This study investigates whether employees attribute different motives to their organization's corporate social responsibility efforts and if these motives influence employee performance. Specifically, we investigate whether employees could distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic CSR motives by surveying 229 employee–supervisor dyads from various industries , and the impact of these perceptions on in-role and extra-role performance of subordinates. We found that employee task performance increases when employees attribute both intrinsic and extrinsic motives for CSR. Moreover, when employees perceive that their organization (...) invests in a CSR practice that is both intrinsic and extrinsic, they also tend to exert extra effort in their work. Theoretical and practical implications are also discussed alongside future research directions. (shrink)

The interest in ethical leadership has grown in the past few years, with an emphasis on the mechanisms through which it affects organizational life. However, research on the boundary conditions that limit and/or enhance its effectiveness is still scarce, especially concerning one of the main misconceptions about ethical leadership, its incompatibility with effectiveness . Thus, the present study examines the relationship between ethical leadership and organizational deviance via affective commitment to the organization, as a reflection of the quality of the (...) employee–organization relationship and proposes this relationship is conditional on the supervisor’s personal reputation for performance . Using a sample of 224 employees and their respective supervisors from 18 organizations, we confirmed our hypotheses . Our findings suggest that ethical leadership is positively related to employees’ affective commitment to the organization, particularly when supervisor’s reputation for performance is high, which in turn is associated with decreased organizational deviance. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings conclude the paper. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to identify the relative contribution of individual and contextual predictors to students’ attitudes toward the acceptability of cheating and plagiarism. A group of 324 students from a tertiary institution in New Zealand completed an online survey. The findings indicate that gender, justice sensitivity, and understanding of university policies regarding academic dishonesty were the key predictors of the students’ attitudes toward the acceptability of cheating and plagiarism, both as agents of dishonest conduct and as witnesses (...) of misconduct among their peers. The implications of these findings for the development of policies and initiatives in tertiary institutions are discussed. (shrink)

Irony is acknowledged to be usually critical: the ironic speaker tends to exhibit an apparent positive attitude in order to communicate a negative valuation. The reverse is considered to be also possible though: the ironic speaker can praise by apparent blaming, although it seldom happens. This unbalance between the two sorts of ironic examples is the so-called asymmetry issue of irony. Here I shall deny the possibility of being ironic without criticizing — hence the asymmetry issue is an illusion. By (...) claiming that irony is always critical I suggest an even stronger claim: criticism is what distinguishes irony from the similar phenomenon of metaphor. (shrink)

The present study aimed to explore and map the views of Portuguese laypersons regarding the acceptability of downsizing and restructuring measures during a recession. Two hundred and seven participants with various levels of training in economics were presented with a number of realistic scenarios depicting various measures, and were asked to indicate the extent to which they considered them to be acceptable. The scenarios were created by varying three factors likely to have an impact on people’s views: the magnitude of (...) a company’s reduction in net sales, the magnitude of planned downsizing, and the way in which downsizing would be implemented, either through layoffs, job alliances or both. Six qualitatively different personal positions were found. Four of these following positions were expected: never acceptable, mainly depends on the magnitude of downsizing, mainly acceptable and job alliance. Two unexpected positions were also observed: drastic measures and undetermined. (shrink)

The present study aimed to explore and map the views of Portuguese laypersons regarding the legitimacy of bonuses for senior executives. Two hundred eight participants, with various levels of training in economics, were presented with a number of concrete scenarios depicting the circumstances in which senior executives have received bonuses of variable amounts, and they were asked to indicate the extent to which such bonuses may be considered as legitimate. The scenarios were created by varying four factors likely to have (...) an impact on people’s views: the extent to which the objectives fixed by the company have been met or not, the global economic context in which the company has performed, the availability of experienced senior executives in the sector under consideration, and the amount of money that has been awarded, in terms of both the euros and multiples of the average worker’s pay. Five qualitatively different personal positions were found. The most common positions were that executive bonuses were either never legitimate or not very legitimate. People without any background in economics were more likely to hold these views than people with a background in economics. The remaining 45 % of the participants supported the awarding of bonus, but their support was conditional, and the main condition was the extent to which the company’s objectives were met. Thus for most participants, the practice of awarding extra pay to senior executives was either never legitimate, or legitimate only when the company’s objectives have been attained, or legitimate only when, even in a time of economic crisis, the company’s objectives have been surpassed. (shrink)

