Normative and historical arguments support the idea that religion potentially shapes decisions to support fair trade products. That said, the question of how religion influences organizational decision-makers to purchase fair trade products in a business-to-business context has remained largely unaddressed. This research examines the interactive effect of individual religious commitment and contextual religious salience on an individual’s willingness to pay a price premium for a fair trade product, when buying on behalf of an organization. Findings from two experimental studies reveal (...) that the effect of a decision-maker’s religious commitment on his or her willingness to pay a price premium, for the purchase of a fair trade product on behalf of an organization, is moderated by the contextual salience of religion. Specifically, when religion is highly salient in the organizational context, religious commitment is positively related to the decision-maker’s willingness to pay a premium for the fair trade product; when contextual religious salience is low, religious commitment and willingness to pay a premium are unrelated. Implications for theory and practice are presented. (shrink)

With the increase in market competition and dynamic work environment, work overload seems to have become a common issue suffered by almost every employee. Overload usually results in not only poor health conditions but also mental circumstances. These problems then become a threat to the organizations in the form of poor performance and lack of ability to reach standards. Workplace spirituality is one way to deal with stressful overload conditions. This research deals with the study of moderating affects of workplace (...) spirituality on job overload and employee’s satisfaction relationship. Having large piles of work in given targeted time results in employees becoming stressed out from their work as well as their organization. The motive of their job becomes to achieve targets and diminish the creativity within the employees. Workplace spirituality basic dimensions mentioned in this research help one achieve these targets and help employees cope with the symptoms caused by work overload. The research includes three variables, workplace spirituality, job overload, and job satisfaction. The samples of 76 respondents were asked to fill the questionnaire on all the three variables. The final results show interestingly different results then, as conceptualized according to theory. Workplace spirituality also showed to have quite an impact on job satisfaction. (shrink)

Visionary quests to return to the Garden of Eden have shaped Western culture from Columbus' voyages to today's tropical island retreats. Few narratives are so powerful - and, as Carolyn Merchant shows, so misguided and destructive - as the dream of recapturing a lost paradise. A sweeping account of these quixotic endeavors by one of America's leading environmentalists, Reinventing Eden traces the idea of rebuilding the primeval garden from its origins to its latest incarnations in shopping malls, theme parks (...) and gated communities. With eloquence and insight, Merchant shows how the drive to conquer nature and to explore and settle the globe, springs from this utopian pastoral impulse throughout Western history. Time and again, human manipulation of the environment is our downfall: Eden is achieved by fencing off pristine beauty in national parks and wildlife preserves, while leaving the majority of the earth in ruins. Challenging both narratives, Merchant argues that the green veneer of city-park conservation has become a cover for the corruption of the earth and the neglect of its environment. Reinventing Eden is a bold new way to think about the earth that includes green political parties, sustainable development and a partnership between humans and earth that is nothing short of an ecological revolution. (shrink)

In the contemporary postmodern era, the boundaries that once rigidly separated well-established genres have become more fluid, resulting in what scholars Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan call ‘genre-blurring’. This phenomenon of incorporating elements from diverse genres represents a challenge to dominant ideologies and expands the possibilities within fictional texts. The dystopian fiction written by feminist writers towards the end of the twentieth century and beyond significantly exemplifies this form of hybrid textuality. In doing so, these writers seek to renovate the (...) dystopian genre by making it both formally and politically oppositional. This article aims to explore Midnight Robber (2000), a feminist dystopian novel by Nalo Hopkinson, a Jamaican–Canadian writer, to illustrate how the author manipulates the generic boundaries of science fiction, fantasy and mythology. By amalgamating Afro-Caribbean religious and cultural beliefs, mythical creatures and traditional knowledge systems with a technologically advanced future world, Hopkinson challenges the essentially White, Eurocentric model of dystopian fiction. The article will also examine how, as an Afrofuturist writer, Hopkinson attempts to challenge and subvert the patriarchal discourse of dystopian fiction, traditionally dominated by White male writers, through a strong Black female character, Tan-Tan, who seeks to resist the patriarchal structures governing her, and finally succeeds in emerging as a female leader figure. For this purpose, Barbara Creed’s insights into the monstrous-feminine are explored, introducing novelty into the discourse of feminist dystopia. (shrink)

