This comparative field study evaluated the moral reasoning used by U.S. and Belizean business students in resolving business-related moral dilemmas. The Belizeans, citizens of a less-developed country with Western heritage and a values-based education system, revolved the dilemmas using higher stages of moral judgment than did the U.S. business students.

Unravels the many different definitions of ideology, explores the history of the concept from the Enlightenment to postmodernism, and interprets the works of ...

This study is divided into three parts: the classical tradition; Althusser and after; and modern debates. It includes chapters on class consciousness, ideology and utopia, and the epistemology of sociology, looking at the work of Georg Lukas, Karl Mannheim and Lucien Goldman respectively.

He sets out not just to expose the illusions of postmodernism but to show the students he has in mind that they never believed what they thought they believed ...

Offers a through examination of the philosophy of literature, looking at the place of literature in human culture, what literature can be defined as and much more.

Thomas More’s Utopia, a book that will be 500 years old next year, is astonishingly radical stuff. Not many lord chancellors of England have denounced private property, advocated a form of communism and described the current social order as a “conspiracy of the rich.” Such men, the book announces, are “greedy, unscrupulous and useless.” There are a great number of noblemen, More complains, who live like drones on the labour of others. Tenants are evicted so that “one insatiable glutton and (...) accursed plague of his native land” may consolidate his fields. Monarchs, he argues, would do well to swear at their inauguration never to have more than 1,000lbs of gold in their coffers. Perhaps this is one reason why Utopia is... (shrink)

Philosophy is one of the most intimidating and difficult of disciplines, as any of its students can attest. This book is an important entry in a distinctive new series from Routledge: The Great Philosophers . Breaking down obstacles to understanding the ideas of history's greatest thinkers, these brief, accessible, and affordable volumes offer essential introductions to the great philosophers of the Western tradition from Plato to Wittgenstein. In just 64 pages, each author, a specialist on his subject, places the philosopher (...) and his ideas into historical perspective. Each volume explains, in simple terms, the basic concepts, enriching the narrative through the effective use of biographical detail. And instead of attempting to explain the philosopher's entire intellectual history, which can be daunting, this series takes one central theme in each philosopher's work, using it to unfold the philosopher's thoughts. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Vocational‐Academic Distinctions Criticisms of the Vocational Education/General Education Dichotomy The Front‐end Model and its Increasing Problems Vocational Education and Training: Developments and Strategies Conclusion: Enhancing Vocational Studies.

When The Age renamed the corner of Russell and Bourke streets the ‘Golden Elbow’ it brought the city into close proximity with an altogether different city. Neither Chang Mai, Hong Kong nor Melbourne, the Golden Elbow was defined by what it could be. Neither one thing nor another, the Golden Elbow is a space of the city-becoming-other. Through narrative work and news media maps of no-go zones, machines mobilise fear and thus value, from the desire flowing through this abject zone. (...) Capitalism sucks value from these encounters through the production of fear as affect. The city-becoming-other is both enormously productive, and destructive of bodies caught up in the mix. This article explores the flow of desire and the abject of a city becoming other through a street drug marketplace. The encounter with the abject brings use closer to the beauty and fear of ontological mixity. (shrink)

In Sociology of Culture and of Cultural Practices, Laurent Fleury presents a synthesis of research and debate from France and the United States. He traces the development of the sociology of culture from its origins and examines the major trends that have emerged in this branch of sociology. Fleury also raises issues of cultural hierarchy, distinction, and legitimate culture and mass culture and focuses on new areas of research, including the role of institutions, the reception of works of art, aesthetic (...) experience, and emancipation through art. (shrink)

Talks about a man who had it all - looks, wealth, culture, fame, travel, career - and gave it all up to find for himself the answer to his question, Is there actually anything like freedom, enlightenment or liberation behind all the abstractions the religions have thrown at us? This book aims to introduce you to the unknown truth of life.

A resurgence of interest in the materialist aesthetics of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht has helped to free Marxist criticism from the neo-Hegelian forms within which it has long been imprisoned. Yet the central category of those materialist aesthetics—the ‘author as producer’—remains a transitional concept, potently demystificatory but politically indeterminate. And crucial though the analysis of the relations between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ within art itself clearly is, its historical explanatory power is not yet fully evident. The moment of Brecht, for (...) example, is not easily translatable to English literary culture. Donne's Songs and Sonnets and George Herbert's The Temple belong to different modes of literary production, but inhabit alternative areas of the same ideological formation; Defoe and Fielding practise the same mode of literary production, but it is their ideological antagonism which claims our attention. Henry Esmond was the only novel of Thackerary to be published complete, rather than in monthly serialized parts; but though this difference of productive mode undoubtedly impresses itself on the novel's form, it leaves the ‘Thackerayan ideology’ essentially intact. No one expects modes of literary production and literary ‘superstructures’ to form a symmetrical relationship, dancing a harmonious minuet hand-in-hand throughout history; yet even if we allow for disjunction and uneven development, it seems true that the ‘author as producer’ concept is one which must, as it were, lie dormant over certain spans of literary history. The aesthetic redefinition of fiction as ‘organic form’ which develops in late nineteenth-century England, to discover its major ideologue in Henry James, is doubtless related to those shifts in literary production (from serialization and the ‘three-decker’ novel to the single volume) determined by the economic demands of the monopolist private lending libraries; yet it is not clear how such material mutations become an active element in the reconstruction of fictional ideologies. (shrink)

Political Beckett? In September 1941, one of the twentieth century’s most apparently non-political artists secretly took up arms against fascism. Samuel Beckett, who with exquisite timing for a notorious pessimist was born on Good Friday 1906, had been living in Paris since 1937, self-exiled from his native country in the manner of many an eminent Irish writer. The Irish, unlike their erstwhile colonial proprietors, have always been a cosmopolitan nation, from the nomadic monks of the Middle Ages to the corporate (...) executives of the Celtic Tiger. If the oppressiveness of colonial rule turned some of them into nationalists, it turned others into citizens of the world. Joyce, Synge, Beckett and Thomas MacGreevy, men already caught between two or three cultures and languages, were to flourish in the rootless, polyglot, ambience of high-modernist Europe, rather as half a century later their compatriots were to embrace the European Union. It helped, in signing up to a linguistically self-conscious modernism, to stem from a nation in which language, as a political minefield, could never be taken for granted. (shrink)