This paper investigates whether accounting professionals’ ethical judgment is influenced by the disciplinary system established by the accounting profession in France and the United States. Our study first attempts to determine whether there is a link between the EJ of accounting professionals and the disciplinary context, in each country. It then performs a comparative analysis of the two nations. Our findings indicate that the judgment of American accounting professionals is correlated with the disciplinary decisions of the accountancy board. By contrast, (...) the judgment of French accounting professionals is independent of the disciplinary context. Whereas cross-national studies have thus far attributed differences among nations mainly to cultural distance, current research shows that non-cultural national factors should also be considered. In line with this perspective, our study suggests that institutional factors, in particular the disciplinary system, may also account for the differences between French and American accounting professionals’ ethical perceptions. We support these results by highlighting some characteristics of the countries’ respective legal systems, which may explain the divergences observed. We conclude by identifying implications for the independence of accounting professionals’ EJ and the risks associated with dissuasive disciplinary systems. (shrink)

This article examines how employees form their perceptions of managerial responsibility in a concrete organizational setting. Drawing on negotiated order theory, it shows that these perceptions are the result of complex processes of social construction and negotiation, rather than the application of predetermined ethics models or norms. Employees’ perceptions appear to be unstable; they are subject to constant alterations, fluctuating with the organizational circumstances, and are likely to create considerable organizational perturbations, especially when managers make complex and ambiguous decisions. This (...) process is illustrated through an ethnographic study that analyzed the evolution of employee perceptions during a three-year crisis—one that led managers to repeatedly postpone salary payments to save jobs. The process approach adopted by the study highlights important dynamics that traditional business ethics approaches overlook, such as the fragility of the construct of managerial responsibility, which cannot be coherent unless it is constantly renegotiated among an organization’s various employee groups. (shrink)

This article offers a critical view of the process of material constitutionalization of the European citizenship, through an analysis of the transformations of its outer borders in the phase of enlargement. The repositioning and deterritorialization of the inner and outer borders of the EU lead to a decomposition of its judiciary space, which illustrates the way in which borders have become an instrument of governance of Europe’s postcolonial condition. The analysis focuses on the recent legislative transformations introduced in Poland, Romania (...) and Bulgaria in order to adapt their national judicial systems to EU common rules. (shrink)

The article considers the changes that have affected European border regimes of migration control as a testcase for discussing arbitrariness. The argument highlights the limited capacity of notions of arbitrariness defined as a departure from the rule of law to capture the ongoing conflict at the borders of Europe and brings, instead, to the foreground the ambivalent meaning of arbitrariness. By comparing Santi Romano’s classical theory of legal pluralism with recent analyses of legal globalization processes, arbitrariness emerges either as an (...) authoritative attempt to impose a different order on society or as a means to contrast acts of resistance to border regimes. In both cases, arbitrariness forcefully blurs the limits between the ordered and unordered, indicating the paradoxical impossibility of excluding the law’s outside from the legal order. On these premises, the article advocates the importance of reframing the demand for open borders as a call for freedom of those who challenge the pragmatic order of migration regimes. Indeed, arbitrariness is necessarily limited when the legal order recognizes, to an extent, the agency and the claims of subjectivities that resist the dichotomy between inclusion and exclusion. Keywords: migration, arbitrariness, borders, legal order. (shrink)

Experiments on intertemporal consumption typically show that people have difficulties in optimally solving such problems. Previous studies have focused on contexts in which agents are faced with risky future incomes and have to plan over long horizons. We present an experiment comparing decision making under certainty, risk, and ambiguity, over a shorter lifecycle. Results show that behavior in the ambiguity treatment is markedly different than in the risk condition and it is characterized by a significant pattern of under-consumption.

When imposing traffic congestion pricing around downtown commercial centers, there is a concern that commercial activities will have to consider relocating due to reduced demand, at a cost to merchants. Concerns like these were important in the debates before the introductions of congestion charges in both London and Stockholm and influenced the final policy design choices. This study introduces a sequential experimental game to study reactions to congestion pricing in the commercial sector. In the game, merchants first make location choices. (...) Consumers, who drive to do their shopping, subsequently choose where to shop. Initial responses to the introduction of congestion pricing and equilibrium selection adjustments over time are observed. These observations are compared to responses and adjustments in a condition where congestion pricing is reduced from an initially high level. Payoffs are non-linear and non-transparent, making it less than obvious that the efficient equilibrium will be selected, and introducing possibilities that participants need to discover their preferences and anchor on past experiences. We find that initial responses reflect standard inverse price–demand relations, and that adjustments over time rely on signaling by consumers leading to the efficient equilibrium. There is also evidence that priming from initial experiences influence play somewhat. We confirm that commercial activities relocate following the introduction of congestion pricing and that the adjustment process is costly to merchants. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to test a prediction of the quasi-hyperbolic model. The test is innovative in that it uses an experimental implementation in which there are two treatments: a forward market and a spot market. In each of these markets goods and activities are sold. The good and activities sold are investment goods or activities and temptation goods or activities. The prediction of the quasi-hyperbolic model is that in the spot (forward) market participants will buy more temptation (...) (investment) goods and activities than in the forward market and less investment (temptation) good and activities. This prediction is not confirmed by the data, and hence is at odds with previous experiments which have shown support for the hyperbolic model. We speculate on the reasons for this. (shrink)

