Business and Society Review, Volume 127, Issue 1, Page 23-48, Spring 2022.

In a world of limited resources, it could be argued that companies that aspire to be good corporate citizens need to focus on making best use of resources. User value and environmental harm are created in supply chains and it could therefore be argued that company business ethics should be extended from the company to the entire value chain from the first supplier to the last customer. Starting with a delineation of the linkages between business ethics, corporate sustainability, and the (...) stakeholder concept, this article argues that supply chains generally have a great innovation potential for sustainable development. This potential could be highlighted with system thinking and the use of change management knowledge, promoting not only innovations within technology but also within organizational improvement. We propose process models and performance indicators as means of highlighting improvement potential and thus breaking down normative business ethics' requirements to an opertionalizable corporate level: Good business ethics should focus on maximizing stakeholder value in relation to harm done. Our results indicate that focusing on supply chains reveals previously unknown innovation potential that seems to be related to limited system understanding. The assumption is that increased visibility of opportunities will act as a driver for change. Results also highlight the importance of focusing on sustainability effects of the core business and clearly relating value created to harm done. (shrink)

This book provides insight into the work of Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), one of the most prophetic minds of the 20th century, whose dire historical predictions - world wars, ecological disasters, gigantic cities with unrestrained urban sprawl, increasing race conflicts, failure of nerve among the ruling elites, and rapid decline of cultural norms - have more than passed the test of time. Besides focusing on Spengler the prophet and the controversies which surrounded his name in the 1920s, this book also emphasizes (...) Spengler's pioneering role in the development of a comparative study of cultures based on biological principles. (shrink)

A favorite assumption of anglo-American scholarship is that locke's influence "pervaded the eighteenth century with an almost scriptural authority." examining the philosophy of the german enlightenment, This essay disputes the exaggerated importance ascribed to locke in the eighteenth century. Locke's influence was always limited by native traditions inimical to his thought. His empiricism could not compete with the leibniz-Wolff system in which all german philosophers, Including the lockean sympathizers, Were educated. It is true that around mid-Century and beyond locke attracted (...) a certain following, But those who accepted his theories were minor figures (popular philosophers) and exercised very little influence on the future course of german philosophy (kant). (shrink)

As a logical consequence of recent developments in the philosophy of science the concept of rationality has lost much of its impact. It seems that the rationality of methodological decisions in science can be defined no longer in an absolute sense but only in relation to a given context and in hindsight. This failure of methodology in assessing once and for all the rights and wrongs of scientific decisions is taken as a clue for reanalyzing the strategical intervention-points of methodological (...) norms. It is shown that relativism and irrationalism are to be avoided by not cutting the process of scientific investigation into intrinsically different portions: context of justification and context of discovery. This dichotomy opens a logical and psychological gap between different stages of scientific evolution that the idea of comparing factual contents or degrees of justification is no longer able to bridge. In two case studies, the development of modern science in the 16th and 17th centuries and the development of special and general realtivity it is shown that the dichotomy is inherently implausibel. But if it is possible to analyze the context of justification and the context of discovery in same terms, the logical chain of reasoning is closed. This problem-shift defies both irrationalism and relativism and leads to a different view of scientific progress as an increase of information-processing capacity that can be measured by a certain set of indicators radically different from the received one. (shrink)

Can Science do without a Theory? The main questions that are discussed are as follows: 1) Do we have - as a matter of fact - a general philosophy of science which is comprehensive and powerful enough to present a solution to all the relevant methodological and metatheoretical problems arising within the sciences? 2) Do scientists feel a need for such a general metatheoretical tool? 3) In the probable case of a negative answer to both questions posed above: what, if (...) any, is the legitimate status of the philosophy of science? It is argued in some detail that at least three types of models have failed, at least as far as their advisory function for scientific action in realistic situational settings is concerned: the ideal language model (Wittgenstein, Carnap), methodological falsificationism (Popper), and behavioral theories of scientific action. From the standpoint of the history of science it is plainly obvious that science has always been ahead of its purported metatheory and that important advances within the latter had been implicit in real scientific action at least for centuries. (shrink)

