Despite the proliferation of studies on corporate social responsibility (CSR), there is a lack of consensus and a cardinal methodological base for research on the quality of CSR communication. Over the decades, studies in this space have remained conflicting, unintegrated, and sometimes overlapping. Drawing on semiotics—a linguistic-based theoretical and analytical tool, our article explores an alternative perspective to evaluating the quality and reliability of sustainability reports. Our article advances CSR communication research by introducing a theoretical-cum-methodological perspective which provides unique insights (...) into how to evaluate the quality of CSR communication. Particularly, we illustrate the application of our proposed methodology on selected U.K. FTSE 100 companies. Our two-phased analysis employed the Greimas Canonical Narrative Schema and the Semiotic Square of Veridiction in drawing meanings from selected sustainability/csr reports. In addition, we present a distinctive CSR report quality model capable of guiding policy makers and firms in designing sustainability/csr reporting standards. (shrink)

Organisations are increasingly expected to respond to societal and environmental issues within their supply chains. The nuances of this expectation necessitate the consideration of the disparities in corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices within supply chains. Drawing on the stakeholder theory, this paper examines the meanings and influences on socially responsible purchasing (SRP) in supply chains. It adopts an interpretivist qualitative methodology, relying on data from semi-structured, face-to-face interviews with practitioners from multi-national and indigenous organisations in Nigeria. Our findings present a (...) useful understanding of SRP based on the specific endogenous-level and exogenous-level influences. In particular, we develop an encompassing scope for SRP's meaning, outlining its key components, clarifying its boundaries and highlighting inconsistencies in its description. Our study provides a fresh understanding of SRP, with attendant contributions to the broad literature on CSR, corporate governance and supply chain management. It also offers insights to managers, purchasers, suppliers, financial analysts and policy-makers in embedding SRP. (shrink)

Esta lectura de Patriagonia, poemario escrito por la poeta Huichille-chilena, Ivonne Coñuecar, intenta dar cuenta de la estética de tres de sus textos reunidos en esta edición: Catabática, Adiabática y Anabática desde una mirada feminista y queer, interseccional y descolonial. La lectura explora la urdimbre de relacio-nes identitarias no binarias, de territorio y estado-nación, como una serie de revueltas geodésicas y eróticas, geopoéticas y políticas. La hablante poética da cuenta de chispazos y desplazamientos de memoria rupturista a partir de múltiples (...) agenciamientos de poder que abarcan el cuerpo, la familia heteropatriarcal y la centralidad capital del Estado neoliberal. (shrink)

African nations are many and diverse, each one of them a multicultural home to philosophies that have enriched human communities over the centuries. Yet, the continent's wisdom remains largely undocumented. Of particular importance are those insights that could serve as stimuli to the more responsible and sustainable management of the global economy and the earth's resources. African philosophies about the way to live a flourishing life are predominantly virtue-oriented. However, narratives of African conceptions of virtue are uncommon. This book therefore (...) helps bridge an important gap in literature. Authors writing from South Africa, Ghana, Egypt, Kenya, Mauritius, Côte D'Ivoire and Nigeria share research on indigenous wisdoms on virtue, displaying a marked consensus about the communitarian nature of African virtue ethics traditions and virtues essential for a flourishing life. They also show how indigenous virtue ethics improve corporate practices. This book will be a launchpad for further studies in Afriethics as well as a medium for sharing rich knowledge with the rest of the world.These chapters form a unique record in ethics for researchers, teachers, students and management practitioners of responsible management and African studies. (shrink)

Managers often face moral decision crossroads that demand self-leadership and require an internal locus of control. This article suggests that the concept of a locus of control should be incorporated into business ethics education in Nigeria, keeping in mind environmental characteristics that inhibit internality, and, based on a qualitative study carried out in Eastern Nigeria, that Rotter's scale be adapted to reduce response bias in this environment. Both incorporation of the concept and adaptation of the scale would be useful in (...) enhancing the ethical reasoning capabilities of future business leaders. (shrink)

The abstract structure of inquiry - the process of acquiring and changing beliefs about the world - is the focus of this book which takes the position that the "pragmatic" rather than the "linguistic" approach better solves the philosophical problems about the nature of mental representation, and better accounts for the phenomena of thought and speech. It discusses propositions and propositional attitudes (the cluster of activities that constitute inquiry) in general and takes up the way beliefs change in response to (...) potential new information, suggesting that conditional propositions should be understood as projections of epistemic policies onto the world.Robert C. Stalnaker is a professor in the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

Responsibilities towards employees constitute a recognised general subject area in the field of business ethics. Thus, research has been done regarding respecting employees’ rights to fairness in dismissal procedures, to their privacy, to a fair wage, etc. Employee loyalty has also been shown to be very important both in management literature and in legal debate but much less attention has been given to employer loyalty which could be one of the responsibilities of an employer to his or her employee. Rather, (...) some confusion regarding the nature of loyalty has at times led to suggestions that loyalty should be replaced by self-interest. However, scholars who favour this view usually do so in reaction to the one-sidedness of loyalty expectations. This paper proposes that loyalty is a duty that employers also owe their employees, based on the reciprocal nature of certain rights and duties within human relationships and an understanding of psychological contracts. Thus the paper argues that loyalty should be a mutual expectation between the parties rather than unidirectional. In fact, employer loyalty enriches the employers themselves in terms of their human fulfilment, since it is a human virtue, and leads to employee loyalty response, which then impacts the bottom-line.The paper’s content is also important insofar as it could contribute to building ethical duty foundations for employers in developing countries where weak regulatory environments combine with the harshness of the economy to make it an employers’ world and make instances of unfairness towards employees common. (shrink)