Hermeneutics, in its phenomenological mode, has become one of the dominating issues in contemporary philosophical discours. Hans-Georg Gadamer, the leading exponent of phenomenological hermeneutics, develops his theory in his monumental work Truth and Method1, by regarding hermeneutics as an exploration of both the archaeology of human understanding and constitutive role of language in experience. In this paper, we have presented a brief exposition of Gadamer's views, giving an emphasis on how human understanding of objects inevitably mingles with its traditions or (...) prejudices. Following Gadamer, we also have offered a systematic account of the role of language upon our overall understanding and building of an impersonal criterion of the truth and meaning of experiences. And finally we have critically examined Habermas* critique of Gadamer's failure to see language as a camouflage of domination of stronger experiences and the fact that the history of understanding is systematically distorted by this domination. (shrink)

Contemporary critics have opined that the vision of dystopian texts has come true about the present situation rather than about the future. In today’s technologically driven world, where the gulf between speculative fiction and political reality seems to have narrowed, feminist dystopian fiction has gained immense popularity. These texts address gender ideologies and issues and often use current social conditions to demonstrate the sexism inherent in patriarchal societies. This article aims to analyse the novel Vox (2018) by American writer Christina (...) Dalcher within the framework of feminist dystopia to highlight the unbridled nature of violence used against women and the eventual emergence of the female body as the locus of self-articulation and resistance against the dystopian authority. It also demonstrates how the novel creates a narrative space within which the feminine body is transformed from a static object of representation to a potent subject of the text. (shrink)

An examination of the Scientific Revolution that shows how the mechanistic world view of modern science has sanctioned the exploitation of nature, unrestrained commercial expansion, and a new socioeconomic order that subordinates women.

Hermeneutics, in its phenomenological mode, has become one of the dominating issues in contemporary philosophical discours. Hans-Georg Gadamer, the leading exponent of phenomenological hermeneutics, develops his theory in his monumental work Truth and Method1, by regarding hermeneutics as an exploration of both the archaeology of human understanding and constitutive role of language in experience. In this paper, we have presented a brief exposition of Gadamer's views, giving an emphasis on how human understanding of objects inevitably mingles with its traditions or (...) prejudices. Following Gadamer, we also have offered a systematic account of the role of language upon our overall understanding and building of an impersonal criterion of the truth and meaning of experiences. And finally we have critically examined Habermas* critique of Gadamer's failure to see language as a camouflage of domination of stronger experiences and the fact that the history of understanding is systematically distorted by this domination. (shrink)

For efficient energy distribution, microgrids provide significant assistance to main grids and act as a bridge between the power generation and consumption. Renewable energy generation resources, particularly photovoltaics, are considered as a clean source of energy but are highly complex, volatile, and intermittent in nature making their forecasting challenging. Thus, a reliable, optimized, and a robust forecasting method deployed at MG objectifies these challenges by providing accurate renewable energy production forecasting and establishing a precise power generation and consumption matching at (...) MG. Furthermore, it ensures effective planning, operation, and acquisition from the main grid in the case of superior or inferior amounts of energy, respectively. Therefore, in this work, we develop an end-to-end hybrid network for automatic PV power forecasting, comprising three basic steps. Firstly, data preprocessing is performed to normalize, remove the outliers, and deal with the missing values prominently. Next, the temporal features are extracted using deep sequential modelling schemes, followed by the extraction of spatial features via convolutional neural networks. These features are then fed to fully connected layers for optimal PV power forecasting. In the third step, the proposed model is evaluated on publicly available PV power generation datasets, where its performance reveals lower error rates when compared to state-of-the-art methods. (shrink)

Fragmentary utterances such as short answers and subsentential XPs without linguistic antecedents are proposed to have fully sentential syntactic structures, subject to ellipsis. Ellipsis in these cases is preceded by A-movement of the fragment to a clause-peripheral position; the combination of movement and ellipsis accounts for a wide range of connectivity and anti-connectivity effects in these structures. Fragment answers furthermore shed light on the nature of islands, and contrast with sluicing in triggering island effects; this is shown to follow from (...) an articulated syntax and the PF theory of islands. Fragments without linguistic antecedents are argued to be compatible with an ellipsis analysis, and do not support direct interpretation approaches to these phenomena. (shrink)

This commentary comprises three different responses to Counted and Zock’s article: “Place Spirituality: An Attachment Perspective.” The first response is from Esther Sternberg, MD, who gives a psychophysiological and neuroscience critique. The second is from Altaf Engineer, PhD, from the perspective of architecture and environmental psychology, and the last response is from Hester Oberman, PhD, who gives a psychology of religion rebuttal.

