Management practices are at the heart of most organizations’ sustainability efforts. Despite the importance of values for the design and implementation of such practices, few researchers have analyzed how human values, particularly ethical values, relate to human resource management practices in organizations. The purpose of this conceptual paper is to integrate scholarship on organizational sustainability, human resource practices, and values in delineating how four specific values—altruism, empathy, positive norm of reciprocity, and private self-effacement—support effective human resource practices in organizations. This (...) set of distinct values has sustainability implications, global relevance, and ethical significance. Propositions that indicate relationships among these values, human resource practices, and organizational sustainability, as well as the effects of the resource-based view to potentiate these relationships, are developed. This analysis suggests that ethical and multicultural values are important for planning and implementing effective management practices and organizational sustainability. (shrink)
This empirical study advances the understanding of the theory of investment in human capital by outlining limitations to its applicability in the context of return to education. The study uses the concept of moral hazard to examine circumstances when financial support for education purpose generates less desirable post-graduation incomes. This study explores the relationship between financial support and post-graduation incomes using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation that is designed to measure the economic situation of individuals. Results (...) suggest that students are less likely to engage in moral hazardous behavior to the degree to which they are older and to the degree to which they receive costlier financial assistance. (shrink)
The paper discusses self-plagiarism and associated practices in scholarly publishing. It approaches at some length the conceptual issues raised by the notion of self-plagiarism. It distinguishes among and then examines the main families of arguments against self-plagiarism, as well as the question of possibly legitimate reasons to engage in this practice. It concludes that some of the animus frequently reserved for self-plagiarism may be the result of, among others, poor choice of a label, unwarranted generalizations as to its ill effects (...) based on the specific experience (and goals) of particular disciplines, and widespread but not necessarily beneficial publishing practices. (shrink)
In this essay, Liviu Andreescu examines the question of whether a certain category of aprofessional acts by academics deserves protection against academic sanctions under the principle of academic freedom. Andreescu discusses two alternative views of academic freedom providing different answers to the question. He then examines some of the arguments advanced by the proponents of the more recent, restrictive theory of academic freedom against the broader, traditional theory, which in recent times has been on the defensive. Andreescu ultimately suggests (...) that the choice between the two definitions of academic freedom is a question of sound policy in specific institutional contexts, rather than a matter of conceptual consistency. (shrink)
The article distinguishes between the various arguments traditionally offered as justifications for the principle of academic freedom. Four main arguments are identified, three consequentialist in nature, and one nonconsequentialist. The article also concentrates on the specific form these arguments must take in order to establish academic freedom as a principle distinct from the more general principles of freedom of expression and intellectual freedom.
This paper explores the relationship between the principle of academic freedom and religiously-affiliated higher education. The arguments advanced are based on a general theory concerning the role of universities in a democratic society, and as such they are intended to apply to any such society, irrespective of the particulars of religious higher education in a specific national context. The article looks at three classes of arguments advanced against a “secular” standard of academic freedom: arguments on the nature of academic disciplines (...) in religious colleges; arguments concerning the relationship between the institutional mission of religious universities and academic freedom; and arguments from democracy and religious freedom. The paper concludes that none of these arguments are successful in claiming a different standard of academic freedom for religiously-affiliated universities; and that, further, a “secular” standard leaves such institutions adequate room to express their religious dimension. (shrink)
The conference aims at explaining the term “globalization” from various perspectives. It is a problematic concept due to the fact that it allows a powerful spreading of information, economic values, services, yet it is easier to be analyzed from the ideological point of view. This may be seen at the political movements today because of its particular influence it has on these.
The non-random mixing of biomembrane components, especially saturated phospholipids, exhibits important consequences in molecular biology. Particularly, the distribution of lipids within natural and model membranes is strongly determined by the selective association processes. These processes of phospholipids take place due to the cooperative modes in multiparticle systems as well as the specific lipid-lipid interactions both in the hydrophobic core and in the region of the polar headgroups. We demonstrated that the investigation of the selective association processes of saturated phospholipids might (...) contribute to the insight of the lipid domains appearance inside the bilayer membranes. The association probabilities of like- pairs and cross- pairs from a binary mixture of saturated phospholipids were tested for both parallel and anti-parallel alignments of the polar headgroups. The present model confirms the experimental evidence for saturated phospholipids to have a high tendency for association in parallel configuration of the electric dipole moments of the polar headgroups whether the cross-sectional area of the polar headgroup is in an usual range of 25-55 2. There are three major lipid domains in a binary mixture of saturated phospholipids: lipid domains in non-mixed phase of the first mixture component, in parallel alignment of the polar headgroups; lipid domains in non-mixed phase of the second mixture component, in anti-parallel alignment of the polar headgroups; lipid domains in mixed phase. We think that the selective association processes of phospholipids are neither exclusively, nor only involved in promoting the lipid domains appearance through bilayer phospholipid membranes. (shrink)
This study analyses several aspects of the relationship between communist censorship and literature, from the vantage point of literary sociology. Focusing on the issue of religious drama, the author intends to examine the transformations undergone by Romanian literature in the 1950s and 1960s, considering the impact of totalitarian communist ideology had upon it. What the study highlights is the game between prohibition and subversiveness, between misappropriation and reappropriation, which shaped the literary climate of that period. One of the conclusions envisaged (...) here is that despite unrelenting and excessive pressures exerted by censorship, literature resisted being turned into an ally of the Romanian Communist Party. (shrink)
Simona Nicoarã, Istorie si imaginar – eseuri de antropologie istoricã (History and Imaginary - Essays in Historical Anthropology) Editura Presa Universitarã Clujeanã, Cluj-Napoca, 2000.