: To act is to be the author of an intentional bodily movement. I will show that, in order for that authorship to be assured, the agent must both amount to more than the mereological sum of her mental or neural states and events, and have an irreducible causal power over, at least, some of them. Hence, agent-causalism is the best position for any realist about action to assume. I will contend that, contrary to what many have claimed, agent-causalism is (...) not an unscientific theory, since it can ground its view of the agent on a form of emergent dualism that can account for robust forms of agency without having to challenge the natural supervenience of the mental on the physical. I claim that the conditions of possibility for a causally effective emergent self are the presence of neuronal indeterminism and the break of causal closure, both of which will be shown to be compatible with our current scientific picture of the world. Keywords: Action; Self; Emergent Dualism; Downward Causation; Indeterminism Prendere sul serio l’agente: ovvero, come un’attenta analisi dell’agentività ci conduce al dualismo emergentista Riassunto: Agire vuol dire essere l’autore di un movimento corporeo intenzionale. Intendo mostrare che, per assicurarsi il riconoscimento di essere l’autore di un’azione, l’agente debba essere più della semplice somma mereologica dei propri stati mentali ed eventi neurali e che debba anche avere un irriducibile potere causale su di essi, o al limite su parte di essi. Pertanto, una concezione causale riferita all’agente è la migliore posizione da assumere per chi voglia dirsi realista riguardo alle azioni. Intendo affermare che, diversamente a quanto da molti sostenuto, la concezione causale riferita all’agente non sia una teoria non scientifica, dal momento che può fondare la sua concezione dell’agente su una forma di dualismo emergentista in grado di legittimare forme robuste di agentività senza dover mettere in dubbio la sopravvenienza del mentale sul fisico. Indeterminismo neurale e rottura della chiusura causale saranno indicate come condizioni di possibilità per un sé causalmente ed effettivamente emergente e mostrerò come entrambi siano compatibili con l’immagine scientifica del mondo che oggi abbiamo. Parole chiave : Azione; Sé; Dualismo emergentista; Causalità rivolta verso il basso; Indeterminismo. (shrink)

Agent-causal theories of free will, which rely on a non-reductionist account of the agent, have traditionally been associated with libertarianism. However, some authors have recently argued in favor of compatibilist agent-causal accounts. In this essay, I will show that such accounts cannot avoid serious problems of implausibility or incoherence. A careful analysis of the implications of non-reductionist views of the agent (event-causal or agent-causal as they may be) reveals that such views necessarily imply either the denial of the principle of (...) supervenience or the assumption of bottom-level indeterminism. I will contend that the former alternative comes at a high cost, while the latter is quite plausible. Therefore, providing that they accept the condition of the truth of indeterminism, non-reductionist accounts of the agent do not have to contradict our scientific worldview. Interestingly, while they should be taken seriously by anyone who is concerned with the passivity of the agent’s role under a reductionist scenario, non-reductivist accounts end up contributing an extra incompatibilist argument to the free will debate. (shrink)

Human behavior can range from automatic and even unconscious bodily movements to very elaborate and rational decisions. In this paper I develop a taxonomy based on the empirical analysis of the phenomenology associated with selected instances of different forms of behavior. The transition from sub-actional behavior to proper actions is shown to take place when the agent intervenes actively in the causal process leading from her mental states to the bodily movement by exercising her power to form intentions to act. (...) It is argued that this type of analysis could be helpful to agent-causal accounts of action and free will. (shrink)

Despite its recent popularity, Emergence is still a field where philosophers and physicists often talk past each other. In fact, while philosophical discussions focus mostly on ontological emergence, physical theory is inherently limited to the epistemological level and the impossibility of its conclusions to provide direct evidence for ontological claims is often underestimated. Nevertheless, the emergentist philosopher’s case against reductionist theories of how the different levels of reality are related to each other can still gain from the assessment of paradigmatic (...) examples of discontinuity between models in physics, even though their implications must be handled with care. (shrink)