Galileo's Philosophy of Science - or: Contra Feyerabend. In analyzing Galileo's methodology, philosophers of science were using, misusing, and abusing his ideas rather unashamedly to suit their own purposes. Like so many others before him, Paul Feyerabend had come to the conclusion that his methodological ideas might gain momentum by demonstrating their compatibility with those of Galileo. The reinterpretation of Galileo as a true, though disguised, anarchist, was considered by Feyerabend as the most forceful, and indeed conclusive, case against rationalism (...) in methodology which might be conceived in view of the privileged position ascribed to Galileo by both philosophers which might be conceived in view of the privileged position ascribed to Galileo by both philosophers and historians of science. The paper argues - against Feyerabend - that Galileo was not a methodological anarchist, neither in theory nor in practice. He had firm methodological convictions that remained basically the same throughout his entire career. In his view, essential and accidental causes of phenomena were not given by experience. Although mathematical and geometrical analysis was needed to discriminate between them, experience and experiment was considered by Galileo from his middle periode on as a means to identify among the set of explanations, demonstrable "ex suppositione" as being mathematically correct, those which could in addition be applied to reality. Thus, Galileo was neither an inductivist nor a naive falsificationist, nor a Copernican zealot adapting his methodology to the needs of his presumed fight for heliocentrism, come what be. Only after the reconstruction of mechanics was in a fairly advanced stage, and after his own telescopic observations had provided independent evidence in favor of the new astronomy, Galileo was in a position to appreciate the Copernican system as a most forceful ally in his fight for the recognition of his physical achievements. Through the end of his life, his view of the heliocentric system remained rather traditional in adhering firmly to the principles of epicyclic and circular motion, as far as the heavens were concerned. (shrink)

Galileo's Philosophy of Science - or: Contra Feyerabend. In analyzing Galileo's methodology, philosophers of science were using, misusing, and abusing his ideas rather unashamedly to suit their own purposes. Like so many others before him, Paul Feyerabend had come to the conclusion that his methodological ideas might gain momentum by demonstrating their compatibility with those of Galileo. The reinterpretation of Galileo as a true, though disguised, anarchist, was considered by Feyerabend as the most forceful, and indeed conclusive, case against rationalism (...) in methodology which might be conceived in view of the privileged position ascribed to Galileo by both philosophers which might be conceived in view of the privileged position ascribed to Galileo by both philosophers and historians of science. The paper argues - against Feyerabend - that Galileo was not a methodological anarchist, neither in theory nor in practice. He had firm methodological convictions that remained basically the same throughout his entire career. In his view, essential and accidental causes of phenomena were not given by experience. Although mathematical and geometrical analysis was needed to discriminate between them, experience and experiment was considered by Galileo from his middle periode on as a means to identify among the set of explanations, demonstrable "ex suppositione" as being mathematically correct, those which could in addition be applied to reality. Thus, Galileo was neither an inductivist nor a naive falsificationist, nor a Copernican zealot adapting his methodology to the needs of his presumed fight for heliocentrism, come what be. Only after the reconstruction of mechanics was in a fairly advanced stage, and after his own telescopic observations had provided independent evidence in favor of the new astronomy, Galileo was in a position to appreciate the Copernican system as a most forceful ally in his fight for the recognition of his physical achievements. Through the end of his life, his view of the heliocentric system remained rather traditional in adhering firmly to the principles of epicyclic and circular motion, as far as the heavens were concerned. (shrink)

By scientiometrically analyzing the physics-literature produced between 1925 and 1933 it is shown that the purely quantitative contribution of physicists subsequently emigrating from Germany to the literature produced by the physics community in this country was much lower than hitherto estimated. The actual figure is not in the range of 30%, as is generally assumed, but much nearer to 11%. Control analysis of three leading German physics journals and of memberships in the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft confirms this result. Further investigation (...) of university calendars shows that transferring these results to purely academic physics would amount to committing a “universalistic fallacy”. In academic physics emigré-physicists held a total of 15,5% of all teaching postitions.Differentiating the physics literature into various specialties allows further insights into the cognitive and social structure of the German physics community before 1933. Works of emigré-physicists are not randomly distributed over specialities; instead, the distribution reveals a nearly perfect correlation with what could be called “the specialty's paradigmatic age”. The spectrum begins with quantum theory, where future emigrants produced more than 25% of the literature, and fades away with acoustics, where their contribution amounts to less than 4%. The commonly accepted explanation of this phenomenon, which is based on the assumption that time of institutionalization of a specialty, “prestige” of that specialty, and entrance barriers for Jewish scientists are correlated, is falsified by two cases of non- or zero-correlation: by the very old specialties and by the technical disciplines. A new explanans is proposed which is based on the hypothesis of cognitive and social marginality being correlated and on a certain amount of cognitive marginality enhancing the disposition to innovative behavior and creativity. (shrink)

ArgumentKuhnian phases of paradigmatic development correspond to characteristic variations of citation measures. These correlations can in turn be predicted from a simple model of human information processing when applied to the common environments of scientists. By combining a scientometric and a human information processing approach to the history of scientific thought, structures of disciplinary development, and in particular paradigmatic cycles, can be more reliably assessed than before. Consequently, the quantitative historian of science is liberated to some extent from the vagaries (...) of qualitative judgment, as exemplified by traditional narrative type approaches to the history of science. (shrink)