In his study on the Sermon on the Mount, Hans Dieter Betz remarks that the expression `the poor in spirit' (οί πτωχοί τω πνεύματι) (Mt. 5:3) is unique in the entire New Testament and does not appear at all in the early Christian literature or elsewhere in the Greek language. Considering the profound and veiled meaning of the first Matthean beatitude in the Sermon on the Mount, this article asks whether a patient analysis of the Christian virtue of humility may (...) reveal a way of life worthy of the blessings enjoyed by the `poor in spirit' in the Kingdom of Heaven. As such, it is argued throughout that the virtue of humility is the foundation of Christian discipleship, adducing arguments from the patristic exegesis of the first beatitude, the humility of the incarnate Son, and the Eastern Orthodox practice of spiritual direction. (shrink)
This paper looks at the state of research on churchstate relations in post-communist Romania in order to provide an outline of the most important questions which need to be addressed in the coming years. The article consists of two parts. First, a survey of academic studies published over the past two decades on the relationship between the country’s churches and state after 1990. Secondly, a breakdown of pressing churchstate issues today, accompanied by short discussions of existing studies and suggestions as (...) to what future research should probe into. (shrink)
The present study proposes a valorization of the work of professor and philosopher Ioan Biriş. The statistics of his books and studies, their distribution by areas of interest, and especially the ideas in his work confirm the need for philosophy in the Romanian cultural life. As a whole, his philosophical endeavor is based on the concept of totality. Thus in the Hegelian spirit, Ioan Biriş successfully convinces us that the logical may exceed the limits of formal exercise and become the (...) organon of philosophy. In this capacity, the logical may operate on the real and valorize the multiple relationships between identity and difference. His books Filosofia și logica științelor sociale, Totalitate, sistem, holon, Rolul imaginarului în cunoașterea științifică, Istorie şi cultură, as well as a series of studies among which let me mention: “L’identité symbolique et la logique partitive des valeurs spirituelles”, “On the logic of religious terms”, “Le rapport identite-difference et la conjonction collective. Aspects logiques”, clearly prove the author’s capacity to integrate existential, religious, cognitive and axiological issues into a unitary vision. As Noica would say, he succeeded to enter the spirit’s life thorough the intellect’s gate. (shrink)
The theoretical background of the analysis of the creatio ex nihilo syntagm is constituted by the re- quirements of the semantics of possible worlds. Here the philosophical and logical research is implicitly valued in the modal reconstruction of the ontological argument. In the relations between concept, language, and object, several changes which are controlled by universally valid meth- ods are possible. These are the following: 1. The antinomy given as a mystery of the worlds ori- gin is reduced to a (...) non-contradictory logical structure, to a concept. 2. It can be proved that to this concept - creatio ex nihilo - several things correspond. The idea of a possible world grants subject-object unity to nihil, as an absolute determination and ontological cor- relation of creatio, as a possible determination of the existence. 3. A system that grants possibility to the idea of creation has its basis in the dialectic game between ontological identity and difference. (shrink)
This study departs from the premises that the idea of freedom determines a paradoxical condition of the relation between art and politics. The author uses the concept of freedom in a Kantian manner, as a transcendental condition of the co-ordination of the historically constituted values in the fields of art and politics. Metaphorically speaking, the experience of freedom can be understood as a temptation to existence. Analytically speaking, from the perspective of the practical reason, one can observe that freedom funds (...) the paradoxical relations between the competences of a certain field of culture and the creative performances of the art- ists. More exactly, political persuasion can be rediscovered in what recent history calls “the Manicheist spirit of the artist”. (shrink)
The study attempts to survey the way in which the rationalist spirit (especially Aristotle’s philosophy) was assimilated by Christian thinking in the patristic and scholastic periods. This shows that the great schism is the outcome not only of dogmatic controversies, but also of accepting and promoting distinctive-argumentative methodologies to justify these dogmas. If in the West theory was viewed as contemplation and as method for conceptual construction, in the East the emphasis was laid exclusively on contemplation and revelation. Furthermore, the (...) West accepted the autonomy of sciences by creating the “seven liberal arts” - an unacceptable concept for the Orthodox world, where logic was considered a mere organon, and philosophy, an ancilla theologiae. Among the main consequences detectable to this day are the varied cultural moulds that exist in the Christian world, as well as the scientific and civilizational lagging behind of the Orthodox East. (shrink)
Cet article propose d’envisager un type particulier de texte, le texte tabulaire, qui s’oppose au texte linéaire, du double point de vue du texte et du corpus. Le texte tabulaire est un texte composé de plusieurs modules, ayant chacun une autonomie relative mais étant interdépendants les uns des autres, regroupés sur un espace matériel borné. L’objectif est double : il s’agit d’une part de décrire, dans une perspective croisée d’analyse du discours et de linguistique textuelle, le fonctionnement de ce type (...) de texte particulier, loin d’être marginal, et par ailleurs d’appliquer ces perspectives au fonctionnement des corpus, qui restent aujourd’hui calqués sur le modèle du texte linéaire. (shrink)
The paper deals with the role of the concept of force in different classical mechanical and field theories, pointing out the existence in all cases of a Lorentz-type expression for force. In the case of the classical theory of the gravitational field we obtain the same Lorentz-type expression.
The paper discusses the context, substance and likely implications of the European Court of Human Rights’ very recent but, in our view, historic decision in the case of Lautsi v. Italy. The article offers an outline of the case and of the decision’s motivation, a presentation of the responses, and a brief discussion of its relevance to the similar Romanian case. We examine in some detail the objections leveled against the ruling, track the progress of the Court’s relevant jurisprudence on (...) the issue, and suggest some possible consequences. (shrink)
