Social enterprises in the microfinance industry need to adhere to both financial and social demands. Critics argue that there is a mission drift away from the social mission, and this has motivated the introduction of social rating agencies to strengthen the business ethics of microfinance institutions. Using a global dataset of 204 socially rated MFIs from 58 countries, we assess the factors that drive the social performance ratings of MFIs. Overall our results show that social ratings of MFIs are significantly (...) related to financial performance, greater outreach especially in rural areas, well-defined social objectives, staff commitment, service quality and an enhanced customer service. We observe that various rating agencies attach different importance to each of the social indicators. The public policy implication is that social rating agencies need to become more transparent, to reduce the information asymmetries between heterogenous socially motivated investors and the focal MFI. (shrink)

The economy for artisanal products, such as Navajo rugs or Pashmina shawls are often threatened by mass-produced fakes. We propose the use of AI-based authentication as one part of a larger system that would replace extractive economies with generative circulation. In this case study we examine initial experiments towards the development of a cell phone-based authentication app for kente cloth in West Africa. We describe the context of weavers and cloth sales; an initial test of a machine learning algorithm for (...) distinguishing between real and fake kente, and an outline of the next stages of development. (shrink)

"These essays make a splendid book. Ignatieff's lectures are engaging and vigorous; they also combine some rather striking ideas with savvy perceptions about actual domestic and international politics.

Kwame Gyekye offers a philosophical interpretation and critical analysis of the African cultural experience in modern times. Critically employing Western political and philosophical concepts to clear, comparative advantage, Gyekye addresses a wide range of concrete problems afflicting postcolonial African states, such as ethnicity and nation-building, the relationship of tradition to modernity, the nature of political authority and political legitimation, political corruption, and the threat to traditional moral and social values, practices, and institutions in the wake of rapid social change.

In America today, the problem of achieving racial justice--whether through "color-blind" policies or through affirmative action--provokes more noisy name-calling than fruitful deliberation. In Color Conscious, K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, two eminent moral and political philosophers, seek to clear the ground for a discussion of the place of race in politics and in our moral lives. Provocative and insightful, their essays tackle different aspects of the question of racial justice; together they provide a compelling response to our nation's most (...) vexing problem.Appiah begins by establishing the problematic nature of the idea of race. He draws on the scholarly consensus that "race" has no legitimate biological basis, exploring the history of its invention as a social category and showing how the concept has been used to explain differences among groups of people by mistakenly attributing various "essences" to them. Appiah argues that, while people of color may still need to gather together, in the face of racism, under the banner of race, they need also to balance carefully the calls of race against the many other dimensions of individual identity; and he suggests, finally, what this might mean for our political life.Gutmann examines alternative political responses to racial injustice. She argues that American politics cannot be fair to all citizens by being color blind because American society is not color blind. Fairness, not color blindness, is a fundamental principle of justice. Whether policies should be color-conscious, class conscious, or both in particular situations, depends on an open-minded assessment of their fairness. Exploring timely issues of university admissions, corporate hiring, and political representation, Gutmann develops a moral perspective that supports a commitment to constitutional democracy.Appiah and Gutmann write candidly and carefully, presenting many-faceted interpretations of a host of controversial issues. Rather than supplying simple answers to complex questions, they offer to citizens of every color principled starting points for the ongoing national discussions about race. (shrink)

This text explores the ethical significance of identity, including our gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion and sexuality, for our obligations to others and to ourselves.

On the denial of traditional thought as philosophy Scholars, including philosophers, tend to squirm a little at the mention of African philosophy, ...

A new edition of the highly acclaimed book Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition," this paperback brings together an even wider range of leading philosophers and social scientists to probe the political controversy surrounding ...

Idealization is a fundamental feature of human thought. We build simplified models in our scientific research and utopias in our political imaginations. Concepts like belief, desire, reason, and justice are bound up with idealizations and ideals. Life is a constant adjustment between the models we make and the realities we encounter. In idealizing, we proceed “as if” our representations were true, while knowing they are not. This is not a dangerous or distracting occupation, Kwame Anthony Appiah shows. Our best (...) chance of understanding nature, society, and ourselves is to open our minds to a plurality of imperfect depictions that together allow us to manage and interpret our world. -/- The philosopher Hans Vaihinger first delineated the “as if” impulse at the turn of the twentieth century, drawing on Kant, who argued that rational agency required us to act as if we were free. Appiah extends this strategy to examples across philosophy and the human and natural sciences. In a broad range of activities, we have some notion of the truth yet continue with theories that we recognize are, strictly speaking, false. From this vantage point, Appiah demonstrates that a picture one knows to be unreal can be a vehicle for accessing reality. -/- As If explores how strategic untruth plays a critical role in far-flung areas of inquiry: decision theory, psychology, natural science, and political philosophy. A polymath who writes with mainstream clarity, Appiah defends the centrality of the imagination not just in the arts but in science, morality, and everyday life. (shrink)

This paper is a further refinement of ‘A Manifesto’ recently published in the maiden issue of Studies in World Christianity ;, vol. 1.1, 1995, pp. 51-67. In the present form it was delivered as the keynote address at the recent African Christianity Project conference held in March 1995 in Edinburgh and also at the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies Summer School on Institutional Development, in June-July 1995.

