Much has been written recently about both the urgency and efficacy of teaching business ethics. The results of our survey of AACSB member schools confirm prior reports of similar surveys: The teaching of business ethics is indiscriminate, unorganized, and undisciplined in most North American schools of business. If universities are to be taken seriously in their efforts to create more ethical awareness and better moral decision-making skills among their graduates, they must provide a rigorous and well-developed system in which students (...) can "live ethics" instead of merely learn ethics. A system must be devised to allow students to discover and refine their own values rather than simply learning ethical theories from an intellectual point of view. After reviewing the literature on business ethics in undergraduate curricula, we make a series of recommendations to deliver experiential ethical education for business students. The recommendations include student and faculty written codes of ethics, emphasis on ethical theory within the existing required legal environment course, applied ethics in the functional area capstones using alternative learning, a discussion of employee rights and responsibilities during the curriculum capstone course, and a public service requirement for graduation. These recommendations may be implemented without substantive additional cost or programming requirements. (shrink)

This paper examines the impact of integrated reporting on the integration of environmental, social, and governance issues into the business model and the related economic and ESG performance changes. To investigate these internal and external transformational effects of IR, important differences between IR and alternative ESG reporting strategies are worked out. Using three matched samples of companies from around the world for the sample period 2002–2011, IR companies are matched with companies applying no ESG reporting, stand-alone ESG reporting, or ESG (...) reporting in the annual report. The results suggest that IR is a superior mechanism only for the integration of ESG issues into the core business model when comparing IR with the ESG reporting strategies of no ESG reporting and ESG reporting in annual reports. In comparison with, stand-alone ESG reporting, the results indicate that IR is negatively associated with the ESG integration level and with the economic and ESG performance. Moreover, this negative impact is lower for companies that have already implemented ESG management tools prior to the initiation of IR and is stronger for companies residing in countries with legal requirements for the disclosure of ESG information. A separate change analysis reveals that companies do not benefit from a switch from stand-alone ESG reporting to IR. Thus, this paper provides empirical evidence that contradicts the general notion of IR as a superior reporting mechanism, as the benefits of IR are driven by several factors. (shrink)

When shared decision making breaks down and parents and medical providers have developed entrenched and conflicting views, ethical frameworks are needed to find a way forward. This article reviews the evolution of thought about the best interest standard and then discusses the advantages of the harm principle (HP) and the zone of parental discretion (ZPD). Applying these frameworks to parental refusals in situations of complexity and uncertainty presents challenges that necessitate concrete substeps to analyze the big picture and identify key (...) questions. I outline and defend a new decision-making tool that includes three parts: identifying the nature of the disagreement, checklists for key elements of the HP and ZPD, and a “think list” of specific questions designed to enhance use of the HP and ZPD in clinical decision making. These tools together will assist those embroiled in complex disagreements to disentangle the issues to find a path to resolution. (shrink)

Few sports-related events have generated as much controversy as the steroid crisis in baseball. Both ardent fans and casual observers wonder why professional baseball players would choose to use such substances when their use was viewed as outside the bounds of fair play. This article attempts to answer that question by applying concepts from the area of organizational culture. Understanding the culture of baseball and the ways leaders embedded and strengthened that culture adds insight into the decisions by athletes to (...) engage in steroid use. In general, such use was consistent with the already-existing culture. In addition, key decisions and events likely created the conditions in which steroid use was more likely. (shrink)

Ayahuasca is a psychoactive beverage that is mostly used in ritualized settings (Santo Daime rituals, neo-shamanic rituals, and even do-it-yourself-rituals). It is a common practice in the investigated socio-cultural field to call these settings “healing rituals.” For this study, 15 people who underwent ayahuasca (self-)therapy for a particular disease like chronic pain, cancer, asthma, depression, alcohol abuse, or Hepatitis C were interviewed twice about their subjective concepts and beliefs on ayahuasca and healing. Qualitative data analysis revealed a variety of motivational (...) patterns, subjective effects, and user types. Most participants were convinced that ayahuasca had influenced their illness positively or improved their coping with their illness. More importantly, it had enhanced their well being in general. As a result, we concluded that the effects of ayahuasca should not be reduced to a pharmacological model. The substance should be conceptualized as a psychological catalyst that unfolds within different fields of sociocultural ideas. (shrink)

Advances in neonatology have led to improved survival for periviable infants. Immaturity still carries a high risk of short- and long-term harms, and uncertainty turns provision of life support int...

