Starting from Marr's ideas about levels of explanation, a theory of the data structures and access processes in human memory is demonstrated on 10 tasks. Functional characteristics of human memory are captured implementation-independently. Our theory generates a multidimensional task classification subsuming existing classifications such as the distinction between tasks that are implicit versus explicit, data driven versus conceptually driven, and simple associative (two-way bindings) versus higher order (threeway bindings), providing a broad basis for new experiments. The formal language clarifies the (...) binding problem in episodic memory, the role of input pathways in both episodic and semantic (lexical) memory, the importance of the input set in episodic memory, and the ubiquitous calculation of an intersection in theories of episodic and lexical access. (shrink)

This article presents the results of an inductive, interpretive case study. We have adopted a narrative approach to the analysis of organizational processes in order to explore how individuals in a financial institution dealt with relatively novel issues of corporate social responsibility (CSR). The narratives that we reconstruct, which we label 'idealism and altruism', 'economics and expedience' and 'ignorance and cynicism' illustrate how people in the specific organizational context of a bank ('Credit Line') sought to cope with an attempt at (...) narrative imposition. In particular, our work exemplifies how people in organizations draw on shared discursive resources in order to make sense of themselves and their organizations. We illustrate how many people within the bank found it hard to integrate the normative case for CSR with their version of a narrative identity which had, and continued to be, centred on economic imperatives for new initiatives. Our article demonstrates both the value of the analysis of shared narratives, and represents an attempt to deal adequately with the polyphony of organizational voices, in case studies of CSR. (shrink)

“Responsible lobbying” is an increasingly salient topic within business and management. We make a contribution to the literature on “responsible lobbying” in three ways. First, we provide novel definitions and, thereby, make a clear distinction between lobbying and corporate political activity. We then define responsible lobbying with respect to its content, process, organization, and environment, resulting in a typology of responsible lobbying, a conceptual model that informs the rest of the paper. Second, the paper provides a thematic overview of the (...) current literature underpinning lobbying and the responsible firm, and the underlying paradigms informing this literature. Third, the paper makes specific suggestions for a future research agenda, ending with a consideration of methodological implications of such research. (shrink)

This paper addresses the issue of the influence of global governance institutions, particularly international sustainability standards, on a firm’s intra-organizational practices. More precisely, we provide an exploratory empirical view of the impact of the Global Reporting Initiative on a multinational corporation’s corporate social responsibility management practices. We investigate standard compliance by comparing the stated intention of the use of the GRI with its actual use and the consequent effects within the firm. Based on an in-depth case study, our findings illustrate (...) the processes and consequences of the translation of the GRI within the organization. We show that substantive standard adoption can lead to unintended consequences on CSR management practices; specifically it can influence the management structure and CSR committee function; the choice of CSR activities, the relationships between subsidiaries, the temporal dimension of CSR management and the interpretation of CSR performance. We also highlight the need to look at the relationship dynamics between standards. Finally, we illustrate and discuss the role of reporting and its influence on management in order to better understand the internal issues arising from compliance with standards. (shrink)

This paper provides an alternative theoretical conceptualisation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in order to further our understanding of prosocial organisational behaviour. We argue that consumption provides a perspective that enables theorists to escape the confines of existing CSR literature. In our view the organisation is re-imagined as an arena of consumption where employees are engaged in a quest for value, constructing and confirming their identities as consumers. Using the award-winning tour operator Laskarina Holidays as an illustrative case, it is (...) suggested that CSR can provide combinations of functional, social, emotional, epistemic and conditional value. This new perspective on CSR facilitates the coexistence of a plurality of values that are relativistically constructed and narrativised by organisational stakeholders. Our consumption paradigm provides a thought provoking means of reconciling divergent perspectives and encourages further interdisciplinary research. We argue that future research should begin, not by asking the question of why organisations assume responsibility, but by contemplating the notion of why organisations consume responsibility. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 20 Research by Graham and Haidt suggests that beliefs, rituals, and other social aspects of religion establish moral communities. As such, they suggest religion is most strongly associated with the group-focused “binding” moral foundations of ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. Two studies tested this hypothesis, investigating the role of political orientation in these relationships. These studies supported our hypothesis that general religiosity is positively associated with each of the group-focused moral foundations, even when controlling for the role (...) of political orientation. Further, we find religious and political orientations interact such that low-religious political liberals are least likely to endorse group-focused moral intuitions. Results are discussed in a moral foundations framework and consider the role of religiosity’s association with political orientation and group-focused moral foundations. (shrink)

Associative memory is the ability to link together components of stimuli. Previous evidence suggests that prior familiarization with study items affects the nature of the association between stimuli. More specifically, novel stimuli are learned in a more context-dependent fashion than stimuli that have been encountered previously without the current context. In the current study, we first acquired behavioral data from 62 human participants to conceptually replicate this effect. Participants were instructed to memorize multiple object-scene pairs and were then tested on (...) their recognition memory for the objects. Importantly, 1 day prior, participants had been familiarized with half of the object stimuli. During the test phase, the objects were either matched to the same scene as during study or swapped with a different object’s scene. Our results conceptually replicated the context-dependency effect by showing that breaking up a studied object-context pairing is more detrimental to object recognition performance for non-familiarized objects than for familiarized objects. Second, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to determine whether medial temporal lobe encoding-related activity patterns are reflective of this familiarity-related context effect. Data acquired from 25 human participants indicated a larger effect of familiarization on encoding-related hippocampal activity for objects presented within a scene context compared to objects presented alone. Our results showed that both retrieval-related accuracy patterns and hippocampal activation patterns were in line with a familiarization-mediated context-dependency effect. (shrink)

Colonius suggests that, in using standard set theory as the language in which to express our computational-level theory of human memory, we would need to violate the axiom of foundation in order to express meaningful memory bindings in which a context is identical to an item in the list. We circumvent Colonius's objection by allowing that a list item may serve as a label for a context without being identical to that context. This debate serves to highlight the value of (...) specifying memory operations in set theoretic notation, as it would have been difficult if not impossible to formulate such an objection at the algorithmic level. (shrink)

This commentary is divided into two parts. The first considers a possible role for Gray's predictor plus comparator mechanism in human episodic recognition memory. It draws on the computational specifications of recognition outlined in Humphreys et al. to demonstrate how the logically necessary components of recognition tasks might be mapped onto the mechanism. The second part demonstrates how the mechanism outlined by Gray might be implicated in a form of imitative learning suitable for the acquisition of complex tasks.