Das Altern ist nicht nur eine biologische, sondern auch eine kulturelle Tatsache. Als Objekt der Verhandlungen zwischen Wissensdiskursen erscheint Alter als ein ebenso heterogenes wie problematisches Phanomen, das von Werturteilen und Weltanschauungen bestimmt wird. Des Weiteren sind Alter und Medizin in der offentlichen Meinung moderner Gesellschaften eng miteinander verbunden. Das interdisziplinare Forschungsprojekt "Kulturelle Variationen und Reprasentationen des Alters" geht von einem erweiterten, die geistes-, sozial- und medizinwissenschaftlichen Diskurse integrierenden Konzept von Alterskulturen und Potentialen des Alters aus. Dies bedeutet, Alter als (...) Gegenstand des Wissens und als Konzept zu begreifen. Alterskonzepte, das heisst Vorstellungen, Wertungen und, Bilder des Alters, sind Deutungsmuster fur elementare Bedurfnisse an der Schnittstelle von individuellem und kollektivem Leben. Mit Beitragen von David Blane und Gopalakrishnan Netuveli, Johannes Siegrist und Morten Wahrendorf, Peter Rusterholz, Anouk Janssen, Hiltrud Westermann-Angerhausen, Stefanie Knoll, Jean-Claude Schmitt, Gerd Gockenjan, Giovanna Pinna, Hans-Georg Pott, Monika Gomille, Miriam Seidler, Pat Thane, Simone Moses, Heiner Fangerau und Jorg Vogele, Anja Schonlau, Thomas Kupper". (shrink)

Information technology (IT) is continuously making astounding progress in technical efficiency. The time, space, material and energy needed to provide a unit of IT service have decreased by three orders of magnitude since the first personal computer (PC) was sold. However, it seems difficult for society to translate IT’s efficiency progress into progress in terms of individual, organizational or socio-economic goals. In particular it seems to be difficult for individuals to work more efficiently, for organizations to be more productive and (...) for the socio-economic system to be more sustainable by using increasingly efficient IT. This article provides empirical evidence and potential explanations for this problem. Many counterproductive effects of IT can be explained economically by rebound effects. Beyond that, we conclude that the technological determinism adopted by decision-makers is the main obstacle in translating IT’s progress into non-technical goals. (shrink)

What does it mean to consider the world of AI through a Christian lens? Rapid developments in AI continue to reshape society, raising new ethical questions and challenging our understanding of the human person. Encountering Artificial Intelligence draws on Pope Francis’ discussion of a culture of encounter and broader themes in Catholic social thought in order to examine how current AI applications affect human relationships in various social spheres and offers concrete recommendations for better implementation. The document also explores questions (...) regarding personhood, consciousness, and the kinds of relationships humans might have with even the most advanced AI. Through these discussions, this book investigates the theoretical and practical challenges to interpersonal encounter raised by the age of AI. (AI Research Group for the Centre for Digital Culture of the Dicastery of Culture and Education of the Holy See). (shrink)

The essay departs from a detailed discussion of Jakobson’s description of the »poetic function.« It comes to the conclusion that the distinctive feature of poetic language, defined by Jakobson as the production of paradigmatic similarity, cannot be understood as a result of the projection of the paradigmatic axis of language onto its syntagmatic axis. Furthermore, the semantic effect of these similarities does not consist exclusively in a production of ambivalence; frequently, they produce coherence, as can be shown with reference to (...) examples of metaphors, metonymies and allegories. In a second step, the essay turns to a detailed interpretation of the 8th sonnet of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, which examines its intertextual relations to other son- nets of this cycle as well as those to scholastic theology and Platonic philosophy. This interpretation further develops the idea that poetic language produces coherence; for, precisely those lines that at first seem incomprehensible can be understood as implicit propositions and coherencecreating statements. In its concluding section, the paper characterizes the implicit production of coherence as the specific feature of poetic language and discusses the necessity of a hermeneutics of literary texts. (shrink)

The article examines the record of compliance with the UN Committee against Torture’s decisions in individual complaints cases. Theoretically, I expect that compliance will be the outcome of a combination of normative and rationalist factors: States committed to human rights protection will comply even in the absence of enforcement but only as long as compliance costs remain relatively low. Using a data set covering all adverse decisions issued until 2018 and information on their compliance status, I employ fuzzy-set qualitative comparative (...) analysis to identify necessary and sufficient conditions for the outcomes of compliance and noncompliance. The analysis reveals that the conditions tested—liberal democracy, nonuse of political terror, violation type, and strong civil society—are in part individually (near-)necessary and jointly sufficient for compliance, while the presence of their complements is consistent with noncompliance. The Committee against Torture thus appears to be able to elicit (some) state compliance with its decisions, if mostly only with respect to certain kinds of states and select types of violations. (shrink)