ZusammenfassungKreuzfahrtschiffe zählen gegenwärtig zu den beliebtesten und zugleich umstrittensten Verkehrsmitteln. Das überdimensionale Schiff vor der Kulisse des historischen Zentrums von Venedig wurde zu einem ikonischen Bild. Der Artikel beleuchtet den Hintergrund dieser Debatte und untersucht die Verräumlichung der Kreuzfahrtindustrie durch Infrastrukturen und ihre Auswirkungen auf Venedig und die Lagune aus kulturanalytischer Sicht, und nimmt die Schnittmenge von kulturwissenschaftlicher Technikforschung und Technikgeschichte, kulturwissenschaftlicher Stadtforschung und der Analyse sozialer Bewegungen in den Blick.In meinem Beitrag zeichne ich die Entwicklung dieser Zusammenhänge nach und (...) zeige, wie Aktivist:innen, Vereine und engagierte Bürger:innen diese Verflechtungen aufgreifen und performen. Der Protest machte das Schiff zu einem wirkmächtigen Symbol für die infrastrukturelle Aneignung und Umgestaltung natürlicher und städtischer Räume. Da Transport- und Verkehrswege stets den Alltag der Menschen beeinflussen, gilt es, ihre Auswirkungen auf Praktiken, Räume und Beziehungen zu berücksichtigen, besonders in einer Stadt wie Venedig, wo Fuß- und Wasserwege stark zur Identität der Stadt und ihrer Bewohner:innen beitragen. Durch die Aktionen, das implizite Wissen über lokale Räume und das explizite Wissen, das das Protestnetzwerk produziert, widersetzt es sich hegemonialen Diskursen und trägt zugleich zu diesen bei. Ich argumentiere, dass das Schiff zu einer Metapher des globalen Kapitalismus wurde und daher als Symbol mit transnationaler Wirkung fungiert. (shrink)

Cruise ships are at the same time among the most popular and most controversial means of travel. Photos of oversized ships, passing through the historic center of Venice, have become iconic. This paper explores the background of the debate over cruise ships in Venice. Using research at the intersection of culture and technology, the history of technology, urban anthropology, and social movement theory, it sheds light on how the spatialization of the cruise industry through infrastructures affects Venice and the lagoon. (...) In this paper, I will retrace the development of these interdependencies to show how activists, associations, and citizen campaigners address and perform these entanglements. Protest has turned the ship into a powerful symbol for the infrastructural appropriation and transformation of natural and urban space. Since transportation and traffic routes influence people’s everyday lives, it is important to consider their impacts on practices, spaces, and relations, especially in a city like Venice, where footpaths and waterways form an important element of the identity of both the city and its inhabitants. Through its actions, its tacit knowledge of local space, and the explicit knowledge the protest network produces, it both opposes and adds to hegemonic discourses. I argue that the cruise ship has been transformed into a metaphor of global capitalism, which in turn renders it a symbol with transnational impact. (shrink)

This paper examines whether and to what extent the overall business strategy influences the firm’s mismanagement of sustainability. Specifically, an empirical measure for the mismanagement of sustainability is developed by exploiting the newly available materiality guidelines for US firms to define industry-specific material sustainability issues. Using this measure, this paper shows that mismanagement of sustainability can represent unethical business behavior when firms intentionally perform better on immaterial issues than on material issues by diverting stakeholders’ attention from the firm’s low overall (...) sustainability performance. This paper assumes that the right business strategy can prevent such unethical actions. Based on Miles and Snow’s organizational theory, this paper distinguishes between Prospector and Defender business strategies. By employing multiple firm-level panel regressions, the findings suggest that Prospector-type firms are more likely to mismanage sustainability issues compared to Defender-type firms intentionally. The results give implications for researchers, regulators and standard setters, auditors, sustainability practitioners, and scholars. (shrink)

Stories of young children who make up exaggerated stories provide questions for a discussion about lying.

The Administration of Buddhism in China: A Study and Translation of Zanning and the Topical Compendium of the Buddhist Clergy, by Albert Welter. Cambria Press, 2018. 722pp., Hb. $154.99. ISBN-13: 9781604979428.

