We propose a model that identifies the configurations of relations between environmental practices and other management practices that can improve employee performance, measured as labor productivity. To test our model, we use the qualitative comparative analysis methodology, which allows us to demonstrate empirically how different configurations of management practices, including environmental practices, quality management systems, teamwork, and interorganizational relations, contribute to work systems in ways that increase labor productivity. Our results, based on data from 4,975 employees from 1,866 firms, show (...) that environmental practices are associated with higher labor productivity only when they are combined with other management practices. (shrink)

Our aim in this study was to determine students’ and teachers’ attitudes towards cheating in assessing students’ performance. We used mixed methodology and the main research method was a case study. We aimed to describe how our respondents: 1. recognize ethical misconduct in several situations given through case studies, 2. understand the roles of each subject involved, 3. predict consequences of the EM and how they understand its possible causes, 4. create individual answers to EM or resolve problem situations. The (...) research sample of students includes participants from three basic study programs and two postgraduate programs in the field of education. A sample of teachers was obtained from a number of faculties by random selection. Our respondents have identified most forms of EM reasonably well, although in some situations, the respondents recognized other errors as EM. Therefore, the issues of ethics are not completely clear to all respondents, which leads to the conclusion that universities must organize training in this field. Both groups of respondents understand EM in a similar way, and whether it is a professor or a student who commits EM has not affected their responses. Our results suggest that it is necessary to work on the prevention of fraud by discussing the consequences, by learning ethical reasoning, by developing functional strategies of learning for the purpose of preventing fraud. (shrink)

Corporate sustainable innovation is a major driver of institutional change, and its success can be largely attributed to employees. While some scholars have described the importance of intrinsic motivations and flexibility to facilitate innovation, others have argued that constraints and extrinsic motivations stimulate innovation. In the context of sustainable innovation, we explore which employee work practices are more conducive to firm-level innovation in corporate sustainability. Our results, based on a sample of 4640 French employees from 1764 firms, confirm the positive (...) impact of intrinsic motivations, and the negative impact of job strain, on corporate sustainable innovation. We also find that extrinsic rewards, through pay satisfaction, counteract the negative effect of job strain to promote sustainable innovation. This indicates that intrinsic and extrinsic rewards can work in tandem to facilitate sustainable innovation. (shrink)

Ageing causes progressive decline in metabolic, behavioural, and physiological functions, leading to a reduced health span. The extracellular matrix (ECM) is the three‐dimensional network of macromolecules that provides our tissues with structure and biomechanical resilience. Imbalance between damage and repair/regeneration causes the ECM to undergo structural deterioration with age, contributing to age‐associated pathology. The ECM ‘Ageing Across the Life Course’ interdisciplinary research network (ECMage) was established to bring together researchers in the United Kingdom, and internationally, working on the emerging field (...) of ECM ageing. Here we report on a consultation at a joint meeting of ECMage and the Medical Research Council / Versus Arthritis Centre for Integrated Research into Musculoskeletal Ageing, held in January 2023, in which delegates analysed the key questions and research opportunities in the field of ECM ageing. We examine fundamental biological questions, enabling technologies, systems of study and emerging in vitro and in silico models, alongside consideration of the broader challenges facing the field. (shrink)

Mamardašvili’s ‘classical’ paradigm of knowledge is seen to be minimally based on extrapolations from Descartes’ classical philosophy to which Mamardašvili attributes features that rather anticipate his own post-classical ontology. The latter is oriented towards the primacy of perception as a subjective process, in which the self-conscious subject constructs the world, not as illusion, but as a ‘picture’ or ‘model’ (Wittgenstein’s Bild). By examining Mamardašvili’s definition of the ‘phenomenon’ against the␣background of Husserl’s ‘reduction’, Wittgenstein’s ‘object’ and the Freudian and post-structuralist psychoanalytic (...) model of subjectivity, the paper arrives at the inference that Mamardašvili is essentially a post-Structuralist thinker who appropriates concepts from various critical and philosophical disciplines to construct his own multi-disciplinary theory of consciousness and perception. (shrink)

The philosophical works of Merab Mamardashvili are part of the emergence of phenomenological thought on the “margins” of the Eastern European sphere, appropriating and mediating a version of French poststructuralism in the “Soviet” 1980s, in which deconstruction constitutes both method and content. More specifically, Mamardashvili uses Descartes as the point de repère for his investigations into the phenomenology of the object of knowledge and the structure of consciousness, which come to model Mamardashvili's phenomenological Self, anticipating a modern, post-ideological Subject. Mamardashvili's (...) paradigm of the object constitutes the “linguistic” turn in late Soviet Georgian philosophy. Mamardashvili's phenomenon or “fact” makes its appearance in an ideologically determined regime, like a “Centaur,” as a melange of myth, belief and “physical” event, as something unseen, not as an unmediated experience of the world, yet neither as pure “thought from outside.”. (shrink)

The philosophical works of Merab Mamardashvili are part of the (re-)emergence of phenomenological thought on the “margins” of the Eastern European sphere, appropriating and mediating a version of French poststructuralism in the “Soviet” 1980s, in which deconstruction constitutes both method and content. More specifically, Mamardashvili uses Descartes as the point de repère for his investigations into the phenomenology of the object of knowledge and the structure of consciousness, which come to model Mamardashvili's phenomenological Self, anticipating a modern, post-ideological Subject. Mamardashvili's (...) paradigm of the object constitutes the “linguistic” turn in late Soviet Georgian philosophy. Mamardashvili's phenomenon or “fact” makes its appearance in an ideologically determined regime, like a “Centaur,” as a melange of myth, belief and “physical” event, as something unseen (in both senses of the word), not as an unmediated experience of the world, yet neither as pure “thought from outside.”. (shrink)

Amongst the most treated questions in Western research on the works of Svetlana Aleksievich is the question of the genre of Aleksievich’s prose works, followed closely by the question of the historical authenticity of her method of collecting oral information about the Soviet period of history from witnesses of that history. The questions treated, such as the problem of genre, aesthetic authenticity and the relationship of history and fiction, can be distilled into the question of the authority of the literary (...) text. If the Nobel Prize for literature is awarded on the assumption that Aleksievich’s work is literature—and no one, including the author, has questioned that assumption—then it is justifiable to pose the question of the authority of the literary text as an aesthetic message—as literary truth—using the tools of literary analysis, not of historiography or sociology. In this essay, the claim that Secondhand Time [Vremia second hend] is a novel will be examined in the context of the narratological model of the literary text of Russian Formalism and Prague Structuralism and by applying the test of “artistic quality” (khudozhestvennost’), which validates the aesthetic value of texts of the literary canon. This examination will allow us to answer the question about what kind of text has been created using oral testimonies as material for a work of fiction. (shrink)

While the traditional boulevard novel of Eugène Sue wants to entertain and sell, Umberto Eco's boulevard novel wants to entertain and educate the contemporary reader in Italian history and in a form of modern semiotic theory. However, Eco's educational mission does not transform the low genre of the boulevard novel but remains bound by its limitations of “rhetoric and ideology.” Eco's reader is left with a representation of history as pastiche and a populist misconception about the potential of semiotics to (...) relativise the perception of reality. Both history and semiotics are ultimately used by Eco not as heuristic devices but as instruments of seduction directed at a modern middle-class reading public with intellectual aspirations. (shrink)