l examine three approaches to environmental ethics and illustrate them with examples from California. An egocentric ethic is grounded in the self and based on the assumption that what is good for the individual is good for society. Historically associated with laissez faire capitalism and a religious ethic of human dominion over nature, this approach is exemplified by the extraction of natural resources from the commons by private interests. A homocentric ethic is grounded in society and is based on the (...) assumption that policies should reflect the greatest good for the greatest number of people and that, as stewards of the natural world, humans should conserve and protect nature for human benefit. Historically associated with govemment regulation of the private sector, a homocentric approach can be illustrated by federal, state, and local environmental agencies charged with protecting the welfare of the general public. An ecocentric ethic is grounded in the cosmos, or whole environment, and isbased on the assignment of intrinsic value to nonhuman nature. Exemplified by ecologically based sciences and process-oriented philosophies, an ecocentric approach often underlies the political positions of environmentalists. This threefold taxonomy may be useful in identifying underlying ethical assumptions in cases where ethical dilemmas and conflicts of interest develop among entrepreneurs, govemment agencies, and environmentalists. (shrink)

Reveals how the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries changed our view of the earth and argues that the advance of science set back the cause of women.

The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, published in 1980, presented a view of the Scientific Revolution that challenged the hegemony of mechanistic science as a marker of progress. It argued that seventeenth‐century science could be implicated in the ecological crisis, the domination of nature, and the devaluation of women in the production of scientific knowledge. This essay offers a twenty‐five‐year retrospective of the book’s contributions to ecofeminism, environmental history, and reassessments of the Scientific Revolution. It also (...) responds to challenges to the argument that Francis Bacon’s rhetoric legitimated the control of nature. Although Bacon did not use terms such as “the torture of nature,” his followers, with some justification, interpreted his rhetoric in that light. (shrink)

In the first edition of Radical Ecology --the now classic examination major philosophical, ethical, scientific, and economic roots of environmental problems--Carolyn Merchant responded to the profound awareness of environmental crisis which prevailed in the closing decade of the twentieth century. In this provocative and readable study, Merchant examined the ways that radical ecologists can transform science and society in order to sustain life on this planet. Now in this second edition, Merchant continues to emphasize how laws, regulations (...) and scientific research alone cannot reverse the spread of pollution or restore our dwindling resources. Merchant argues that in order to maintain a livable world, we must formulate new social, economic, scientific, and spiritual approaches that will fundamentally transform human relationships with nature. She analyzes the revolutionary ideas of visionary ecologists for a new economy, society, science, and religion, and examines their efforts to bring environmental problems to the attention of the public. This new edition features a new Introduction from the author, a thorough updating of chapters, and two entirely new chapters on recent global movements and globalization and the environment. It is a timely update that will give students everything they need to know on the most recent philosophical positions and social movements that characterize the radical ecology spectrum. (shrink)

With the arrival of European explorers and settlers during the seventeenth century, Native American ways of life and the environment itself underwent radical alterations as human relationships to the land and ways of thinking about nature all changed. This colonial ecological revolution held sway until the nineteenth century, when New England's industrial production brought on a capitalist revolution that again remade the ecology, economy, and conceptions of nature in the region. In Ecological Revolutions, Carolyn Merchant analyzes these two major (...) transformations in the New England environment between 1600 and 1860. In a preface to the second edition, Merchant introduces new ideas about narrating environmental change based on gender and the dialectics of transformation, while the revised epilogue situates New England in the context of twenty-first-century globalization and climate change. Merchant argues that past ways of relating to the land could become an inspiration for renewing resources and achieving sustainability in the future. (shrink)

"To some scholars, Francis Bacon's writings have represented progress for humanity through science and technology. To others, his rhetoric has been problematical from the perspectives of women and the environment. The rise of modern science in the seventeenth century depended on a transition from occult to public knowledge of nature's secrets, from constraints against the penetration of nature's inner recesses to the assumption that nature herself was willing to reveal her own secrets. That Nature gendered as female held secrets that (...) could be extracted from her womb through "art and the hand of man" and that women held secrets that could be extracted through dissection of her womb and bosom were part of an emerging scientific method—the method of the constrained, controlled experiment that Bacon's rhetoric inspired and that has endured through his legacy. ". (shrink)