Authentic Replicas: Buddhist Art in Medieval China by Hsueh-man Shen. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press 2019. 352 pp.; 132 illustrations, 113 in colour. Hb $72 ISBN-13: 9780824867058.

Reports of children participating in hunger strikes while detained in offshore detention centres raise interrelated ethical issues and recognizable challenges for the medical decision-makers at these sites. A composite case study, informed by reports in the public domain, is employed to explore the unique challenges of consent and decision-making in these circumstances and the perennial issues inherent in adolescents’ developing capacity and autonomy. We present an amalgamated case of a fourteen-year-old adolescent who refused to consent to medical reversal of her (...) hunger strike protest. The medical team became the final arbiter when her parents, who were also in detention, could not agree with each other even after mediation. The case explores the complexity of evaluating the adolescent’s capacity to provide informed consent while influenced by the opinions of co-detainees in this extreme setting. We argue that the parents and the child had compromised decisional capacity due to the effects of detention. The challenges to the medical team are recognized and discussed. The team members faced a difficult dilemma and considered the competing values of the multiple cultural and ethical factors. Each team member integrated his or her own roles, duties, and discipline-specific professional guidelines with the primary goal of mitigating potential harms. (shrink)

In the wake of the most recent financial crisis, corporations have been criticized as being self-interested and unmindful of their relationship to society. Indeed, the blame is sometimes placed on the corporate legal form, which can exacerbate the tension between duties to shareholders and interests of stakeholders. In comparison, the Benefit Corporation (BC) is a new legal business entity that is obligated to pursue public benefit in addition to the responsibility to return profits to shareholders. It is legally a for-profit, (...) socially obligated, corporate form of business, with all the traditional corporate characteristics combined with societal responsibilities. Considering the history and perception of shareholder primacy in United States law, it is argued that this new business structure is an ethical step toward empowering socially committed commercial entities. The contribution of this research is to provide a fundamental base of knowledge about the new legal form of business, the BC, upon which further study may rely. First, the legal history of the corporation is briefly reviewed in order to provide context to the relationship of the corporate form to society, including exploration of the premise that shareholder wealth maximization is its best and only purpose. Second, the BC is described in detail, and state statutes are compared. Third, the BC is placed within the context of corporate social responsibility. Finally, opportunities for future research are discussed. (shrink)

The dominant theory of elite power, grounded in Weberian bureaucracy, has analyzed elites in terms of stable positions at the top of enduring institutions. Today, many conditions that spawned these stable ‘command posts’ no longer prevail, and elite power thus warrants rethinking. This article advances an argument about contemporary ‘influence elites’. The way they are organized and the modus operandi they employ to wield influence enable them to evade public accountability, a hallmark of a democratic society. Three cases are presented, (...) first to investigate changes in how elites operate and, second, to examine varying configurations in which the new elites are organized. The cases demonstrate that influence elites intermesh hierarchies and networks, serve as connectors, and coordinate influence from multiple, moving perches, inside and outside official structures. Their flexible and multi-positioned organizing modes call for reconsidering elite theory and grappling with the implications of these elites for democratic society. (shrink)

PurposeSocial media has increased as a marketing channel, and Facebook is the biggest social media company globally. Facebook contains both positive and negative information about companies; therefore, it is important for companies to manage their Facebook page to best serve their own interests. Although most users are familiar with business and marketing activities on Facebook, they use it primarily for fun and personal purposes. The most effective methods for companies to use Facebook have not been clear. The personal nature of (...) Facebook presents unique challenges for companies by raising ethical and social responsibility issues that are important to users. The purpose of this paper is to discover how companies can optimize their use of Facebook as a marketing channel.Design/methodology/approachA survey was conducted. The respondents were 158 users of Facebook in Sweden; complete answers were provided by all respondents. In a series of specific questions and comments, the respondents were asked to describe an optimal marketing solution on Facebook for companies. They rated different functions, which were illustrated with pictures, to help in the cognitive process and to avoid misunderstandings.FindingsMost users who have an opinion on the issue accept marketing on Facebook, but only in the right amount. There are basically two groups: those who think that companies have no place on Facebook and those who want companies to be active on Facebook. The latter group emphasizes the importance of meaningful posts without unsolicited sales messages, and would prefer to search for the companies themselves rather than being bombarded by company messages. By far, status updates and pictures/images were found to be the most important functions to respondents.Research limitations/implicationsThe sample consisted of only Swedish users. Another limitation was that, since many Facebook users do not normally think about the implications of being exposed to marketing on Facebook, they have difficulty taking a position on many issues related to the service.Practical implicationsThe results give companies a clear idea of how to effectively use Facebook in their marketing efforts.Originality/valueA large number of companies are currently asking themselves, “How can we use Facebook in an optimal way?” The results in this study answer this question and lead directly to saving time and resources for these companies. (shrink)