Contemporary theories of criminalisation address, with varying emphasis, themes concerning the harmfulness and the wrongfulness of the conduct. In his article for the present issue, Antony Duff relies chiefly on notions of wrongfulness as the basis for his proposed criminalisation doctrines; whereas in their 2011 volume on criminalisation, Andrew Simester and Andreas von Hirsch invoke both wrongfulness and harmfulness as prerequisites for prohibiting conduct. The present article assesses the comparative merits of these approaches, and argues in favour of the latter, (...) two-element perspective. In this article, the author puts forward a number of reasons suggesting why the two-element approach is preferable. These reasons include, firstly, an inductive argument—that the kinds of wrongful conduct for which criminalisation seems a plausible response are those that include an element of harm or risk of harm. Secondly, a defining role for the state is one of resource-protection: of safeguarding the means and resources through which citizens can live good lives. Thus the concept of citizens’ living resources—and the related conception of harm—should be made a constitutive and explicit element of criminalisation theory, rather than subsuming resource-protection under a general rubric of wrongfulness. Thirdly, a two-element approach provides reciprocal limiting principles concerning the scope of criminalisation. One can, for example, employ wrongfulness requirements to limit the criminalisation of conduct that has remote harmful consequences; and, conversely, use a harmfulness requirement as means for restricting the criminalisation of wrongful acts. (shrink)

The present study aimed to examine the relations between physical self-concept, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation as well as physical performance of 1,082 children aged 7–8 years. The central objective of this study was to contrast a mediation model assuming physical self-concept as a mediator of the relations between both types of motivation and physical performance to a mediation model assuming both types of motivation as mediators of the relations between physical self-concept and physical performance. Physical self-concept and both types of (...) motivation were measured by using self-reported questionnaires, while physical performance was measured with 10 motor skill tests. All tests were carried out during regular school hours (8–12 A.M.) by qualified test personnel. Beyond correlation analyses, structural equation modeling (SEM) was performed to find evidence for the predictive relations between the variables under study. Results showed that physical self-concept was significantly positively related to both types of motivation and physical performance (allp< 0.001). In contrast, results of SEM revealed that only physical self-concept (p< 0.001) and intrinsic motivation (p< 0.05) were significantly positively linked to physical performance. Furthermore, physical self-concept proved to significantly mediate the relations of both types of motivation to physical performance (p< 0.001), while only intrinsic motivation, but not extrinsic motivation, proved to significantly mediate the relation between physical self-concept and physical performance (p< 0.05). These results suggest that school-based or extracurricular interventions targeted at improving younger children's physical performance only by means of an increased level of physical activity or by external factors without supporting children's physical self-concept and intrinsic motivation may have less or no effects on their physical performance. (shrink)

We discuss and respond to the contributions of Tatjana Hörnle, John Kleinig, and John Stanton-Ife, and clarify some aspects of the arguments made in Crimes, Harms, and Wrongs.

As a contribution to the emerging field of corporate social responsibility cognition, this article reports on the findings of an exploratory study that compares SME owner–managers’ mental models with regard to CSR and related concepts across six European countries. Utilising Repertory Grid Technique, we found that the SME owner–managers’ mental models show a few commonalities as well as a number of differences across the different country samples. We interpret those differences by linking individual cognition to macro-environmental variables, such as language, (...) national traditions and dissemination mechanisms. The results of our exploratory study show that nationality matters but that classifications of countries as found in the comparative capitalism literature do not exactly mirror national differences in CSR cognition and that these classifications need further differentiation. The findings from our study raise questions on the universality of cognition of academic management concepts and warn that promotion of responsible business practice should not rely on the use of unmediated US American management terminology. (shrink)

The delivery of education in refugee camps has become a key component of humanitarian programs. Since the late 1980s, camps have become the dominant way through which refugee movements are managed around the world. Children, the perfect embodiment of the innocent victim, are particularly targeted by humanitarian aid. When refugee situations become protracted and the temporary permanent, their learning structures tend to be become actual schools made of an administration, a teaching staff and a curriculum. Generally funded and coordinated by (...) the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, these camp schools contribute today to the schooling of almost 3,5 millions of refugee children. Going beyond an idealized vision of education as a “basic human right” and an instrument of “protection,” this article looks at the ways in which humanitarian aid contributes to establishing the school norm in the margins of the Nation-States while at the same time being closely intertwined with the politics of controlling human mobility. Based on the case studies of schools in two Congolese refugee camps, we explore which registers of legitimization and understandings of the child they are built on; how they are governed and negotiated on a daily basis by multiple actors; and how they are perceived by the students. What emerges from this analysis are a variety of tensions that characterize the dynamics of these schools: they simultaneously include their students in and exclude them from the dominant social order; they victimize them at the same time as they project them as future citizens, and they produce the conditions of their confinement while creating opportunities for certain socio-spatial mobilities. (shrink)