Drawing on methodological approaches used by visual anthropologists, film theorists and debates prevalent in the cultural studies literature, this paper is interdisciplinary in approach and attempts to tackle the challenge of collecting and analyzing embodied, sensuous and pre-reflective ‘data’ by advocating the value of integrating videography into research methodologies. The paper is illustrated with an examination of underwater videography footage, featuring scuba divers coming to terms with their surroundings. By considering the ways in which those featured in the film relate (...) to the onscreen images, upon watching the footage, the paper explores how we might begin to study and represent the ‘unrepresentable’ senses of, for example, touch and the somatic senses, including proprioception, in addition to the heightening or modification of these. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the use of interviews with scientists by members of two disciplinary communities: oral historians and historians of science. It examines the disparity between the way in which historians of science approach autobiographies and biographies of scientists on the one hand, and the way in which they approach interviews with scientists on the other. It also examines the tension in the work of oral historians between a long-standing ambition to record forms of past experience and more (...) recent concerns with narrative and personal ‘composure’. Drawing on extended life story interviews with scientists, recorded by National Life Stories at the British Library between 2011 and 2016, it points to two ways in which the communities might learn from each other. First, engagement with certain theoretical innovations in the discipline of oral history from the 1980s might encourage historians of science to extend their already well-developed critical analysis of written autobiography and biography to interviews with scientists. Second, the keen interest of historians of science in using interviews to reconstruct details of past events and experience might encourage oral historians to continue to value this use of oral history even after their theoretical turn. (shrink)

The phenomena, molecular path in a liquid or a gas, fluctuating price stoke, fission and fusion, quantum field theory, relativistic wave motion, etc., are modeled through the nonlinear time fractional clannish random Walker’s parabolic equation, nonlinear time fractional SharmaTassoOlver equation, and the nonlinear space-time fractional KleinGordon equation. The fractional derivative is described in the sense of conformable derivative. From there, the G ′ / G, 1 / G -expansion method is found to be ensuing, effective, and capable to provide functional (...) solutions to nonlinear models concerning physical and engineering problems. In this study, an extension of the G ′ / G, 1 / G -expansion method has been introduced. This enhancement establishes broad-ranging and adequate fresh solutions. In addition, some existing solutions attainable in the literature also confirm the validity of the suggested extension. We believe that the extension might be added to the literature as a reliable and efficient technique to examine a wide variety of nonlinear fractional systems with parameters including solitary and periodic wave solutions to nonlinear FDEs. (shrink)

With the development of wireless technology, two basic wireless network models that are commonly used, known as infrastructure and wireless ad hoc networks, have been developed. In the literature, it has been observed that channel contention is one of the main reasons for packet drop in WANETs. To handle this problem, this paper presents a routing protocol named CCBR. CCBR tries to determine a least contended path between the endpoints to increase packet delivery ratio and to reduce packet delay and (...) normalized routing overhead. Moreover, throughout the active data section, each intermediate node computes its channel contention value. If an intermediate node detects an increase in channel contention, it notifies the source node. Then the source node determines another least contended route for transmission. The advantages of CCBR are verified in our NS2-based performance study, and the results show that CCBR outperforms ad hoc on-demand distance vector in terms of packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, and routing overhead by 4% to 9%. (shrink)

The term ‘ellipsis’ can be used to refer to a variety of phenomena: syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. In this article, I discuss the recent comprehensive survey by Stainton 2006 of these kinds of ellipsis with respect to the analysis of nonsententials and try to show that despite his trenchant criticisms and insightful proposal, some of the criticisms can be evaded and the insights incorporated into a semantic ellipsis analysis, making a ‘divide-and-conquer’ strategy to the properties of nonsententials feasible after all. (...) -/- Editor's comment: To find the contribution, please go to item 16 of the URL, which contains the full text. Professor Merchant has permitted this. (shrink)

Introduction:Can nature be controlled?. Autonomous nature -- Greco-Roman concepts of nature -- Christianity and nature -- Nature personified : Renaissance ideas of nature -- Controlling nature. Vexing nature : Francis Bacon and the origins of experimentation -- Natural law : Spinoza on natura naturans and natura naturata -- Laws of nature :Lleibniz and Newton -- Epilogue : rambunctious nature in the twenty-first century.

l examine three approaches to environmental ethics and illustrate them with examples from California. An egocentric ethic is grounded in the self and based on the assumption that what is good for the individual is good for society. Historically associated with laissez faire capitalism and a religious ethic of human dominion over nature, this approach is exemplified by the extraction of natural resources from the commons by private interests. A homocentric ethic is grounded in society and is based on the (...) assumption that policies should reflect the greatest good for the greatest number of people and that, as stewards of the natural world, humans should conserve and protect nature for human benefit. Historically associated with govemment regulation of the private sector, a homocentric approach can be illustrated by federal, state, and local environmental agencies charged with protecting the welfare of the general public. An ecocentric ethic is grounded in the cosmos, or whole environment, and isbased on the assignment of intrinsic value to nonhuman nature. Exemplified by ecologically based sciences and process-oriented philosophies, an ecocentric approach often underlies the political positions of environmentalists. This threefold taxonomy may be useful in identifying underlying ethical assumptions in cases where ethical dilemmas and conflicts of interest develop among entrepreneurs, govemment agencies, and environmentalists. (shrink)

