Gerald L. Bruns. the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his recreation of that work" (p. 80). The notion of a pure language, a language uncontaminated by mere speech, may be one of modernity's great unkillable ...

Freud's criticism of the localization project as carried out by Theodor Meynert and Carl Wernicke has usually been seen as marking his break with contemporaneous brain science. In this article, however, I show that Freud criticized localization not by turning his back on brain science, but rather by radicalizing some of its principles. In particular, he argued that the physiological pretensions of the localization project remained at odds with its uncritical importation of psychological categories. Further, by avoiding a confusion of (...) categories and adopting a parallelist reading, Freud was able to develop a fully “physiologized” account of nervous processes. This opened up the possibility for forms of mental pathology that were not reliant on the anatomical lesion. Instead, Freud suggested that lived experience might be able to create a pathological organization within the nervous system. This critique—a passage through, rather than a turn away from, brain science—opened the possibility for Freud's theory of the unconscious and his developing psychoanalysis. On a methodological level, this article aims to show how the intellectual history of modern Europe can gain from taking seriously the impact of the brain sciences, and by applying to scientific texts the methods and reading practices traditionally reserved for philosophical or literary works. (shrink)

Based on three empirical studies, this research sets out to conceptualise and subsequently operationalise the construct of consumer perceived ethicality (CPE) of a company or brand. Study 1 investigates consumer meanings of the term ethical and reveals that, contrary to philosophical scholars' exclusively consequentialist or nonconsequentialist positions, consumers' ethical judgments are a function of both these evaluation principles, illustrating that not any one scholarly definition of ethics alone is capable of capturing the content domain. The resulting conceptualisation identifies six key (...) themes explicating the construct. Building upon these findings, studies 2 and 3 were conducted to operationalise CPE. Such operationalisation is an essential prerequisite for future explorations and theory development given the absence of a suitable tool to capture and quantify the strength and direction of CPE. The key focus was on developing a valid and reliable multi-item measurement tool that is practical, parsimonious and easy to administer. The scale's general applicability allows deployment in academic and business contexts as well as different research areas and doing thus facilitates the much-needed theory building in this new research area. (shrink)

The philosopher Stanley Cavell once asked, "Can a human being be free of human nature?" _On Ceasing to Be Human_ examines philosophical as well as literary texts and contexts, in which various senses of Cavell's question might be explored and developed. During the past thirty or so years, the very concept of "being human" has been called into question within such fields as cybernetics, animal-rights theory, analytic philosophy. This book examines these issues, but its main concern is the link between (...) freedom and nonidentity that Cavell's question implies, and which turns out to be a major concern among the thinkers Bruns takes up in this book: Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Jacques Derrida. Each of these is, in different ways, a philosopher of the "singular" for whom the singular cannot be reduced to concepts, categories, distinctions, or the rule of identity. (shrink)

Gerald Bruns’s “Stanley Cavell’s Shakespeare” is a consistently sympathetic and thoughtful response to Cavell’s difficult essays on Shakespeare.1 Nevertheless, while Bruns’s exposition of Cavell’s thought places it in a pertinently complex region of philosophical and literary concerns, it is hampered by its relative isolation from much of Cavell’s other work and from certain abiding conflicts within contemporary philosophy which inform that work. The resultant misunderstandings of Cavell’s thought are perhaps as inevitable as they are widespread—a function of the (...) way in which the modern American university carves up and compartmentalizes the world of humanistic learning—and are on the verge of becoming entrenched among commentators on his work. Much of Cavell’s work has been concerned to resist some of the costs of this process of compartmentalization or professionalization. The problems this resistance poses for the reception of the work are perhaps nowhere more pervasive than in the case of Cavell’s collection of essays on Shakespeare, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare, in part because of Cavell’s sense of the figure of Shakespeare, of what this corpus of writing represents. In light of, and in appreciation of, Bruns’s serious and resourceful effort to get Cavell’s thought on these matters straight, it is worth trying to get it clearer. James Conant, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, is currently a fellow at the Michigan Society of Fellows. His “Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and Nonsense” is included in Pursuits of Reason: Essays in Honor of Stanley Cavell. (shrink)

