This book provides coverage of managerial decision-making for the firm in relation to the consumer, production, and costs. It covers firm behaviour under monopolistic and oligopolistic market conditions.

This paper discusses the economic and philosophical inadequacies that have characterised the Project Tiger scheme in India. Launched in the 1970s to protect the habitats of the Royal Bengal Tiger, Project Tiger has over time evolved into a management system that has abstracted the tiger from its habitat by highlighting its charismatic functions. However the abstraction has also caused the tiger to be valued for its narrow consumptive uses. By comparison the habitats that have nurtured the tiger have received less (...) attention. The paper critiques partial equilibrium frameworks that have attempted to value a tiger in terms of demand and supply functions rather than as an integral element of an ecosystem. While considering the superiority of the Total Economic Value concept as a value-determining method, the paper also points to the limitation of the concept in not addressing the conflicts between use and non-use values of a tiger. In the light of these facts, the paper advances the theory of complementarity as a valuation approach that considers the tiger and its habitat as a joint resource that needs to be protected and conserved in the larger interests of biodiversity conservation in India. (shrink)

In this essay I discuss the issue of Kantian hospitality and how Katrin Flikschuh’s arguments in “Kant’s Nomads: Encountering Strangers” offer us a framework for dealing with certain problems that seem to arise out of the Kantian account, namely, problems of dealing with cultures unlike modern liberal states, such as nomadic and indigenous communities. I look at some criticisms of Kant’s position on hospitality and cosmopolitan right and on how Flikschuh’s discussion helps to resolve these criticisms. I focus especially on (...) her discussion of respectful interaction and openness in the course of encountering cultural others, encounters that inherently and positively contain a large element of unexpectedness. (shrink)

Despite powerful strategic approaches in the health systems in many afTluent countries, the pandemic that has hit us has cascaded beyond the imagination of many civil societies around the world. There is a call for a higher understanding and practice as the contents in the social media reTlected an urgency to understand more on the healing effects of the body, mind and spirit. In fact, contents in social media highlighted many coping mechanisms which were related to religious, cultural and spiritual (...) values. The public expressed information that included remedies for the body, mind and the spiritual aspects of humanity and their interconnectedness with the environment. These narratives were equally as signiTicant as the logistic arrangements, professional and political decision making among the healthcare professions and members of other inter-related health networks. The results of the COVID-19 outbreak has crea ted a deeper unders tanding, o f a higher consciousness as populations around the world recognize that the world works as one large organism trying to balance the ethical and unethical practices rampant in our societies. This paper proposes the integration of “change theory” to explore the various existing elements in narratives of the public and research studies from healthcare practices. An exploratory analysis of contents in social media and the related literature in healthcare and nursing studies has revealed speciTic patterns which helped put the theory in perspective and to formulate a model for future understanding on what common universal values exist in the commonly existing patterns. (shrink)

Introduction Kant develops a positive though regulative role for reason toward the end of the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason, particularly in the Appendix to the Dialectic. In the opening section, “The Regulative Employment of the Ideas of Pure Reason”, he provides us with an account of how these ideas can unify the understanding in its employment, although only regulatively. Part of this account includes a discussion of the hypothetical use of reason, in which one inspects a group (...) of particulars to see whether they fit a given universal and then generalizes over other future particulars that the universal will apply to them as well. (shrink)

Recently Samuel Fleischacker has developed Kant’s model of enlightenment as a “minimalist enlightenment” in the tradition of a relatively thin proceduralism focused on the form of public debate and interaction. I want to discuss the possibility that such a minimalism, endorsed by Fleischacker, Habermas, Rawls, and others, benefits from a metaphysics of critical individual subjectivity as a prerequisite for the social proceduralism of the minimalist enlightenment. I argue that Kant’s enlightenment, metaphysically thicker than much contemporary proceduralism, constitutes a recovery and (...) transformation of a subjective interiority deeply Cartesian in spirit and central to the reciprocity of the community of subjects in What is Enlightenment. This opens a space for a site of resistance to the social. Descartes’ solus secedo describes the analogical space of such a resistance for Kant’s sapere aude. The Meditations thus point forward implicitly to how a rational subject might achieve critical distance from tradition in its various forms, epistemic, ethical, moral, and political. (shrink)