Spontaneous actions are preceded by brain signals that may sometimes be detected hundreds of milliseconds in advance of a subject's conscious intention to act. These signals have been claimed to reflect prior unconscious decisions, raising doubts about the causal role of conscious will. Murakami et al. (2014. Nat Neurosci 17: 1574–1582) have recently argued for a different interpretation. During a task in which rats spontaneously decided when to abort waiting, the authors recorded neurons in the secondary motor cortex. The neural (...) activity and relationship to action timing was parsimoniously explained using an integration-to-bound model, similar to those widely used to account for evidence-based decisions. In this model, the brain accumulates spontaneously occurring inputs voting for or against an action, but only commits to act once a certain threshold is crossed. The model explains how spontaneous decisions can be forecast (partially predicted) by neurons that reflect either the input or output of the integrator. It therefore presents an explicit hypothesis capable of rejecting the claim that such predictive signals imply unconscious decisions. We suggest that these results can inform the current debate on free will but must be considered with caution. (shrink)

Science aims to transform the subjectivity of individual observations and ideas into more objective and universal knowledge. Yet if there is any area in which first-person experience holds a particularly special and delicate role, it is the sciences of the mind. According to a widespread view, first-person methods were largely discarded from psychology after the fall of introspectionism a century ago and replaced by more objective behavioral measures, a step that some authors have begun to criticize. To examine whether these (...) views are sufficiently informed by actual scientific practice, we conducted a review of methodological approaches in the cognitive science literature. We found that reports of subjective experience are in fact still widely used in a broad variety of different experimental paradigms, both in studies that focus on subjective experience, and in those that make no explicit reference to it. Across these studies, we documented a diverse collection of approaches that leveraged first-person reports, ranging from button presses to unstructured interviews, while continuing to maximise experimental reproducibility. Common to these studies were subjects acting as sensors, intentionally communicating their experience to the experimenter, which we termed “second-person” methods. We conclude that, despite views to the contrary, first-person experience has always been and is still central to investigations of the mind even if it is not recognized as such. We suggest that the conversation ought to be reframed: instead of debating whether to accept subjects’ first-person knowledge we should discuss how best to do so. (shrink)

Differences in Common engages in the ongoing debate on ‘community’ focusing on its philosophical and political aspects through a gendered perspective. It explores the subversive and enriching potential of the concept of community, as seen from the perspective of heterogeneity and distance, and not from homogeneity and fused adhesions. This theoretical reflection is, in most of the essays included here, based on the analysis of literary and filmic texts, which, due to their irreducible singularity, teach us to think without being (...) tied, or needing to resort, to commonplaces. Philosophers such as Arendt, Blanchot, Foucault, Agamben or Derrida have made seminal reflections on community, often inspired by contemporary historical events and sometimes questioning the term itself. More recently, thinkers like Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak or Rada Ivekovic—included in this volume are essays by all three—have emphasized the gender bias in the debate, also problematizing the notion of community. Most of the essays gathered in Differences in Common conceive community not as the affirmation of several properties which would unite us to other similar individuals, but as the “expropriation” of ourselves (Esposito), in an intimate diaspora. Community does not fill the gap between subjects but places itself in this gap or void. This conception stresses the subject’s vulnerability, a topic which is also central to this volume. The body of community is thus opened by a “wound” (Cixous) which exposes us to the contagion of otherness. The essays collected here reflect on different topics related to these issues, such as: gender and nation; nationalism, internationalism, transnationalism; nationalism’s naturalization of citizenship and the exclusion of women from citizenship; the violent consequences of a gendered nation on women’s bodies; gendering community; preservation of difference(s) within the community; bodily vulnerability and new politics; community and mourning; community and the politics of memory; fiction, historical truth and (fake) documentary; love, relationality and community; interpretive communities and virtual communities on the Web, among others. Joana Sabadell-Nieto is Professor of Contemporary Spanish Literature (Gender and Feminist Studies) at Hamilton College (USA) and Researcher at the Center for Women and Literature at the University of Barcelona. Marta Segarra is Professor of French and Francophone literature and Gender Studies at the University of Barcelona (Spain), Director of the UNESCO Chair Women, Development and Cultures and co-founder and director of the Center for Women and Literature (2003-2012). (shrink)

Does the interaction between climactic demands, monetary resources, and freedom suggest a more general relationship between the environmental challenges that human societies face and their resources to meet those challenges? Using data on press freedom (Van de Vliert 2011a), we found no evidence of a similar interaction with natural resources (as measured by oil exports) or risk for natural disasters.

