In industries populated by small and medium enterprises, managers' good intentions frequently incur barriers to superior environmental performance (Tilley, Bus Strategy Environ 8:238-248, 1999). During the period when the U.S. wine industry was beginning to promote voluntary adoption of sound environmental practices, we examined managers' attitudes, norms, and perceptions of stakeholder pressures to assess their intentions to implement environmental management programs (EMP). We found that managers within the simple structures of these small and medium firms are responsive to attitudes, norms, (...) and pressures from internal stakeholders and that voluntarily established EMP increased the success of firms' implementation of energy conservation and recycling practices. Applications of our findings to future research on small and medium enterprises as well as direct practical applications of our results are discussed. (shrink)

Jianjun Mei: Cultural Interaction between China and Central Asia during the Bronze Age Charles Higham: The Origins of the Civilization of Angkor Ralph Hanna: Yorkshire Writers Christopher Ricks: Shakespeare and the Anagram Tony Wrigley: The Quest for the Industrial Revolution Linda Colley: 'This Small Island': Britain, Size and Empire Murray Pittock: Robert Burns and British Poetry Peter Pulzer: Special Paths or Main Roads? Making Sense of German History Wolf Lepenies: Overestimating Culture: A German Problem. Exile and Emigration, The Survival (...) of German Culture Angela Leighton: Elegies of Form in Bishop, Plath, Stevenson Nicholas Stern: Development as a Process of Change: Toward a Dynamic Public Economics Lord Woolf: Human Rights: Have the Public Benefitted? (shrink)

We use Homer and Sun Tzu as a background to better understand and reformulate confrontation, anger and violence in medicine, contrasting an unproductive ‘love of war’ with a productive ‘art of war’ or ‘art of strategy’. At first glance, it is a paradox that the healing art is not pacific, but riddled with militaristic language and practices. On closer inspection, we find good reasons for this cultural paradox yet regret its presence. Drawing on insights from Homer's The Iliad and The (...) Odyssey, we argue for better understanding of confrontation, anger, bullying, intimidation and violence in medicine in order to change the culture. For example, equating medicine with war is not a given condition of medicine but a convenient metaphor with historical origins and a historical trajectory. Other, non-martial metaphors, such as medicine as collaboration, may be more appropriate in an age of team-based care. Taking lessons from Homer, we suggest three key ways in which cold-hearted confrontation and anger in medicine can be transformed into productive, warm-hearted engagement: the transformation of angry impulse into reflection, moral courage and empathy. Thinking with Homer can offer an aesthetically and morally charged alternative to the current body of literature on topics, such as anger in doctors, and how this may be ‘managed’, without recourse to an instrumental economy where emotions are viewed as commodities, and emotional responses can be ‘trained’ through communication skills courses. (shrink)

Women are routinely subjected to penetrating surveillance during pregnancy. On the surface, this may appear to flow from a cultural commitment to protect babies – a cultural practice of “better safe than sorry” that is particularly vigilant given the vulnerability of fetuses and babies. In reality, pregnancy occasions incursions against human rights and well-being that would be anathema in other contexts. Our cultural practices concerning risk in pregnancy are infused with oppressive norms about women’s responsibility for pregnancy outcomes and the (...) demands of extreme self-sacrifice from women to protect their fetuses. Of particular concern is our culture’s willingness to enforce norms concerning risk during pregnancy using coercive measures including forced cesarean sections and criminal penalties for exposing fetuses to risk. This chapter will consider assaults on self-determination, bodily integrity and privacy inherent in such interventions, as well as the structural violence and “mangled pieties” that buttress such practices in our unjust society. (shrink)

Mammals have an XX:XY system of chromosomal sex determination in which a small heterochromatic Y controls male development. The Y contains the testis determining factor SRY, as well as several genes important in spermatogenesis. Comparative studies show that the Y was once homologous with the X, but has been progressively degraded, and now consists largely of repeated sequences as well as degraded copies of X linked genes. The small original X and Y have been enlarged by cycles of autosomal addition (...) to one partner, recombination onto the other and continuing attrition of the compound Y. This addition–attrition hypothesis predicts that the pseudoautosomal region of the human X is merely the last relic of the latest addition. Genes (including SRY) on the conserved or added region of the Y evolved functions in male sex determination and differentiation distinct from the general functions of their X‐linked partners. Although the gonadogenesis pathway is highly conserved in vertebrates, its control has probably changed radically and rapidly in vertebrate – even mammalian – evolution. (shrink)