Extortion is one of the ways that the formal economy leaks. Like bribery, extortion is not adequately documented because perpetrators are unlikely to record it. Like bribery, it raises the cost of business. It is similar to facilitating payments in that neither seeks something to which the payer is not entitled and so they may seem less harmful than outright bribery . Both are however harmful and lead to worse forms of corruption, . This paper explains how extorters operate and (...) proposes a framework of what characterizes every incident.The paper examines 159 victim narratives of experiences of extortion of fifty-five postgraduate students. In a challenging economy where businesses struggle for profitability, a discussion of money leakages is relevant. Understanding how extortion works will make it easier to recommend anti-extortion mechanisms. The extortion cycle proposed depicts the incidence and spread of corruption through self-perpetuation. Adopting the style of Nielsen the paper concludes by suggesting a bidirectional approach to fighting extortion—one aiming at creating a more enabling environment for ethical behaviour and another at forestalling individual unethical behaviour. (shrink)

Responsible Management in Africa delivers a rich reservoir of indigenous value-narratives based on a well-balanced philosophical anthropology, enriching global knowledge in the philosophy of management and in business ethics and contributing much-needed insights for leaders around the world to manage enterprise responsibly.

Metaphysicians speak of laws of nature in terms of necessity and universality; scientists, in terms of symmetry and invariance. In this book van Fraassen argues that no metaphysical account of laws can succeed. He analyzes and rejects the arguments that there are laws of nature, or that we must believe there are, and argues that we should disregard the idea of law as an adequate clue to science. After exploring what this means for general epistemology, the author develops the empiricist (...) view of science as a construction of models to represent the phenomena. (shrink)

Philosophers of biology typically pose questions about individuation by asking “what is an individual?” For example, we ask, “what is an individual species”, “what is an individual organism”, and “what is an individual gene?” In the first part of this chapter, I present my account of the gene concept and how it is used in investigative practices in order to motivate a more pragmatic approach. Instead of asking “what is a gene?”, I ask: “how do biologists individuate genes?”, “for what (...) purposes?”, and “do their practices of individuating genes serve these purposes?" In the second part of this chapter, I propose that we use this approach when analyzing concepts of organisms and biological individuals. Following philosophical pragmatism, I argue that we should abstain from attempts to situate individuation of Darwinian individuals or of holobionts in a philosophy of nature. Instead, we should analyze practices of individuating organisms in terms of three-place relations between the world, ideas, and human purposes and actions. I conclude with three lessons: an ontological, an epistemological, and a meta-philosophical lesson, which I suggest, apply to philosophy of science generally and to philosophy and metaphysics at large. (shrink)

What is empiricism and what could it be? Bas . van Fraassen, one of the world’s foremost contributors to philosophical logic and the philosophy of science, here undertakes a fresh consideration of these questions and offers a program for renewal of the empiricist tradition. The empiricist tradition is not and could not be defined by common doctrines, but embodies a certain stance in philosophy, van Fraassen says. This stance is displayed first of all in a searing, recurrent critique of metaphysics, (...) and secondly in a focus on experience that requires a voluntarist view of belief and opinion. Van Fraassen focuses on the philosophical problems of scientific and conceptual revolutions and on the not unrelated ruptures between religious and secular ways of seeing or conceiving of ourselves. He explores what it is to be or not be secular and points the way toward a new relationship between secularism and science within philosophy. (shrink)

Bazzocchi disposes the text of the Tractatus in a user-friendly manner, exactly as Wittgenstein's decimals advise. This discloses the logical form of the book by distinct reading units, linked into a fashioned hierarchical tree. The text becomes much clearer and every reader can enjoy, finally, its formal and literary qualities.

José Benardete developed a famous paradox involving a beginningless set of items each member of which satisfies some predicate just in case no earlier member satisfies it. The Grim Reaper version of this paradox has recently been employed in favor of various finitist metaphysical theses, ranging from temporal finitism to causal finitism to the discrete nature of time. Here, I examine a new challenge to these finitist arguments—namely, the challenge of implying that the future cannot be endless. In particular, I (...) develop future-oriented Benardete paradoxes and examine their epistemic symmetry with past-oriented paradoxes. (shrink)

Benardete paradoxes involve a beginningless set each member of which satisfies some predicate just in case no earlier member satisfies it. Such paradoxes have been wielded on behalf of arguments for the impossibility of an infinite past. These arguments often deploy patchwork principles in support of their key linking premise. Here I argue that patchwork principles fail to justify this key premise.

This book develops an Aristotelian account of the virtue of practical intelligence or "phronesis"--an excellence of deliberating and making choices--which ...

Pensar epistémico, educación popular e investigación participativa es un testimonio intelectual acerca de tres figuras emblemáticas del pensamiento crítico latinoamericano: Orlando Fals Borda, Paulo Freire y Hugo Zemelman. Alfonso Torres Carrillo, educador popular colombiano, expone su propia interpretación, nutrida por el diálogo con estos tres pensadores, sobre la vigencia (y trascendencia) de sus propuestas críticas y de acción social. Redimensiona, así, estas tres vertientes teóricas y metodológicas en América Latina: el pensar epistémico, la educación popular y el modelo de la (...) investigación participativa. Acerca del autor: Alfonso Torres Carrillo. Educador popular e investigador social colombiano. Profesor del Departamento de Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad Pedagógica Nacional. Magíster en Historia (Universidad Nacional de Colombia) y doctor en Estudios Latinoamericanos (UNAM, México), es autor de varios libros y numerosos artículos sobre educación popular, movimientos sociales e investigación alternativa. (shrink)

Artikelen en lezingen uit de periode 1970-1982.

In this volume of newly commissioned essays, leading moral philosophers offer a comprehensive overview of virtue ethics.