After reviewing current opinions about the social function of literature in second-century BCE Rome, I focus on two controversial fragments assigned to Cato the Censor's Origines. In the first, Cato portrays the ancestors in a convivial setting as they sing the praises and the manly deeds of famous men; in the second, he gestures towards the pontifex maximus' specialized use of writing and the functioning of the tabula as a locus of memory. By drawing on the field of performance studies, (...) I identify the performative features inherent in both of these fragments and map out how these features inform the positioning of Cato in relation to the identity politics of his time, professionalism, and writing. The aim of this study is to return the Origines to its immediate socio-cultural purview, but working towards this aim will also entail a shift in perspective and a reassessment of our notions of “poetry” and “prose.” In fact, by stressing the performance dimension that underlies the genesis of the Origines as a text, this article will also expose the shortcomings inherent in the hyper-literary approaches that have been so far adopted. (shrink)

This landmark handbook collects in a single volume the current state of cutting-edge research on the capability approach. It includes a comprehensive introduction to the approach as well as new research from leading scholars in this increasingly influential multi-disciplinary field, including the pioneers of capability research, Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya Sen. Incorporating both approachable introductory chapters and more in-depth analysis relating to the central philosophical, conceptual and theoretical issues of capability research, this handbook also includes analytical and measurement tools, (...) as well as policy approaches which have emerged in the recent literature. The handbook will be an invaluable resource for students approaching the capability approach for the first time as well as for researchers engaged in advanced research in a wide range of disciplines, including development studies, economics, gender studies, political science and political philosophy. (shrink)

Heraklits Denken und seine philosophischen Positionen haben einen ungeheuren Einfluss im Altertum, in der Neuzeit und bis in die Moderne hinein ausgeübt. Die Beiträge dieses Bandes machen die kulturellen Bedingungen sichtbar, unter denen dieses Denken entstanden ist, und helfen, sowohl den,Dunklen' selbst, wie er seit der Antike genannt wurde, als auch seine Wirkung systematisch besser zu verstehen. Alle Beiträge gehen auf eine internationale Konferenz zurück, die im Oktober 2013 ausgewiesene Spezialisten zu einem umfassenden Dialog in Ephesos zusammenführte. Im Zusammenwirken verschiedener (...) Disziplinen ließ sich Heraklits Ort in der Philosophie- und Geistesgeschichte genauer bestimmen, als das in den bisher vorwiegend auf philosophiehistorisch-philologische Aspekte fokussierten Darstellungen geschehen ist. Das Alleinstellungsmerkmal der Konferenz in ihrer Orientierung am genius loci und auch die damit einhergehende Einbeziehung historischer und archäologischer Fragestellungen bedeutet etwas Neues für die Heraklit-Forschung: Das Aufzeigen der Verbindungen zwischen der naturräumlichen Situation in Ephesos zur Zeit Heraklits, dem Verhältnis des Denkers zu seiner Stadt sowie der Rolle seiner Reflexion auf die Bedingungen menschlicher Erkenntnis und ihrer Vermittlung. (shrink)

This paper reports on an experimental test of the Principle of Optimality in dynamic decision problems. This Principle, which states that the decision-maker should always choose the optimal decision at each stage of the decision problem, conditional on behaving optimally thereafter, underlies many theories of optimal dynamic decision making, but is normally difficult to test empirically without knowledge of the decision-maker's preference function. In the experiment reported here we use a new experimental procedure to get round this difficulty, which also (...) enables us to shed some light on the decision process that the decision-maker is using if he or she is not using the Principle of Optimality - which appears to be the case in our experiments. (shrink)