What is it to be seen (naked) by one's cat? In “L'animal que donc je suis” (2006), the first of several lectures that he presented at a conference on the “autobiographical animal,” Jacques Derrida tells of his discomfort when, emerging from his shower one day, he found himself being looked at by his cat. Th experience leads him, by way of reflections on the question of the animal, to what is arguably the question of his philosophy: Who am I? It (...) is not so much that Derrida wants to answer this question as to be free of it. His task here is to determine the sense of it— where it leads, for example, when it comes to the nature of the diff erence between himself and his cat. Unlike animal rights activists (and unlike philosophers Martha Nussbaum and Cora Diamond, who have recently addressed this issue), Derrida does not want to erase this difference but wants to multiply it in order (among other things) to affirm the absolute alterity or singularity of his cat, which cannot be subsumed by any category (such as the animal). His cat is an Other in a way that no human being (supposing there to be such a thing, which Derrida is not prepared to grant) could ever be. And here is where “the question who?” leads as well, namely, to a path of escape from absorption into any identity-machine. As Derrida puts it in A Taste for the Secret: Who am I when I am not one of you? In a hospitable world one would be free not to answer. (shrink)

Recent research on moral decision-making has suggested that many common moral judgments are based on immediate intuitions. However, some individuals arrive at highly counterintuitive utilitarian conclusions about when it is permissible to harm other individuals. Such utilitarian judgments have been attributed to effortful reasoning that has overcome our natural emotional aversion to harming others. Recent studies, however, suggest that such utilitarian judgments might also result from a decreased aversion to harming others, due to a deficit in empathic concern and social (...) emotion. The present study investigated the neural basis of such indifference to harming using functional neuroimaging during engagement in moral dilemmas. A tendency to counterintuitive utilitarian judgment was associated both with ‘psychoticism’, a trait associated with a lack of empathic concern and antisocial tendencies, and with ‘need for cognition’, a trait reflecting preference for effortful cognition. Importantly, only psychoticism was also negatively correlated with activation in the subgenual cingulate cortex (SCC), a brain area implicated in empathic concern and social emotions such as guilt, during counterintuitive utilitarian judgments. Our findings suggest that when individuals reach highly counterintuitive utilitarian conclusions, this need not reflect greater engagement in explicit moral deliberation. It may rather reflect a lack of empathic concern, and diminished aversion to harming others. (shrink)

Bruns lucidly depicts the distinctions and convergences between these two lines of thought by examining the works of Mallarme, Flaubert, Joyce, Beckett, and ...

This book argues that political philosophy is central to early Stoic philosophy, and is deeply tied to the Stoics' conceptions of reason and wisdom. Broad in scope, it explores the Stoics' idea of the cosmic city, their notion of citizen-gods, as well as their account of the law.

Belief and Truth: A Skeptic Reading of Plato explores a Socratic intuition about belief, doxa -- belief is "shameful." In aiming for knowledge, one must aim to get rid of beliefs. Vogt shows how deeply this proposal differs from contemporary views, but that it nevertheless speaks to intuitions we are likely to share with Plato, ancient skeptics, and Stoic epistemologists.

The threat simulation theory of dreaming states that dream consciousness is essentially an ancient biological defence mechanism, evolutionarily selected for its capacity to repeatedly simulate threatening events. Threat simulation during dreaming rehearses the cognitive mechanisms required for efficient threat perception and threat avoidance, leading to increased probability of reproductive success during human evolution. One hypothesis drawn from TST is that real threatening events encountered by the individual during wakefulness should lead to an increased activation of the system, a threat simulation (...) response, and therefore, to an increased frequency and severity of threatening events in dreams. Consequently, children who live in an environment in which their physical and psychological well-being is constantly threatened should have a highly activated dream production and threat simulation system, whereas children living in a safe environment that is relatively free of such threat cues should have a weakly activated system. We tested this hypothesis by analysing the content of dream reports from severely traumatized and less traumatized Kurdish children and ordinary, non-traumatized Finnish children. Our results give support for most of the predictions drawn from TST. The severely traumatized children reported a significantly greater number of dreams and their dreams included a higher number of threatening dream events. The dream threats of traumatized children were also more severe in nature than the threats of less traumatized or non-traumatized children. (shrink)