Gaining ethical approval for qualitative health research and implementing all the planned research processes in a proposed study are not straightforward endeavours. The situation becomes more complex when qualitative research is conducted in a cross-national healthcare and academic context. Also, it is even exhausting when the study is student-based, as student researchers may be considered novices and inexperienced researchers, especially for field-based research. Our aim in this reflective paper is to present, reflect, and discuss the experiences of a doctoral researcher (...) in dealing with two independent institutional review boards in Canada and Ghana during an interdisciplinary Ph.D. project and the ethical dilemmas encountered while collecting data in Ghana. Based on the researcher’s experiences, it became apparent that consent and its documentation can have cultural implications in different settings; hence, institutional review boards must exercise reflexivity in their protocol review practice. Also, sharing research data with participants and institutional leaders while maintaining participant confidentiality and privacy in institutional ethnographic research requires sensitivity to bi-lateral ethical values. With the experiences shared in this paper, we advocate for a dialogic ethical review process in qualitative research where researchers and research ethics boards engage in ongoing dialogue rather than the usual prescriptive format research ethics reviews often assume. (shrink)

From a classical perspective, multinational companies operate based on market determinants, but recent economic discussions emphasize the central role of the human cognitive system in the decision-making process, thereby giving birth to interdisciplinary fields such as behavioral economics and neuroeconomics. While neuroeconomics is still considered an emerging field, hitherto scant studies have investigated the reflection of cultural experiences on the nervous system. Moreover, the interpretation of cultural diversity in the decision-making process, especially from a neuroeconomic perspective, has not been explored. (...) In response, this study, aperspective research in nature, endeavors to research the neural responses to cultural diversity by contextualizing the neuroeconomic discussion within an MNC framework as one of the best multicultural settings. This study demonstrates that the internationalization process of MNCs is established on the cultural identity and integration of the executive. Through a neuroscientific lens, our findings prove that culture is a fundamental determinant of the cognitive makeup; therefore, cultural diversity in MNCs influences their decision-making process. Moreover, the performance of MNCs is driven by cultural harmonization at the executive level. Finally, the study reveals that the novel field of neuroeconomics is instrumental in identifying cultural intuitions on brain cells and the implications on economic decisions even at a corporate level. The main contribution of this study is the initiation of a multidisciplinary merge of the sociocultural and economic as well as neuroscientific fields, as a research center for MNCs’ decision-making processes. (shrink)

Abusua do funu. The matriclan loves a corpse. AKAN PROVERB My father died, as I say, while I was trying to finish this book. His funeral was an occasion for strengthening and reaffirming the ties that bind me to Ghana and “my father's house' ...

This book aims to allow readers with no previous exposure to professional philosophy to gain an understanding of the approaches and the positions current in the field and to prepare them for further reading.

A political and philosophical manifesto considers the ramifications of a world in which Western society is divided from other cultures, evaluating the limited capacity of differentiating societies as compared to the power of a united world.

Through most of the twentieth century, life scientists grew increasingly sceptical of the biological significance of folk classifications of people by race. New work on the human genome has raised the possibility of a resurgence of scientific interest in human races. This paper aims to show that the racial sceptics are right, while also granting that biological information associated with racial categories may be useful.

To find more information on Rowman & Littlefield titles, please visit us at www.rowmanlittlefield.com.

In this paper i argue that the bundle-theory, the theory that substance is nothing but a collection of qualities, bristles with difficulties. i show that a conjunction of the so-called essential qualities would primarily yield a conception not of an individual substance socrates, for instance, but of a species, i.e., the concept 'man', and that only the addition of some uniquely determining accidental qualities to the essential ones would yield an individual substance. but, then, these accidental qualities and infinite in (...) number and are therefore only potential and unknowable. thus, the "bundle" can never be 'actualized'. nor can the notion of substance be eliminated in favor of descriptions, since these should include negative descriptions which are infinite in number because expressible in terms of the whole universe. since not all descriptions apply to a thing, where they do, they must have been antecedantly 'derived' from that thing. hence, i conclude that there are grounds for at least a limited defense of a substance ontology. (shrink)

K. Anthony Appiah, the author of the internationally best-selling Cosmopolitanism, analyzes what causes societies to end cruelty and injustices - such as slavery, foot binding, or honor killing. Can a government through its laws halt egregious violations of human decency and can mere moral instruction bring an end to human suffering? No, says Appiah, demonstrating how reform succeeds only when it enlists the primal human sense of honor. When it comes to morality, honor is the lever arm that connects what (...) we know to what we do. (shrink)

In an attempt to overcome the legacy of its predecessor body, the Organization of African Unity, which so often ignored atrocities in member states due to a doctrine of non-interference, the...