One of the most startling, and hence theoretically challenging, properties of wh-movement in Sluicing is that it can move wh-phrases out of islands, an important observation which goes back to Ross (1969). Equally challenging is the fact that similar wh-movement out of VP Ellipsis sites remains for the most part illicit. Briefly put, it seems that for a wide range of cases, deletion of an IP containing an island voids the effect of that island for wh-movement, while deletion of a (...) VP containing an island does not. This chapter investigates one aspect of this puzzling dichotomy with respect to island repair, and attempts to show that an interesting and partly novel range of data follow if island deviancies come about due to illicit traces of intermediate movement, working in tandem with a constraint on ellipsis operative in structures that host wh-movement. I will argue that a wide range of islands are indeed active at PF, but not in the way that this claim has usually been understood thus far. Instead of the island node itself being responsible for the degradation in acceptability, I will show that the data support the idea that it is the traces of wh-movement outside the island itself which trigger a PF-crash. I begin with some relevant Background on Sluicing, given in section 6.1, before taking up the Sluicing data in section 6.2 and the VP Ellipsis facts in section 6.3. (shrink)

Elided VPs and their antecedent VPs can mismatch in voice, with passive VPs being elided under apparent identity with active antecedent VPs, and vice versa. Such voice mismatches are not allowed in any other kind of ellipsis, such as sluicing and other clausal ellipses. These latter facts indicate that the identity relation in ellipsis is sensitive to syntactic form, not merely to semantic form. The VP-ellipsis facts fall into place if the head that determines voice is external to the phrase (...) being elided, here argued to be v P; such an account can only be framed in approaches that allow for the separation of syntactic features from the heads on which they are morphologically realized. Alternatives to this syntactic, articulated view of ellipsis and voice either undergenerate or overgenerate. (shrink)

Conceptualization should not be founded on a theory of the object—the conceptualized object is not the single criterion of a good conceptualization. We have to know the historical conditions which motivate our conceptualization. We need a historical awareness of our present circumstance.The materialist doctrine focusing upon transformation in circumstances and thus in education forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that the educator must himself be educated. (translation modified)If we take Raymie McKerrow’s seminal essay “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis” (...) (1989) as the locus classicus of the attempt to establish a selfconsciously critical standpoint for rhetoric, it would be fair to say that this .. (shrink)

Francis Bacon's concept of the ‘vexations of art’ entailed experimentation as an intervention into nature for the purpose of extracting its secrets. Although the standard edition of Bacon's works by Spedding, Ellis and Heath and the new Oxford edition by Graham Rees translate the phrase vexationes artium as the ‘vexations of art’, a significant number of scholars, translators and editors from the seventeenth century to the present have read Bacon's Latin as the ‘torment’ or ‘tortures of art’. Here I discuss (...) these latter interpretations and speculate on the reasons for their association of the term with experimentation. While it may not be possible to say with certainty what Bacon meant by ‘vexation’, the context of his thought, the rich set of metaphors on which he drew and the interpretations of dozens of scholars over four centuries would seem to favour assigning a robust, interventionist meaning to vexare. (shrink)

This squib investigates a paradox that arises from the interaction of two well-studied domains of grammar: antecedent-contained deletion and the licensing of negative polarity items. The conflict arises from a simple set of facts that have been overlooked in the literature, given in (1).

At the Inserm Ethics Committee's annual conference in October 2021, the "Gender and Health Research" working group presented a study comparing the impact of the COVID-19 crisis in France and the United States. This comparison highlights the dysfunction of public policies in the United States regarding equitable access to healthcare for women and minorities, in contrast to France where the public authorities have taken exceptional measures, notably to guarantee access to abortion and care for victims of violence.In France, during the (...) first lockdown, statistics from the national toll-free number "Sexualities, Contraception, Abortion" revealed that reports of difficulties related to abortion or contraception access... (shrink)

This article addresses the issue and practice of surrogacy in France. Surrogacy contracts are void under French law, and intermediaries, medical personnel, and in some cases, parents can be penaliz...

This commentary expands on Burt's concept of downward causation to include any association between genomic variants and a given outcome that is forged through social practices rather than biochemical pathways. It proposes the social stratification of population, through which endogamy over a period of generations produces allele frequency differences between socioeconomic strata, as a mechanism of downward causation.