Background Decisions on limiting life-sustaining treatment for patients in the vegetative state (VS) are emotionally and morally challenging. In Germany, doctors have to discuss, together with the legal surrogate (often a family member), whether the proposed treatment is in accordance with the patient's will. However, it is unknown whether family members of the patient in the VS actually base their decisions on the patient's wishes. Objective To examine the role of advance directives, orally expressed wishes, or the presumed will of (...) patients in a VS for family caregivers' decisions on life-sustaining treatment. Methods and sample A qualitative interview study with 14 next of kin of patients in a VS in a long-term care setting was conducted; 13 participants were the patient's legal surrogates. Interviews were analysed according to qualitative content analysis. Results The majority of family caregivers said that they were aware of aforementioned wishes of the patient that could be applied to the VS condition, but did not base their decisions primarily on these wishes. They gave three reasons for this: (a) the expectation of clinical improvement, (b) the caregivers' definition of life-sustaining treatments and (c) the moral obligation not to harm the patient. If the patient's wishes were not known or not revealed, the caregivers interpreted a will to live into the patient's survival and non-verbal behaviour. Conclusions Whether or not prior treatment wishes of patients in a VS are respected depends on their applicability, and also on the medical assumptions and moral attitudes of the surrogates. We recommend repeated communication, support for the caregivers and advance care planning. (shrink)

Books reviewed in this article:Daniele Archibugi, David Held, and Martin K??hler, Re‐imagining Political Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy.Max Pensky, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays. By J??rgen Habermas.Beate Kohler‐Koch, Regieren in entgrenzten R??umen. Politische Vierteljahresschrift, special issue 29.Wolfgang Streeck, Internationale Wirtschaft, nationale Demokratie. Herausforderungen f??r die Demokratietheorie. Michael Z??rn, Regieren jenseits des Nationalstaates.

Some narrative approaches assume a tight relation between narrative and selfhood. They hold that the self-understanding of persons as individuals possessing a set of particular character traits is above all narratively structured for it is constituted by stories persons tell or can tell about their lives. Against this view, it is argued that self-understanding is also characterized by certain non-narrative and invariant mental features. In order to show this, a non-narrative awareness of self-identity over time will be analyzed. It will (...) be argued that this basic form of awareness plays a fundamental role for the possibility of a richer form of self-understanding. (shrink)

Thus it would not be the content or meaning of a written Torah that Jeremiah would attack; rather it would be the Deuteronomic “claim to final and exclusive authority by means of writing” . Jeremiah’s problem is political rather than theological. He knows that writing is more powerful than prophecy and that he will not be able to withstand it—and he knows that the Deuteronomists know no less. As Blenkinsopp says, “Deuteronomy produced a situation in which prophecy could not continue (...) to exist without undergoing profound transformations” —that is, without ceasing to be “free prophecy,” or prophecy unbound by any text, including its own. “It might be considered misleading or flippant to say that for [Deuteronomy], as for rabbinic orthodoxy, the only good prophet is a dead prophet. But in point of fact the Deuteronomic scribes, despite their evident debt to and respect for the prophets, contributed decisively to the eclipse of the kind of historically oriented prophecy represented by Jeremiah and the emergence in due course of quite different forms of scribal prophecy” .It is at this point that we reach a sort of outer limit of biblical criticism—a threshold that scholars, with their foundations in literary criticism, their analytical attitude toward texts, and their theological concerns, are not inclined to cross. In any case, it is no accident that the political meaning of the conflict of prophecy and canon has received its most serious attention not from a biblical scholar but from a radical historian, Ellis Rivkin. In The Shaping of Jewish History, a brilliant and tendentious book, Rivkin proposes to treat the question of canon-formation and the promulgation of canonical texts of the Scriptures, not according to literary criteria but according to power criteria. For Rivkin, the production of the Hebrew Scriptures “was not primarily the work of scribes, scholars, or editors who sought out neglected traditions about wilderness experience, but of a class struggling to gain power.”23 23. Ellis Rivkin, The Shaping of Jewish History: A Radical New Interpretation , p. 30; further references to this work will be included in the text. Gerald R. Bruns is professor of English at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language and Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Understanding in Literary History . The present essay is from a work in progress, Hermeneutics, Ancient and Modern. (shrink)