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Physicalism The Argument for Physicalism Quasi‐Physicalism Conclusion.

Sara Suleri has written recently, in Meatless Days, of being treated as an "otherness machine"-and of being heartily sick of it.20 Perhaps the predicament of the postcolonial intellectual is simply that as intellectuals-a category instituted in black Africa by colonialism-we are, indeed, always at the risk of becoming otherness machines, with the manufacture of alterity as our principal role. Our only distinction in the world of texts to which we are latecomers is that we can mediate it to our fellows. (...) This is especially true when postcolonial meets postmodern; for what the postmodern reader seems to demand of Africa is all too close to what modernism-in the form of the postimpressionists-demanded of it. The role that Africa, like the rest of the Third World, plays for Euro-American postmodernism-like its better-documented significance for modernist art-must be distinguished from the role postmodernism might play in the Third World; what that might be it is, I think, too early to tell. What happens will happen not because we pronounce on the matter in theory, but will happen out of the changing everyday practices of African cultural life.For all the while, in Africa's cultures, there are those who will not see themselves as Other. Despite the overwhelming reality of economic decline; despite unimaginable poverty; despite wars, malnutrition, disease, and political instability, African cultural productivity grows apace: popular literatures, oral narrative and poetry, dance, drama, music, and visual art all thrive. The contemporary cultural production of many African societies, and the many traditions whose evidences so vigorously remain, is an antidote to the dark vision of the postcolonial novelist. 20. Sara Suleri, Meatless Days , p. 105. Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor of philosophy and literature at Duke University, is the author of a number of books, including For Truth in Semantics , Necessary Questions , and In My Father's House , a collection of essays on African cultural politics. His first novel, Avenging Angel, was published in 1990. (shrink)

Les Européens semblent se jouer à nouveau des Africains, mais avec des armes différentes des fusils utilisés pendant conquêtes et colonisations. L’ambigüité entretenue autour du terme « restitution » par les musées européens, en particulier allemands et britanniques, en constitue un exemple frappant. Par restitution, ils entendent souvent prêts temporaires ou permanents d’objets d’art africains. Car, admettre la restitution définitive de ces objets revient à reconnaître la réalité des raids et pillages coloniaux ainsi que le génocide de certains peuples. Des (...) excuses juridiques sont également avancées. Kwame Opoku considère qu’il n’y a pas de difficulté juridique s’il y a volonté de faire. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this paper I argue that the economistic conception of development which has all along been touted by development ‘experts’and which has been made the monolithic framework for understanding and tackling the problem of development, is lopsided and terribly inadequate. That conception, it seems to me, fails to come to grips with the complex nature of human society and culture. That complexity, I argue, calls for a comprehensive, not segmented, approach to the development of human society. I therefore argue (...) also that development must be perceived in terms of adequate responses to the entire existential conditions in which human beings function, conditions which encompass the economic, political, social, moral, cultural, intellectual and others. It is pointed out that these conditions are greatly helped by a congenial political climate and a viable ethical and cultural framework. (shrink)

The more passages one examines in the translations from Arabic to Latin and from Arabic to English and other modern languages, the more mistakes one comes across in the translation of the Arabic expression ‘alā al-qaṣd al-awwal . The mistakes stem from the failure to distinguish between two senses of the expression, one an adverb, and the other a famous philosophic concept. Failing to distinguish between the two senses, the translators translated the phrase literally, often with unsatisfactory results. In this (...) paper, I shall indicate a Greek word which was rendered by the Arabic ‘alā al-qaṣd al-awwal. I shall refer to some English translations from the Arabic and show how wrong they are. I shall suggest that in Arabic philosophy itself al-Fārābī, rather than Avicenna, may have been the origin of the philosophic concepts of “first and second intentions.” I shall point out that although these concepts may have been introduced into Latin scholasticism by Raymond Lull, he could not have derived them from the Logic of al-Ghazālī, as has been alleged. (shrink)

From an African point of view, there is no social justice in the world today and, from that point of view, there may not be much difference between the African, African-American, Asian, or even Western perspectives. There may, however, be some difference in the reasons given in support of this perspective or, rather, conclusion. The African perspective is heavily influenced by events such as the trans-Atlantic slave trade, colonialism, and, more recently, by the report of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation (...) Commission and the bombing of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The reason, in part, is that all of these events or reports seem to reinforce the belief, which I take to be contrary to the core principle of social justice, that African lives are either worthless or do not count as much as others. Further, they seem to have the effect of cheating Africans or making fools out of them, which, from a traditional Akan point of view, is a violation of the tenets of social justice. (shrink)