio de revueltas del 68. Sostenemos que en las artes, lo dialógico representó una estrategia política por partida doble: la conversación y el encuentro eran tanto un vector de ruptura con los modos de apreciar y vivir lo sensible y de entender el hecho artístico, como un procedimiento (...) para someter el individualismo y construir una presencia corporal y común considerada perdida y/o necesaria. Seguidamente veremos en qué sentido el diálogo se presenta como una de las claves de la filosofía política actual preocupada por combatir al sujeto individualista e hiperproductivo que propugna el neoliberalismo. Finalmente, trataremos de llevar a efecto esta invitación a dialogar. Así, la última sección de este escrito tomará la forma de una conversación entre nosotros, para interrogarnos juntos sobre algunas de las cuestiones anteriormente esbozadas. (shrink)

TThis paper aims to evidence the inherently metonymic nature of co-speech gestures. Arguing that motivation in gesture involves iconicity (similarity), indexicality (contiguity), and habit (conventionality) to varying degrees, it demonstrates how a set of metonymic principles may lend a certain systematicity to experientially grounded processes of gestural abstraction and enaction. Introducing visuo-kinetic signs as an umbrella term for co-speech gestures and signed languages, the paper shows how a frame-based approach to gesture may integrate different cognitive/functional linguistic and semiotic accounts of (...) metonymy (e.g., experiential domains, frame metonymy, contiguity, and pragmatic inferencing). The guiding assumption is that gestures metonymically profile deeply embodied, routinized aspects of familiar scenes, that is, the motivating context of frames. The discussion shows how gestures may evoke frame structures exhibiting varying degrees of groundedness, complexity, and schematicity: basic physical action and object frames; more complex frames; and highly abstract, complex frame structures. It thereby provides gestural evidence for the idea that metonymy is more basic and more directly experientially grounded than metaphor and thus often feeds into correlated metaphoric processes. Furthermore, the paper offers some initial insights into how metonymy also seems to induce the emergence of schematic patterns in gesture which may result from action-based and discourse-driven processes of habituation and conventionalization. It exemplifies how these forces may engender grammaticalization of a basic physical action into a gestural marker that shows strong metonymic form reduction, decreased transitivity, and interacting pragmatic functions. Finally, addressing basic metonymic operations in signed lexemes elucidates certain similarities regarding sign constitution in gesture and sign. English and German multimodal discourse data as well as German Sign Language (DGS) are drawn upon to illustrate the theoretical points of the paper. Overall, this paper presents a unified account of metonymy’s role in underpinning forms, functions, and patterns in visuo-kinetic signs. (shrink)

What kind of reference (if any) do terms such as “pencil,” “chair,” “television,” and so on have? On the matter, a de-bate between directly referential theorists and descriptiv-ist theorists is open. It is largely acknowledged that natural kind terms (such as “water,” “gold,” “tiger,” etc.) are directly referential expressions (cf. Putnam,1975). That is, they are expressions whose reference is determined by their refer-ents' nature, independent of whether we know or will ever know what this nature is. However, it does not (...) seem like-wise convincing that all artifactual kind terms (like “pen-cil,” “chair,” “television,” etc.) semantically behave the same. Terms for artifactual kinds seem more likely to be subjected to a descriptivist view, that is, definable not by links to their extensions' nature but in terms of conjunctions or clusters of properties. In his celebrated “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’” (1975), Hilary Putnam originated the mentioned debate by arguing that artifactual kind terms also refer directly. Thus, the discussion ultimately revolves around establishing whether artifactual and natural kind terms are both directly referential expressions. The authors engaged in this debate have tried to argue in favor of (or against) Putnam's proposal by highlighting the similarities (or differences) between nat-ural vis-à-vis artifactual kind words and their respective ref-erents. This paper aims to provide a thorough and reasoned overview of the debate at stake, pointing out trends and problems associated with each proposed account. (shrink)

ArgumentThe Ashkenazi grammars of Hebrew written between roughly 1600 and 1800 fill a modest and largely forgotten shelf in the Jewish scholarly library. At first sight, especially when compared with the medieval Jewish and contemporary Christian Hebrew traditions, they seem to lack technical sophistication. As this paper hopes to demonstrate, however, this apparent lack of sophistication was not so much an intrinsic flaw as a deliberate choice. For the earliest Ashkenazi textbooks were not about studying grammar, but about teaching Hebrew. (...) By adapting the existing descriptive models to the needs of the classroom and the gemeyne leytn, Jewish scholars and teachers in such cities as Prague, Wilhelmsdorff, and Amsterdam hoped to find and instruct new audiences. Depending on context and target audience, they either relied on Hebrew, Yiddish, or on an intricate interplay of the two for maximum success and efficiency. It was this innovative combination of didactic simplification and functional bilingualism that allowed them not only to reach a new readership, but also to equip that readership to henceforth read their Bible and prayers with unprecedented autonomy. (shrink)