Despite the variety of theories suggesting how human language might have evolved, very few consider the potential role of emotions in such scenarios. The few existing theories jointly highlight that gaining control over the production of emotional communication was crucial for establishing and maintaining larger social groups. This in turn resulted in the development of more complex social emotions and the corresponding sophisticated socio-cognitive skills to understand others’ communicative behavior, providing the grounds for language to emerge. Importantly, these theories propose (...) that the ability of controlling emotional communication is a uniquely human trait, an assumption that we will challenge. By taking a comparative approach, we discuss recent findings from behavioral and neurobiological studies from our closest relatives, the non-human primates, on the extent of control over their gestural, facial and vocal signals. This demonstrates that research foci differ drastically across these modalities, which further enhances the traditional dichotomy between emotional, involuntary facial and vocal expressions in contrast to intentionally, voluntarily produced gestures. Based on this brief overview, we point to gaps of knowledge in primate communication research and suggest how investigating emotional expressions in our closest relatives might enrich the road map towards the evolution of human language. (shrink)

This research investigates how consumers’ ethical brand perceptions are affected by differentially valenced information. Drawing on literature from person-perception formation and using a sequential, mixed method design comprising qualitative interviews and two experiments with a national representative population sample, our findings show that only when consumers perceive their judgment of a brand’s ethicality to be pertinent, do they process information holistically and in line with the configural model of impression formation. In this case, negative information functions as a diagnostic cue (...) to form an unethical brand perception, irrespective of other positive information at hand. However, in the case where processing relevance of the un/ethical information provided is low, brand perception formation is algebraic, in which case positive information can counterbalance and neutralize the detrimental impact of brand misbehavior. Our findings extend existing research on consumer perceived ethicality as well as consumer reactions to corporate social responsibility and sustainability initiatives, which has so far assumed the asymmetric impact of negative information on ethical perceptions and consumer attitudes to be prevalent. We derive a range of academic and managerial implications and present a number of important avenues for future research. (shrink)

There is no doubt that emotions have an important effect on practices of moral reasoning such as clinical ethics consultation. Empathy is not only a basic human emotion but also an important and learnable skill for health care professionals. A basic amount of empathy is essential both in patient care and in clinical ethics consultation. This article debates the “adequate dose” of empathy in ethics consultations in clinical settings and tries to identify possible situations within the process of consultation in (...) which this crucial feeling is at risk. (shrink)

Although religious belief is often claimed to help with physical ailments including pain, it is unclear what psychological and neural mechanisms underlie the influence of religious belief on pain. By analogy to other top-down processes of pain modulation we hypothesized that religious belief helps believers reinterpret the emotional significance of pain, leading to emotional detachment from it. Recent findings on emotion regulation support a role for the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, a region also important for driving top-down pain inhibitory circuits. (...) Using functional magnetic resonance imaging in practicing Catholics and avowed atheists and agnostics during painful stimulation, here we show the existence of a context-dependent form of analgesia that was triggered by the presentation of an image with a religious content but not by the presentation of a non-religious image. As confirmed by behavioral data, contemplation of the religious image eneabled the religious group to detach themselves from the experience of pain. Critically, this context-dependent modulation of pain specifically engaged the right VLPFC, whereas group-specific preferential liking of one of the pictures was associated with activation in the ventral midbrain. We suggest that religious belief might provide a framework that allows individuals to engage known pain-regulatory brain processes. (shrink)

Marcel Duchamp once asked whether it is possible to make something that is not a work of art. This question returns over and over in modernist culture, where there are no longer any authoritative criteria for what can be identified (or excluded) as a work of art. As William Carlos Williams says, “A poem can be made of anything,” even newspaper clippings.At this point, art turns into philosophy, all art is now conceptual art, and the manifesto becomes the distinctive genre (...) of modernism. This book takes seriously this transformation of art into philosophy, focusing upon the systematic interest that so many European philosophers take in modernism. Among the philosophers Gerald Bruns discusses are Theodor W. Adorno, Maurice Blanchot, Arthur Danto, Stanley Cavell, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Emmanuel Levinas.As Bruns demonstrates, the difficulty of much modern and contemporary poetry can be summarized in the idea that a poem is made of words, not of any of the things that we use words to produce: meanings, concepts, propositions, narratives, or expressions of feeling. Many modernist poets have argued that in poetry language is no longer a form of mediation but a reality to be explored and experienced in its own right. But what sort of experience, philosophically, might this be? The problem of the materiality or hermetic character of poetic language inevitably leads to questions of how philosophy itself is to be written and what sort of communitydefines the work of art—or, for that matter, the work of philosophy.In this provocative study, Bruns answers that the culture of modernism is a kind of anarchist community, where the work of art is apt to be as much an event or experience—or, indeed, an alternative form of life—as a formal object. In modern writing, philosophy and poetry fold into one another. In this book, Bruns helps us to see how. (shrink)

