Extensive studies of DNA secondary structure during the past decade have shown that DNA is a dynamic molecule, whose structure depends on the underlying nucleotide sequence and is influenced by the environment and the overall DNA topology. Three major non‐B‐DNA structures have been described (Z‐DNA, triplex DNA and cruciform DNA) which are stabilized by unconstrained negative supercoiling and can be formed under physiological conditions. In this essay we summarize the DNA primary structure features that are pertinent to the formation (...) of these conformers and present data concerning the occurrence of these sequences in the eukaryotic genome. The evidence in favor of the existence of these unusual DNA structures in vivo is discussed. The effect of alternative non‐B‐DNA structures on the way DNA is organized in chromatin is considered, and this is followed by evaluation of the data relating these structures to eukaryotic transcription. Some possible mechanisms by which the effect of non‐B structures on transcription might be exerted are proposed. (shrink)

To Vallortigara & Rogers's (V&R's) evidence of everyday directional asymmetries in the natural environment of a variety of species, we offer one more example for human beings. It is the bias for holding an infant on the left side, and it illustrates several themes in the target article.

In Holding and Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective, Joyce Slochower brings a contemporary relational framework to bear on Winnicott's notion of the analytic holding environment. She presents a fresh, thought-provoking, and clinically useful integration of Winnicott's seminal insights with contemporary relational and feminist/psychoanalytic contributions. Seeking to broaden the concept of holding beyond work with severely regressed patients, she addresses holding in a variety of clinical contexts and focuses especially on holding processes in relation to issues (...) of dependence, self-involvement, and hate. She also considers clinical work with patients "on the edge" - patients who seem deperately to need a holding experience that remains paradoxically elusive. Slochower begins her study by questioning the therapeutic limitations of an interactive style. There are times, she proposes, when certain patients simply cannot tolerate evidence of the analyst's separate subjective presence and instead need a holding experience. Though this holding function is essential to work with difficult patients, it enters into the treatment of all patients, whether as figure or ground. Slochower's relational understanding of holding leads her to consider the impact of holding on patient and analyst alike. Throughout, she emphasizes the analyst's and the patient's co-construction, during moments of holding, of an essential illusion of analytic attunement; this illusion serves to protect the patient from potentially disruptive aspects of the analyst's subjective presence. Slochower's case vignettes helpfully illuminate the intersubjective aspects of the holding process, including the clinical picture when a holding frame fails. She elaborates her thesis by considering the therapeutic function of holding in mourning. And she concludes her study with a cogent examination of the theoretical and clinical limitations of working with a holding process. A welcome reprise on an essential Winnicottian theme, Holding and Psychoanalysis broadens and deepens our understanding of the therapeutic role of the analyst's holding function. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to investigate human spatiality and perception in general, with the experience of adventure sports as its background. These activities highlight especially our strong relationship with the world when we consider the specific way in which the environment participates in the development of human potential. We first analyse the notions of risk and instability as important elements in adventure sports. Then we explore the notion of experience and spatiality, considering the way in which we (...) establish our relationship with the world. The theoretical background is found in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Bachelard’s phenomenology of imagination to investigate perspectives of space among adventurers. We hold that more than a different range of corporeal techniques, adventure sports can teach us a way of interrogating and looking at the world. They require a peculiar sensibility that allows our body to experience the environment in favour of a corporeal wisdom. Alternative sports indicate the possibility that we have to build up different ways of inhabiting the world and comprehending it. (shrink)

In their highly topical paper, Grahamet alargued that Trusted Research Environments (TREs) are not actually about trust because they reduce or remove ‘…the need for trust in the use and sharing of patient health data’. We believe this is fundamentally mistaken. TREs mitigate or remove some risks, but they do not address all public concerns. In this regard, TREs provide evidence for people to decide whether the bodies holding and using their data can be trusted. TREs may make it (...) easier for people to trust but there is still a need for that trust. (shrink)

New work is used as a general term to summarize professional developments in contemporary work style, structure and modus of organizations and society—this means collaborative work and flexible working hours on individual levels, and flat hierarchies and participatory decision-making on organizational levels. Contemporary corporations strive to orient toward the concept of new work to keep up with stakeholder demands, for instance in their branding strategies as an employer. However, studies on organizational practices indicate that alongside explicit values and agendas, organizations (...) tend to slyly exert power to secure their interests. Constructive dismissal is one such instance where contractually protected employees are made to resign their positions because the work environment is altered to become increasingly unbearable. This research analyzes two case studies to explicate routine dismissal procedures at the managerial level in two internationally operating German corporations. Both corporations explicitly profile as new work environments and are structured according to democratic principles including flat hierarchies, feature institutionalized diversity management including control committees for equal opportunities, and emphasize values such as workplace dignity, employee agency, and equality. The data contain long-term participatory observation collected over a 6-month period from two managers of 5 and 8 years of experience in managerial duties. The content analysis of data reveals characteristics of everyday processes in these organizations especially in terminating managers. The findings are presented as the ‘model of the silent dismissal,’ containing seven types of managerial termination carried out by implicit power and symbolic conventions that circumvent subject participation and litigation in an effortless manner. After exposing the model’s mechanisms, we turn to discuss its meaning for both terminated and surviving subjects against a critical theoretical framework of neoliberalism, democracy, and power. (shrink)