Most writing on informed consent in Africa highlights different cultural and social attributes that influence informed consent practices, especially in research settings. This review presents a composite picture of informed consent in Nigeria using empirical studies and legal and regulatory prescriptions, as well as clinical experience. It shows that Nigeria, like most other nations in Africa, is a mixture of sociocultural entities, and, notwithstanding the multitude of factors affecting it, informed consent is evolving along a purely Western model.Empirical studies show (...) that 70–95% of Nigerian patients report giving consent for their surgical treatments. Regulatory prescriptions and adjudicated cases in Nigeria follow the Western model of informed consent. However, adversarial legal proceedings, for a multiplicity of reasons, do not play significant roles in enforcing good medical practice in Nigeria. Gender prejudices are evident, but not a norm. Individual autonomy is recognized even when decisions are made within the family. Consent practices are influenced by the level of education, extended family system, urbanization, religious practices, and health care financing options available. All limitations notwithstanding, consent discussions improved with increasing level of education of the patients, suggesting that improved physician's knowledge and increasing awareness and education of patients can override other influences.Nigerian medical schools should restructure their teaching of medical ethics to improve the knowledge and practices of physicians. More research is needed on the preferences of the Nigerian people regarding informed consent so as to adequately train physicians and positively influence physicians’ behaviors. (shrink)

Taking as its starting point Miri Gur-Arye’s critical discussion of a legal duty to report crime, this paper sketches an idealising conception of a democratic republic whose citizens could be expected to recognise a civic responsibility to report crime, in order to assist the enterprise of a criminal law that is their common law. After explaining why they should recognise such a responsibility, what its scope should be, and how it should be exercised, and noting that that civic responsibility must (...) include a responsibility to report one’s own crimes; it discusses whether that civic responsibility could ground at least a limited legal duty to report certain types of crime. It then turns to the question of whether a civic responsibility to assist the criminal law’s enterprise of bringing wrongdoers to account could include a responsibility to arrest suspected or known offenders if the police cannot or will not do so—a responsibility to make a citizen’s arrest, and the legal power to discharge that responsibility: how far should citizens feel entitled, or duty-bound, thus to ‘take the law into their own hands’? (shrink)

Gordon's emphasizes that the process of prosecution is crucial to the idea of crime. One who commits a public wrong is properly called to public account for it, and the criminal trial constitutes such a public calling to account. The state is the proper prosecutor of crimes: since a crime is ‘our’ wrong, rather than only the victim's wrong, it is appropriate that we should prosecute it, collectively. The case is not simply V the victim, or P the plaintiff, against (...) D the defendant. It is brought, as the Americans properly have it, by ‘the People’, or by ‘the Commonwealth’, against the defendant. This is a useful way in which to think about crimes and criminalisation. This chapter tries to develop this conception of public wrongs a little further, which also involves complicating it more than a little. It works from a version of liberal communitarianism that rejects the metaphysical version of the individualist's ‘unencumbered self’; but the account sketched here should be compatible with all but the most radically individualist kinds of liberal theory. (shrink)

First published in 1953, this seminal introduction to political philosophy is intended for both the student of political theory and for the general reader. After an introduction which explains the nature and purpose of philosophy, Dr Murray provides a critical examination of the principle theories advanced by political philosophers from Plato to Marx, paying special attention to contemporary issues. The book also makes an attempt to define the essential issues of philosophical significance in contemporary politics, with special reference to (...) the conflict between political authority and individual rights, and to show how the different moral assumptions underlying authoritarian and democratic systems of government are ultimately based upon different theories of logic. (shrink)

The molecular mechanism of temperature‐dependent sex determination (TSD) is a long‐standing mystery. How is the thermal signal sensed, captured and transduced to regulate key sex genes? Although there is compelling evidence for pathways via which cells capture the temperature signal, there is no known mechanism by which cells transduce those thermal signals to affect gene expression. Here we propose a novel hypothesis we call 3D‐TSD (the three dimensions of thermolabile sex determination). We postulate that the genome has capacity to remodel (...) in response to temperature by changing 3D chromatin conformation, perhaps via temperature‐sensitive transcriptional condensates. This could rewire enhancer–promoter interactions to alter the expression of key sex‐determining genes. This hypothesis can accommodate monogenic or multigenic thermolabile sex‐determining systems, and could be combined with upstream thermal sensing and transduction to the epigenome to commit gonadal fate. (shrink)