In this paper, it is argued the Stoics develop an account of corporeals that allows their theory of bodies to be, at the same time, a theory of causation, agency, and reason. The paper aims to shed new light on the Stoics' engagement with Plato's Sophist . It is argued that the Stoics are Sons of the Earth insofar as, for them, the study of corporeals - rather than the study of being - is the most fundamental study of reality. (...) However, they are sophisticated Sons of the Earth by developing a complex notion of corporeals. A crucial component of this account is that ordinary bodies are individuated by the way in which the corporeal god pervades them. The corporeal god is the one cause of all movements and actions in the universe. (shrink)

A previous observational study suggested that when faced with a partner with its back turned, chimpanzees tend to move around to the front of a non-attending partner and then gesture — rather than gesturing once to attract attention and then again to convey a specific intent. We investigated this preference experimentally by presenting six orangutans, five gorillas, nine chimpanzees, and four bonobos with a food begging situation in which we varied the body orientation of an experimenter with respect to the (...) subject and the location of the food. These manipulations allowed us to measure whether subjects preferred to move around to face E or to use signals to attract her attention before they begged for food. Results showed that all species moved around to face E and then produced visual gestures, instead of using tactile/ auditory gestures behind E to call her attention. Species differences were apparent particularly when the food and E were in different locations. Unlike gorillas and orangutans, chimpanzees and bonobos produced their gestures in front of E in all conditions, including that in which subjects had to leave the food behind to communicate with her. Implications of these results are discussed in the context of the evolution of social cognition in great apes. (shrink)

Neuroimaging studies on moral decision-making have thus far largely focused on differences between moral judgments with opposing utilitarian (well-being maximizing) and deontological (duty-based) content. However, these studies have investigated moral dilemmas involving extreme situations, and did not control for two distinct dimensions of moral judgment: whether or not it is intuitive (immediately compelling to most people) and whether it is utilitarian or deontological in content. By contrasting dilemmas where utilitarian judgments are counterintuitive with dilemmas in which they are intuitive, we (...) were able to use functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify the neural correlates of intuitive and counterintuitive judgments across a range of moral situations. Irrespective of content (utilitarian/deontological), counterintuitive moral judgments were associated with greater difficulty and with activation in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, suggesting that such judgments may involve emotional conflict; intuitive judgments were linked to activation in the visual and premotor cortex. In addition, we obtained evidence that neural differences in moral judgment in such dilemmas are largely due to whether they are intuitive and not, as previously assumed, to differences between utilitarian and deontological judgments. Our findings therefore do not support theories that have generally associated utilitarian and deontological judgments with distinct neural systems. (shrink)

The article explores the basic conceptual relationship between social cognition, intersubjectivity and self-consciousness. A much-debated recent approach to social cognition, the so-called interaction theory, is the view that the ability to perceive, understand and interpret the behavior of others relies on interaction in the sense of mutual coordination of the embodied agents involved. It will be shown that this notion of reciprocity is too weak in order to fully account for social understanding. It will be argued that the idea of (...) reciprocity should at least in some cases be conceived of as a stance persons adopt towards each other, which in turn presupposes that they acknowledge each other as self-conscious agents. This view is inspired by an argument originally introduced by Johann Gottlieb Fichte. (shrink)

“The Avoidance of Love” is Cavell’s magic looking glass onto Shakespeare, where the idea of missing something, not getting what is obvious, is, on Cavell’s reading, very close to a philosophical obsession. Shakespeare here means—besides Lear—Othello, Coriolanus, Hamlet, The Winter’s Tale, and Antony and Cleopatra, and what Cavell finds in these plays is an attempt to think through what elsewhere, in the formation of the modern philosophical tradition, was getting formulated as the problem of skepticism, or not being able to (...) know that we know . It is not easy to say what this means. As if executing a skeptical decorum, Cavell’s writing does not try for transparency, nor does it always coincide with itself, and anyhow Shakespeare is not so much an object as a region of Cavell’s thinking, so everyday readers are apt to find themselves a bit at sea with him. Without claiming to match Cavell’s views point for point, I would like to give something like a para-Cavellian commentary that tries to say what his thinking, with respect to Shakespeare, seems to be getting at, and also where it leaves us.Gerald L. Bruns is William and Hazel White Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Notre Dame. His most recent book is Heidegger’s Estrangements: Language, Truth, and Poetry in the Later Writings. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEmotion understanding, which can broadly be defined as expertise in the meaning of emotion, is a core component of emotional intelligence and facilitates better intra- and interpersonal outcomes. However, to date only very few standard tests to measure emotion understanding in healthy adults exist. Here, we present two new performance-based tests that were developed and are scored based on componential emotion theory and large-scale cross-cultural empirical findings. These instruments intend to measure facets of emotion understanding that are not included in (...) existing tests. The first test measures the ability to understand and label emotional experiences of a target person from a description of emotion features covering five emotion components embedded in a written vignette. The second test measures semantic knowledge about which features from each component a... (shrink)