O artigo apresenta e analisa as representações acerca da espiritualidade presentes nos relatos de mulheres usuárias de substâncias que buscam acolhimento em comunidades terapêuticas (CTs) de perfil religioso. Os dados observados são provenientes de entrevistas semiestruturadas realizadas ao longo do segundo semestre de 2020 com mulheres acolhidas em duas CT’s, sendo uma delas de perfil católico carismático e outra vinculada a uma igreja que compõe o protestantismo histórico. As lideranças dessas instituições foram igualmente ouvidas com a intenção de alcançar informações (...) a respeito da maneira como religião e espiritualidade são acionadas e articuladas no método empregado por essas CTs. A principal conclusão desse trabalho indica que as estratégias institucionais aplicadas para afastar essas mulheres do uso de substâncias fundamentam-se em narrativas religiosas que, muitas vezes, são ressignificadas pelas acolhidas por meio de suas próprias experiências subjetivas ao longo da permanência na CT. Ainda, deve-se ressaltar que a espiritualidade vivenciada pelas entrevistadas parece, em algumas situações, confrontar as orientações institucionais. (shrink)

BackgroundThe state of the world is one with scarce medical resources where longevity is not equally distributed. Given such facts, setting priorities in health entails making difficult yet unavoidable decisions about which lives to save. The business of saving lives works on the assumption that longevity is valuable and that an early death is worse than a late death. There is a vast literature on health priorities and badness of death, separately. Surprisingly, there has been little cross-fertilisation between the academic (...) fields of priority setting and badness of death. Our aim is to connect philosophical discussions on the badness of death to contemporary debates in health priorities.DiscussionTwo questions regarding death are especially relevant to health priorities. The first question is why death is bad. Death is clearly bad for others, such as family, friends and society. Many philosophers also argue that death can be bad for those who die. This distinction is important for health priorities, because it concerns our fundamental reasons for saving lives. The second question is, ‘When is the worst time to die?’ A premature death is commonly considered worse than a late death. Thus, the number of good life years lost seems to matter to the badness of death. Concerning young individuals, some think the death of infants is worse than the death of adolescents, while others have contrary intuitions. Our claim is that to prioritise between age groups, we must consider the question of when it is worst to die.ConclusionsDeprivationism provides a more plausible approach to health priorities than Epicureanism. If Deprivationism is accepted, we will have a firmer basis for claiming that individuals, in addition to having a health loss caused by morbidity, will have a loss of good life years due to mortality. Additionally, Deprivationism highlights the importance of age and values for health priorities. Regarding age, both variants of Deprivationism imply that stillbirths are included in the Global Burden of Disease. Finally, we suggest that the Time-Relative Interest Account may serve as an alternative to the discounting and age weighting previously applied in the Global Burden of Disease. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to study the relationship between Epicureanism and pandemic priority-setting and to explore whether Epicurus's philosophy is compliant with the later developed utilitarianism. We find this aim interesting because Epicurus had a different way of valuing death than our modern society does: Epicureanism holds that death—understood as the incident of death—cannot be bad (or good) for those who die (self-regarding effects). However, this account is still consistent with the view that a particular death can be (...) bad for everyone else but those who die, such as family, friends, and society (other-regarding effects). During the pandemic, the focus has been on the number of deaths more than on the suffering and reduced well-being of those infected and the rest of society. However, since the pandemic requires prioritization, it is, on a utilitarian account, important to consider priorities that do the most good overall. In this article, we approach the harm of death from an Epicurean point of view, seeking to flesh out potential implications for pandemic priority-setting, and healthcare in general, using a case study of COVID-19 priority-setting. We also explore whether this would conflict with utilitarianism. We conclude that an Epicurean pandemic priority-setting approach would be different but, surprisingly, not radically different from many of the actual priority-setting decisions we saw under the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