The years 2016 and 2017 have been particularly prolific in the field of utopian studies. Spain alone has seen thirty items published since 2016 that were indexed as "utopian" by the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the database from which this article draws its data.1 As we will see, the concept of utopia has inspired researchers and artists from different areas in their production of knowledge and art, as well as in expanding the debate about the philosophical, economic, political, and social (...) issues of contemporary society to the general public. The idea of utopia has also inspired contemporary Spanish poets, namely, Iosu Moracho, who published La Utopia tiene los Pies Descalzos, and José... (shrink)

Aquest llibre recull els textos de les reflexions que van tenir lloc en l'encont re internacional SCAN (festival de fotografia), a Internet del 29 de febrer al 1 7 d'abril de 2008, i al Teatre Metropol, el dia 17 d'abril de 2008. Tres teòrics de la imatge de reconegut prestigi internacional -Christian Caujolle, Joan Font cuberta i Radu Stern- van debatre virtualment a internet i posteriorment de form a presencial a Tarragona sobre el paper de la imatge al nostre temps.

This article discusses Stuart Hall and Homi Bhabha’s theories on multiculturalism and diaspora as alternative epistemological references to confront racist revivals across Europe. Edward Said’ s defence of inclusive academic curricula is equally revisited as a parallel strategy to deconstruct Eurocentric ideas. These three thinkers also represent nationalism as an obsolete paradigm, inadequate to perceive a globalized world. The point of this article is to revisit established postcolonial thinkers and see how their discourses have been reinterpreted by committed artists/writers whose (...) works seem to share with the invoked thinkers the aim of challenging their audiences to think differently about race, cultural difference, invisibility of oppression and right of ‘belonging’. The invoked theoretical discourse is used as a platform to discuss four artistic interventions – a poem by Eunice de Souza, Raimi Gabdamosi’s performance in Cadiz, the collective installation Return to Hansala at MUSAC museum and a sculpture by Portuguese visual artist Ana Vieira. Two of the selected works address gender issues in articulation with domesticity and patriarchal genealogies while the other two pieces address race and marginalization without any particular gender inflection. The choice is deliberate. Feminist discussions cannot be isolated from other discourses that expose related forms of oppression and marginalization even if they are not primarily formed by feminist awareness. (shrink)

Les travaux de Margareth Rago, historienne assez connue du public brésilien, portent sur l'histoire des femmes et des rapports entre les genres, dans une perspective marquée par les travaux de Michel Foucault. Dans ce livre, l'auteure utilise ce cadre théorique pour analyser la vie et l'œuvre de Luce Fabbri, intellectuelle anarchiste, sans cacher une certaine sympathie pour son sujet. Sur un ton alerte, l'ouvrage raconte la vie de cette femme-écrivain italienne qui a vécu 92 ans. Le sa..

C'est un tableau stimulant de la vie des élites dans la ville de São Paulo pendant les années 1920 que nous présente Mônica Raisa Schpun dans cet ouvrage, résultat de son doctorat d'Histoire mené à l'université Paris 7, sous la direction de Michelle Perrot. Le travail est divisé en trois parties, avec, comme fils directeurs, l'histoire de São Paulo, ses transformations et les changements dans les rapports de genre. D'une écriture agile et attrayante, ce livre nous présente les particul..

In the context of the free will debate, both compatibilists and event-causal libertarians consider that the agent’s mental states and events are what directly causes her decision to act. However, according to the ‘disappearing agent’ objection, if the agent is nothing over and above her physical and mental components, which ultimately bring about her decision, and that decision remains undetermined up to the moment when it is made, then it is a chancy and uncontrolled event. According to agent-causalism, this sort (...) of problem can be overcome if one realizes that the agent herself, as an irreducible substance, is the true originator of her actions. I’ll present arguments that favor this view. Event-causalists have countered that if the agent identifies with some of the inner states that play the self-determining causal role in bringing about the action, then it is as though the action was directly caused by herself. I’ll object that this is not a distinctive aspect of free agency. Agent-causalism has been criticized from most naturalistically inclined fronts, and it must address risks of implausibility, contradiction and unintelligibility. Even though I’ll acknowledge these challenges, I’ll still argue that libertarian free will cannot be defended by any reductionist alternative, and that agent-causalism does not conflict with contemporary science but only with some of its unproven assumptions. (shrink)