Pharmaceutical industry marketers are confronted with specific ethical issues linked to the tension between the economic interest being pursued and the health mission of this sector. Indeed this dual mission could be problematic for them when the two objectives contradict each other. We use the concept of moral dissonance to examine how marketers in the pharmaceutical industry perceive the profit/health tension inherent in their sector and how they deal with it. Based on narratives of 18 marketers working in the pharmaceutical (...) sector, our qualitative study identifies ethical conflicts of varying intensity that generate differing degrees of moral dissonance among marketers. To cope with this moral dissonance, they use the following strategies: (1) minimize the sensitivity of their activity; (2) invoke the benefits to patients; and (3) avoid behaviors that conflict with their values. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the comparison of individual and group decision-making, in a stochastic inter-temporal problem in two decision environments, namely risk and ambiguity. Using a consumption/saving laboratory experiment, we investigate behaviour in four treatments: individual choice under risk; group choice under risk; individual choice under ambiguity and group choice under ambiguity. Comparing decisions within and between decision environments, we find an anti-symmetric pattern. While individuals are choosing on average closer to the theoretical optimal predictions, compared to groups in the (...) risk treatments, groups tend to deviate less under ambiguity. Within decision environments, individuals deviate more when they choose under ambiguity, while groups are better planners under ambiguity rather than under risk. Our results extend the often observed pattern of individuals behaving more optimally under risk, to its dynamic dimension. (shrink)

this essay analyzes Vladimir Jankélévitch’s work on death pointing out, in the vast thought of the twentieth century, its original and sharply problematic contribution. if death is generally seen as the perimeter that provides life with sense and autenticity (Heidegger, Lévinas), or more traditionally as the threshold that leads to a salvific other world, Jankélévitch first of all dismantles any reassuring strategy and underlines the elusiveness of death itself, its constituting a “totally other order” that escapes every human category. As (...) a consequence, if on the one hand the philosopher shows how every life has an “own death” that makes every life totally unique, on the other hand he highlights how the elusiveness of death delivers life, any life, to an unavoidable impropriety, which breaks through its individual and personal dimension. (shrink)

The aim of my paper is to call attention to Dionysius’s kataphatic theology and, in particular, to an aspect which is not commonly discussed: the dissimilarimages applied to God. More precisely, I will focus on the image of the worm, which Dionysius considers the vilest and most dissimilar image applied to the divineThearchy. I will try to show that the worm, with its multiple and contradictory attributes, is indeed the best example for Dionysius’s “absurd theology” of the dissimilar images, since (...) it perfectly fits the complex and paradoxical Dionysian view of the relationship/non-relationship between God and the world. (shrink)

The aim of my paper is to call attention to Dionysius’s kataphatic theology and, in particular, to an aspect which is not commonly discussed: the dissimilarimages applied to God. More precisely, I will focus on the image of the worm, which Dionysius considers the vilest and most dissimilar image applied to the divineThearchy. I will try to show that the worm, with its multiple and contradictory attributes, is indeed the best example for Dionysius’s “absurd theology” of the dissimilar images, since (...) it perfectly fits the complex and paradoxical Dionysian view of the relationship/non-relationship between God and the world. (shrink)

Reconstruction of human ecosystems and their stability over time provides knowledge of the processes of adaptability developed by isolated communities. Seasonality of vital events is a good indicator of the effects of different lifestyles, which in turn depend on the ecological context in which a population developed specific subsistence models. Seasonality of births reflects the cultural attitude towards the best time to conceive, in relation to work activities and loads; the latter may also affect physiological functions related to fertility. The (...) present research concerns gross birth rates and seasonality of births and conceptions during four centuries in south-central Italy. Birth rates were between 33·0 and 36·5 per 1000. The pattern of seasonality of births and, by extension, of conceptions defines a southern-type agricultural area for the earlier periods. However, it also shows a progressive shift towards an increasing concentration of conceptions in spring namely from April to August – with a large increase in summer in the 19th century with respect to the previous periods. The new 19th century pattern is reported by Crisafulli, Dalla Zuanna & Solero (2000) as being representative of the central Adriatic region, a geographical classification to which Abruzzo can also be attributed. (shrink)

This paper reports on an experimental test of the Principle of Optimality in dynamic decision problems. This Principle, which states that the decision-maker should always choose the optimal decision at each stage of the decision problem, conditional on behaving optimally thereafter, underlies many theories of optimal dynamic decision making, but is normally difficult to test empirically without knowledge of the decision-maker's preference function. In the experiment reported here we use a new experimental procedure to get round this difficulty, which also (...) enables us to shed some light on the decision process that the decision-maker is using if he or she is not using the Principle of Optimality - which appears to be the case in our experiments. (shrink)

This study investigates seasonality of marriages and reproductive isolation in six long-isolated communities in the central Apennines (Italy). It had two objectives: (1) the identification of an Apennine biodemographic model in comparison with mountain communities of other regions, and with non-Apennine communities in Abruzzo, and (2) to identify the possible effects of the drainage of Lake Fucino (1854 shows that there was a delayed, limited period of increased consanguinity in the few decades around the turn of the century. This is (...) different from the national situation, and thus could be a consequence of the Lake Fucino drainage. (shrink)