The vast majority of empirical research on stakeholder management has traditionally focused on multinational corporations. Only in recent years, scholars have begun to pay attention to the stakeholder management concept in relation to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The few existing studies in this area, however, discuss SMEs as a context free category or remain focused on single country analysis. This cross-national empirical research investigates SME owner–managers’ perceptions of stakeholder management in six European countries. The comparative analysis is followed by (...) a discussion of how institutional, cultural and linguistic contexts can influence owner–managers’ sensemaking of stakeholder management. Our study questions the universality of specific management terms and proposes that more attention should be paid to the institutional, cultural and linguistic environments that shape economic activity in different parts of Europe. (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken ist ein unveränderter, hochwertiger Nachdruck der Originalausgabe aus dem Jahr 1894. Hansebooks ist Herausgeber von Literatur zu unterschiedlichen Themengebieten wie Forschung und Wissenschaft, Reisen und Expeditionen, Kochen und Ernährung, Medizin und weiteren Genres. Der Schwerpunkt des Verlages liegt auf dem Erhalt historischer Literatur. Viele Werke historischer Schriftsteller und Wissenschaftler sind heute nur noch als Antiquitäten erhältlich. Hansebooks verlegt diese Bücher neu und trägt damit zum Erhalt selten gewordener Literatur und historischem Wissen auch für die Zukunft (...) bei. (shrink)

In der vorliegenden Arbeit geht es um Entscheidungsspielräume und Entscheidungsprozesse von hauptamtlichen Hospizmitarbeiterinnen und -mitarbeitern in ethisch relevanten Situationen. Wie sich diese Prozesse und Spielräume konkret in der Praxis gestalten, erforschten wir mittels einer qualitativen Studie, die wir in drei Hospizen in Nordrhein-Westfalen durchführten. Als ethische Haupthandlungsfelder nannten die befragten Pflegekräfte die Medikation in der präfinalen Phase, den Umgang mit terminaler Sedierung und mit der Flüssigkeitszufuhr und Ernährung am Lebensende. Entscheidungen innerhalb dieser Felder werden i. d. R. kollektiv getroffen. Die (...) individuellen Entscheidungsspielräume der Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeiter betreffen hauptsächlich den Pflegestil und das auf den Gast bezogene Zeitmanagement. Die Gestaltung dieser Entscheidungsspielräume hängt dabei häufig weniger von einem Rahmenkonzept ab, wie es Leitbilder oder Ethikkodizes nahelegen könnten, als vielmehr von einer Anspruchsanpassung der Pflegenden in der Praxis, wie es Modelle eingeschränkter Rationalität nahelegen. Damit übernehmen die Pflegekräfte in einem Hospiz eine sich selbst beratende wie korrigierende Funktion in ethischen Fragen, die angesichts des individuellen Sterbens eines Gastes immer wieder von Neuem ausgehandelt werden. (shrink)

The vast majority of empirical research on stakeholder management has traditionally focused on multinational corporations. Only in recent years, scholars have begun to pay attention to the stakeholder management concept in relation to small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The few existing studies in this area, however, discuss SMEs as a context free category or remain focused on single country analysis. This cross-national empirical research investigates SME owner-managers' perceptions of stakeholder management in six European countries. The comparative analysis is followed by (...) a discussion of how institutional, cultural and linguistic contexts can influence owner-managers' sensemaking of stakeholder management. Our study questions the universality of specific management terms and proposes that more attention should be paid to the institutional, cultural and linguistic environments that shape economic activity in different parts of Europe. (shrink)

BackgroundBiobanking biospecimens and consent are common practice in paediatric research. We need to explore children and young people’s (CYP) knowledge and perspectives around the use of and consent to biobanking. This will ensure meaningful informed consent can be obtained and improve current consent procedures.MethodsWe designed a survey, in co-production with CYP, collecting demographic data, views on biobanking, and consent using three scenarios: 1) prospective consent, 2) deferred consent, and 3) reconsent and assent at age of capacity. The survey was disseminated (...) via the Young Person’s Advisory Group North England (YPAGne) and participating CYP’s secondary schools. Data were analysed using a qualitative thematic approach by three independent reviewers (including CYP) to identify common themes. Data triangulation occurred independently by a fourth reviewer.ResultsOne hundred two CYP completed the survey. Most were between 16–18 years (63.7%, N = 65) and female (66.7%, N = 68). 72.3% had no prior knowledge of biobanking (N = 73).Acceptability of prospective consent for biobanking was high (91.2%, N = 93) with common themes: ‘altruism’, ‘potential benefits outweigh individual risk’, 'frugality', and ‘(in)convenience’.Deferred consent was also deemed acceptable in the large majority (84.3%, N = 86), with common themes: ‘altruism’, ‘body integrity’ and ‘sample frugality’. 76.5% preferred to reconsent when cognitively mature enough to give assent (N = 78), even if parental consent was previously in place. 79.2% wanted to be informed if their biobanked biospecimen is reused (N = 80).ConclusionProspective and deferred consent acceptability for biobanking is high among CYP in the UK. Altruism, frugality, body integrity, and privacy are the most important themes. Clear communication and justification are paramount to obtain consent. Any CYP with capacity should be part of the consenting procedure, if possible. (shrink)