The abilities to read, to write, and to compute are of crucial importance. Students who cannot read, write, or compute are in deep trouble. But important though these skills are, they do not encompass all of what people know or the ways in which what they know. An innovative literacy/theater project implemented in two sixth-grade classrooms of a high-poverty, urban, western Pennsylvania middle school was designed to help urban teachers address aliteracy by engaging their students in the discovery of three (...) young adult novels.1 The project was built on a partnership with a semiprofessional theater company that produced adaptations of the literature and designed instructional support materials to meet .. (shrink)

Des mortalités anormales frappent les ruchers d’Europe et d’autres continents depuis un peu plus de vingt ans. Depuis le début des troubles, des suspicions pèsent sur des insecticides d’un genre nouveau, utilisés en traitement de semences. La législation prescrivant l’évaluation des risques environnementaux de toute substance insecticide dès avant sa mise sur le marché, des apiculteurs sont allés consulter les dossiers portant sur les molécules suspectées, ce qui les a amenés à s’impliquer dans la critique et l’élaboration des règles d’évaluation, (...) et à côtoyer le monde des experts en toxicologie de l’abeille.Beehives across Europe and other continents have been affected by abnormal mortality for the last twenty years. Since these problems first appeared, suspicion has fallen on a new type of insecticide, which is used to treat seeds. The legislation prescribes environmental risk assessments of any insecticide substance before it reaches the market, and beekeepers therefore decided to consult the files concerning the suspect molecules. As a result, they became involved in critically reviewing and developing assessment rules, and thus came to rub shoulders with experts in bee toxicology. (shrink)

Que l’on s’attache à mettre en lumière une forme d’humanité chez l’abeille ou que l’on observe dans l’espèce humaine des comportements d’essaims, la volonté de rapprocher les deux espèces est coutumière et récurrente. Ne faut-il voir dans ces déclarations de proximités, cet intérêt et cette fascination pour l’abeille qu’anthropomorphisme simpliste, rêveries champêtres de poètes dominicaux ou fantaisies puériles nourries d’images d’Épinal et de dessins animés japonais ? Le rapprochement n’est ..

Class Clowns: Talking out of Turn with an Orientation Toward Humor The classroom is a primary site for children to learn accommodation to cultural practices and norms, but also for them to develop strategies for disruption and humor while avoiding sanctions. Although the teacher has the power in the elementary classroom, there are twenty or so prospective disruptors and all sorts of possible disruptions with humorous potential at various different points in the interaction. In our paper, we investigate disruptive humor (...) in the first six years of school from the perspective of the pupil adjusting to the restrictions and possibilities of the system, rather than from the usual perspective of the teacher, who wants to control classroom behavior. We explore recorded classroom interaction to determine the types of humorous disruptions and their interactional effects, showing how pupils adjust to the conventions of classroom behavior, but also how they test the system for humorous purposes. We argue that humorous disruptions often function to assert individual identity or to create a particular class personality in the otherwise faceless group orientation of the elementary classroom. (shrink)

This article unfolds in three stages. First, it locates the emergence of modern conceptions of social justice in industrializing Europe, and especially in the discovery of the “social,” which provided a particular idiom for the liberal democratic politics for most of the twentieth century. Second, the article links this particular conception of the social to the political rationalities of the postwar welfare state and the identity of the social citizen. Finally, the article discusses the myriad ways in which this legacy (...) of the social and social justice has been disrupted, although not yet fully displaced, by the economic orthodoxies and individualization that inform the contemporary neoliberal governing project in Canada. The result, the article concludes, has been the institutionalization of insecurity, which demands the renewal of a social way of seeing and a politics of social justice on local and global scales. (shrink)

En prenant pour exemple mon parcours personnel allant du travail de la cure à celui de l’écriture, des violences politiques reflétées dans celles de la famille à la douleur de leurs inscriptions psychiques et textuelles, la première partie de l’exposé montrera en quoi le travail d’élaboration et d’écriture que doit effectuer un descendant de survivants, s’il cherche à psychiser, historiciser et inscrire le trauma de ses ascendants, constitue une démarche violente et transgressive. La seconde partie dégagera quelques aspects des déterminants (...) psychiques qui affectent les descendants de survivants : le caractère double du vécu traumatique, l’expérience d’une délocalisation psychique en l’absence d’image narcissisante, le souvenir de la terreur dans le rapport aux autres, la mutilation ou l’incapacité d’être. (shrink)