Evangelization in the present contemporary context, transmission of faith, and the new architecture of communication are this article’s central axes. Just as interconnected cogwheels, they need to function together to hand on faith appropriately in today’s world. Our society, marked by unprecedented experiences in the field of digital culture, gave rise to a “new person”, who lives and relates within a new architecture of communication altogether. In the communicative process of digital culture, the modality of communication has changed from a (...) unilinear mode of transmission to networked, interactive, collaborative forms of interaction. Based on the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, and in an effort to rethink the present modalities of faith transmission, this study concerns both the convergence and continuity of the Magisterium of the Church on evangelization and the urgency for her to engage in a dialogue between faith and culture. This requires an attitude of courage to consider more deeply the relation between faith, Church life, and the current transformations as experienced today. For in the digital culture, a new perception and understanding of faith has grown and developed. New languages have challenged conventional paradigms and prompted us into a change of mentality and pastoral practice. (shrink)

In this paper a hybrid model of argument from analogy is presented that combines argumentation schemes and story schemes. One premise of the argumentation scheme for argument from analogy in the model claims that one case is similar to another. Story schemes are abstract representations of stories (narratives, explanations) based on common knowledge about how sequences of actions and events we are familiar with can normally be expected to unfold. Story schemes are used (a) to model similarity (...) between two cases, and (2) as the basis of evidence to support the similarity premise of an argument from analogy. Four examples of argument from analogy are used to test the theory. (shrink)

Today’s technological-scientific prospect of posthumanity simultaneously evokes and defies historical understanding. On the one hand, it implies a historical claim of an epochal transformation concerning posthumanity as a new era. On the other, by postulating the birth of a novel, better-than-human subject for this new era, it eliminates the human subject of modern Western historical understanding. In this article, I attempt to understand posthumanity as measured against the story of humanity as the story of history itself. I examine (...) the fate of humanity as the central subject of history in three consecutive steps: first, by exploring how classical philosophies of history achieved the integrity of the greatest historical narrative of history itself through the very invention of humanity as its subject; second, by recounting how this central subject came under heavy criticism by postcolonial and gender studies in the last half-century, targeting the universalism of the story of humanity as the greatest historical narrative of history; and third, by conceptualizing the challenge of posthumanity against both the story of humanity and its criticism. Whereas criticism fragmented history but retained the possibility of smaller-scale narratives, posthumanity does not doubt the feasibility of the story of humanity. Instead, it necessarily invokes humanity, if only in order to be able to claim its supersession by a better-than-human subject. In that, it represents a fundamental challenge to the modern Western historical condition and the very possibility of historical narratives – small-scale or large-scale, fragmented or universal. (shrink)

This essay explores the nature of narrative representations of individual lives and the connection between these narratives and personal good. It poses the challenge of determining how thinking of our lives in story form contributes distinctively to our good in a way not reducible to other value-conferring features of our lives. Because we can meaningfully talk about our lives going well for us at particular moments even if they fail to go well overall or over time, the essay maintains (...) that our good must consist in something more than an accumulation of good discrete moments. Since persons have the capacities to reason, remember, and imagine, our good depends on a larger view of our lives that integrates its particular moments in a narrative. That narrative provides shape and texture to our lives. Storytelling serves to connect the events of our lives to each other, and to explain why the meaning and value of past events or features of our lives can shift as the life, and hence the story of the life, continues to unfold. The essay concludes that narrative enables us to see our lives in ways that support, encourage, or promote our self-concept and self-worth as agents who have controlling authority over our own lives. (shrink)

The study is an intercultural comparison of the theory of reasoned action and the theory of planned behavior to predict students’ intentions for academic cheating. The sample included university students from 7 countries: Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Turkey, Switzerland, United States, and New Zealand. Across countries, results show that attitudes, perceived behavioral control, and moral obligation predict students’ intentions to engage in academic dishonesty in the form of cheating. The extended modified version of the theory of planned behavior emerged as the (...) best explanatory model predicting intentions to cheat. Significant cross-cultural differences were found and discussed. (shrink)

Although it seems plausible to say that the same story can be retold in different media, it is difficult to say exactly what this would entail. The primary difficulty is in coming up with an acceptable theory of story identity. In this article I present several theories of story identity and explore their weaknesses. I argue that in the end we are left with two unattractive options: a strict theory that implies that the same story can (...) almost never be retold and a lenient theory that has trouble differentiating between a general story type and the same story. (shrink)