In this paper I want to say some things about the way William James talks—as, for example, in The Varieties of Religious Experience , the famous Gifford Lectures in which James attempted to rehabilitate religion as a subject fit for philosophical discourse, or as something still worth talking about.1 Some familiar background for this matter is provided by the epigraph I have just given from “What Pragmatism Means,” in which James shows himself to be a nominalist as against a metaphysical (...) realist . The nominalist position, as it applies to James, would be that words make sense to us but not for the reasons we give when we say that we designate things by them, because these things are never quite there, or at all events never quite things, in the way our language makes them out to be. It does not matter whether we are speaking of universals or particulars: words mean because of the way they hang together in sentences and contexts, and they fail to mean when they fail to fit in, not because of a failure of reference. It is not necessary to claim for our words that they are anchored in reality. The intelligibility of a word is always a hermeneutical construction, in the sense that the word depends for its meaning upon how it is taken. Whence the meaning of a word is always rhetorically contingent as well, because it is determined in varying measures by the situation in which it occurs and also, therefore, by the audience who is meant to hear it in a certain way, and who may take it in this certain way or perhaps in another way entirely, depending on the situations. We shall see how James exploits this contingency in his own way of speaking. A word can, of course, be taken as referring to some really existing entity, and in fact most words are taken in this way because this is how they works for us. Words usually end up being about something. A nominalist in this case would be just someone who believes that words do not have to refer to really existing entities in order to be taken in this realistic way, and most words are taken in this realistic way for no good philosophical reason. But what might be allowed to stand as a good philosophical reason for taking words one way rather than another is exactly what our problem is, and it is also one of the things this paper is about. Gerald L. Bruns is the author of Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language and Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Understanding in Literary History . He is currently at work on a new book, Hermeneutics, Ancient and Modern. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry, “Canon and Power in the Hebrew Scriptures,” appeared in the March 1984 issue. (shrink)

Contrary to their predecessors, the Stoics put forward a unified notion of cause: a cause is a bodily because-of-which. Against the backdrop of Plato’s and Aristotle’s influential views, this is an original proposal. It involves the rejection of an earlier trend, according to which causes and explanations are closely associated. It also involves a pulling apart of causes and principles. And it comes with a charge against Plato and Aristotle, namely that they introduce a swarm of causes, a turba causarum.

For many firms, a focus on corporate social responsibility (CSR) is an indication to stakeholders that the firm is concerned about social and environmental issues. However, these same firms may engage in CSR activities with the expectation that these activities will increase their bottom line. A relevant, and highly researched question, is the relationship between CSR and performance. The findings are inconclusive, indicating a need to consider other explanations. Several authors have drawn on the resource-based view of the firm to (...) suggest that CSR can give a firm a competitive advantage. In this article we draw on and further develop this research, by focusing on four outcomes of CSR initiatives: strategic disadvantage, strategic necessity, temporary strategic advantage, and strategic advantage. We exemplify this with two cases. The article contributes to the literature by developing a set of possible outcomes, by recognizing several issues which result in strategic necessity, and by suggesting movement between the outcomes. (shrink)

Despite widespread support for the idea of measuring EI as an ability based on Mayer and Salovey’s model, only a few performance-based EI tests have been developed. I argue that both the original and updated ability EI model provide little guidance for a theory-driven generation of items and their scoring, as the functions and processes associated with high and low EI are not specified in enough detail. One solution is to draw on theories from other fields when creating a measurement (...) rationale for a new EI test. I illustrate this approach by describing two new tests measuring emotional understanding and emotion management. (shrink)