Victim compensation now plays a central role in dealing with harm. It can be brought into play by various devices: private or social insurance, the courts or special funds created for specific disasters. With each device, compensation raises complex evaluation issues: is it appropriate to use financial compensation to repair harm? Who should pay and on what basis should the compensation be awarded? What is the nature of the damage? How to evaluate it and how to value the amount of (...) compensation determined? These questions are the subject of intense work of evaluation by both those who create or implement the compensation devices and by those who use them. This article looks more specifically at this work of evaluation by people who have endured a collective disaster and who have had to deal with the devices designed to compensate them. (shrink)

For most of us, learning to communicate is as effortless as breathing, and like air, communication skills are elemental; integral to our human existence in this world. Our communicative competencies might be seen as a bridge, facilitating our relationship with the world we are immersed in. But what happens when a child has difficulty learning to communicate effectively? What happens when their most basic messages of hunger or thirst fail to be understood or they are unable to jointly share in (...) everyday experiences of curiosity, joy, frustration, or anger? In these situations, it is the role of the Speech-Language Pathologist (SLP) to span the distance between a child and their family, a child and the world, building a route for life experiences and understandings to cross over. An SLP often begins with assessment and after a brief interaction, an SLP may come to a ‘naming’ such as delay or disorder. While the caring professional may intend this naming to be helpful in better understanding a child or facilitating access to valuable support, this naming may also place an immeasurable weight upon the child and their family. The act of naming is therefore an ethical concern. Through observation and interviews, this paper presentation explores SLP’s experiences of coming to a diagnosis through the human lens of phenomenological inquiry. It seeks to enhance thoughtful and conscientious practice by considering the ‘ethical experience of caring responsibility’ as applied to SLP (van Manen, 2016). (shrink)

In the Global Burden of Disease study, disease burden is measured as disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). The paramount assumption of the DALY is that it makes sense to aggregate years lived with disability (YLDs) and years of life lost (YLLs). However, this is not smooth sailing. Whereas morbidity (YLD) is something thathappens toan individual, loss of life itself (YLL) occurs when that individual’s life has ended. YLLs quantify something that involves no experience and does not take place among living individuals. (...) This casts doubt on whether the YLL is an individual burden at all. If not, then YLDs and YLLs are incommensurable. There are at least three responses to this problem, only one of which is tenable: a counterfactual account of harm. Taking this strategy necessitates a re-examination of how we count YLLs, particularly at the beginning of life. (shrink)

In recent years, it has become commonplace among the Global Burden of Disease study authors to regard the disability-adjusted life year primarily as a descriptive health metric. During the first phase of the GBD, it was widely acknowledged that the DALY had built-in evaluative assumptions. However, from the publication of the 2010 GBD and onwards, two central evaluative practices—time discounting and age-weighting—have been omitted from the DALY model. After this substantial revision, the emerging view now appears to be that the (...) DALY is primarily a descriptive measure. Our aim in this article is to argue that the DALY, despite changes, remains largely evaluative. Our analysis focuses on the understanding of the DALY by comparing the DALY as a measure of disease burden in the two most significant phases of GBD publications, from their beginning to the most recent releases. We identify numerous assumptions underlying the DALY and group them as descriptive or evaluative. We conclude that while the DALY model arguably has become more descriptive, it remains, by necessity, largely evaluative. (shrink)

This essay argues that Marshall McLuhan’s most important ideas on the media are to be found in the early writings of the 1940s and 1950s. McLuhan’s work did not provide policy makers with concrete recommendations, nor did he leave communication scholars with a theory of the media; but he developed new methodological ‘probes’ for thinking through the effects of a variety of media on environments and bodies in the newly mediated context of North America in the post-WWII period. His approach (...) to media technology was aesthetic, interdisciplinary, transnational, phenomenological and driven by a commitment to pedagogy. His work was prophetic in terms of recognizing that electronic media would transform experiences of space and time, and the interrelation between global and local cultures. (shrink)