We critically discuss the impact of sustainable development initiatives in Kerala, India, on biodiversity and on women farmers in the matrilineal Adivasi community of the Kurichya-tribe in Wayanad. By contextualizing development programs regarding the specifically gendered access to land, division of labor, distribution of knowledge and decision-making power, we situate our analysis within the theoretical framework of feminist political ecology. We first outline women’s gaining of social and political space in local self-government institutions and then critically discuss the impacts of (...) women’s farming groups. Decentralization and development programs have aimed at empowering women and reducing poverty through improved food security. However, little success has materialized, as patriarchal power structures concerning decision-making processes as well as control over the most valuable resources and traditional knowledge have been maintained. Whereas women’s self-help groups in Kerala have enhanced their position, women’s farming groups, by contrast, have brought little betterment. In some cases they have even downsized women’s management and knowledge of resources related to agriculture and do not integrate or enhance Kurichya women’s knowledge. As some women are now introducing high-yielding rice seeds and fertilizer and as it is impossible for them to control land and get access to traditional rice seeds—the domain of men—we contest the notion of women being considered the preservers of agrobiodiversity. We argue, rather, that the construction and transformation of ecological traditional knowledge is highly dependent on the gendered multi-scaled power structures of state and community. (shrink)

We critically discuss the impact of sustainable development initiatives in Kerala, India, on biodiversity and on women farmers in the matrilineal Adivasi community of the Kurichya-tribe in Wayanad. By contextualizing development programs regarding the specifically gendered access to land, division of labor, distribution of knowledge and decision-making power, we situate our analysis within the theoretical framework of feminist political ecology. We first outline women’s gaining of social and political space in local self-government institutions and then critically discuss the impacts of (...) women’s farming groups. Decentralization and development programs have aimed at empowering women and reducing poverty through improved food security. However, little success has materialized, as patriarchal power structures concerning decision-making processes as well as control over the most valuable resources and traditional knowledge have been maintained. Whereas women’s self-help groups in Kerala have enhanced their position, women’s farming groups, by contrast, have brought little betterment. In some cases they have even downsized women’s management and knowledge of resources related to agriculture and do not integrate or enhance Kurichya women’s knowledge. As some women are now introducing high-yielding rice seeds and fertilizer and as it is impossible for them to control land and get access to traditional rice seeds—the domain of men—we contest the notion of women being considered the preservers of agrobiodiversity. We argue, rather, that the construction and transformation of ecological traditional knowledge is highly dependent on the gendered multi-scaled power structures of state and community. (shrink)

The development of AAC technologies is of critical importance to the many people who are unable to speak intelligibly due to a communication disorder, and to their many everyday interlocutors. Advances in digital technologies have revolutionized AAC, leading to devices that can “speak for” such individuals as aptly as it is illustrated in the case of the world famous physicist, Stephen Hawking. However, given their dependence on prefabricated language, current AAC devices are very limited in their ability to mediate everyday (...) interactions. We argue here that the limits of AAC are firstly theoretical — grounded in prosthetic models that imagine AAC devices as replacements for damaged body parts and in transmission models of language production as communication. In contrast, our multidisciplinary team aims to design pseudo-intelligent mediators of communication by blending strengths of human mediators with features of current AAC technologies. To inform the design process, we report here our initial situated studies focusing on the distributed nature of everyday communicative activities conducted with potential AAC/PIM users. Our analysis focuses on the discursive alignments of these participants and their interlocutors, attending especially to the various ways their personal aides function as human mediators. Specifically, we focus on mapping the communicative activity around each of these differently-abled individuals as they navigated a university campus. We profile the everyday interactional patterns within functional systems and across settings, and present close discourse analysis of one interaction to highlight the diverse roles personal aides adopted in mediating communication. Finally, we argue that attending to differently “abled” bodies as they move through everyday communicative environments pushes CHAT to more fully theorize physicality, individual mobilities, and the roles of bodies in the laminated assemblage of functional systems. (shrink)

Suma Teológica. Primeira Parte, Questão 15: Sobre as Ideias.

This translation of Randhir Singh's text of the Prem Sumarag (or Param Sumarag) presents an extended Sanatan account of Sikh ceremonies, Sikh ideals, and the Sikh way of life, thus providing a fresh insight into the history of Khalsa Rahit.

This translation of Randhir Singh's text of the Prem Sumarag presents an extended Sanatan account of Sikh ceremonies, Sikh ideals, and the Sikh way of life, thus providing a fresh insight into the history of Khalsa Rahit.