Understanding factors that motivate farmers to perform conservation behaviors is seen as key to enhancing efforts to address agri-environmental challenges. This study uses survey data collected from 277 farmers in the La Moine River watershed in western Illinois to develop new measures of farmers’ environmental attitudes and examine their influence on current usage of agricultural best management practices (BMPs). The results suggest that a Dual Interest Theory approach reflecting two separate, competing psychological frames representing a stewardship view of the (...) class='Hi'>environment and a farm as a business (or profit maximization) view of the environment are present within the decision making domain. Using a cluster analysis technique to examine the interaction between these attitude frames reveals four groups of farmers who hold distinct views of the environment. Further exploration of these distinct belief systems reveals little evidence of differences in participation or willingness to participate in agricultural BMPs; however, we observe significant differences between these groups with regard to their willingness to support rural conservation planning priorities that address agri-environmental challenges. Further discussion focuses on the implications of these interactive dual interest typologies and the implications of these findings on efforts to engage farmers in conservation efforts. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Professor Nancy Hudson’s paper “Divine Immanence: Nicholas of Cusa’s Understanding of Theophany and the Retrieval of a ‘New’ Model of God,” (Nancy Hudson, “Divine Immanence: Nicholas of Cusa’s Understanding of Theophany and the Retrieval of a ‘New’ Model of God,” Journal of Theological Studies 56.2 (October 2005): 450–470). Hudson claims that an ecologically promising vision of nature and an environmentally friendly God lies undiscovered withing the mystical theology of Nicholas of Cusa. However, this paper (...) questions whether Cusa's theology is the best way to develop a Christian understanding of God that is environmentally friendly, pointing to alternatives inside and outside the Christian tradition that may hold more promise. (shrink)

The following study examines the critical interplay between ideology, mediated reality, and the role that individuals’ perceptions, beliefs, and actions play in this process. In doing so, the study delves into the examination of the way power structures and dominant narratives proceed into influencing cultural expression and, consequently, impact social action. It is thus argued that in contemporary society, the Situationist notion of “the spectacle” has replaced any understanding of reality and created a reified social world dominated by commodities that (...) reinforce dominant ideologies and determine subjective perceptions. Furthermore, the paper addresses the impact of this mediated reality on personal subjectivity and agency. Drawing on Marx’s metaphor of the “camera obscura” as ideology, it argues for a transformative “reversal of perspective” that changes how individuals view and engage with their environment. Ultimately, this study underscores the profound impact of “the spectacle” on social relations, ideology, and perception. It argues for a transformative and creative approach that challenges individuals to resist the grasp of the spectacle, reclaim their agency, and develop new perspectives for interacting with the world. The extensions of the gaze subtly refer to the basis of economy manifested as “false consciousness” reflected by the camera obscura as an inverted image but readjusted with the tools of spectacles and mirrors within the reflective apparatus. (shrink)

The use of big data to investigate the spread of infectious diseases or the impact of the built environment on human wellbeing goes beyond the realm of traditional approaches to epidemiology, and includes a large variety of data objects produced by research communities with different methods and goals. This paper addresses the conditions under which researchers link, search and interpret such diverse data by focusing on “data mash-ups”—that is the linking of data from epidemiology, biomedicine, climate and environmental science, (...) which is typically achieved by holding one or more basic parameters, such as geolocation, as invariant. We argue that this strategy works best when epidemiologists interpret localisation procedures through an idiographic perspective that recognises their context-dependence and supports a critical evaluation of the epistemic value of geolocation data whenever they are used for new research purposes. Approaching invariants as strategic constructs can foster data linkage and re-use, and support carefully-targeted predictions in ways that can meaningfully inform public health. At the same time, it explicitly signals the limitations in the scope and applicability of the original datasets incorporated into big data collections, and thus the situated nature of data linkage exercises and their predictive power. (shrink)

In recent years, theorists have debated how we introduce new social objects and kinds into the world. Searle, for instance, proposes that they are introduced by collective acceptance of a constitutive rule; Millikan and Elder that they are the products of reproduction processes; Thomasson that they result from creator intentions and subsequent intentional reproduction; and so on. In this chapter, I argue against the idea that there is a single generic method or set of requirements for doing so. Instead, there (...) is a variety of what I call “anchoring schemas,” or methods by which new social kinds are generated. Not only are social kinds a diverse lot, but the metaphysical explanation for their being the kinds they are is diverse as well. I explain the idea of anchoring and present examples of social kinds that are similar to one another but that are anchored in different ways. I also respond to Millikan’s argument that there is only one kind of “glue” that is “sticky enough” for holding together kinds. I argue that no anchoring schema will work in all environments. It is a contingent matter which schemas are successful for anchoring new social kinds, and an anchoring schema need only be “sticky enough” for practical purposes in a given environment. (shrink)

It is common to posit a clear opposition between the values served by property systems and the value of the environment. To give the environment its due, this view holds, the role of private property needs to be limited. Support for this has been said to be found in Locke’s famous ‘enough and as good’ proviso. This article shows that this opposition is mistaken, and corrects the implied reading of Locke’s proviso. In reality, there is no opposition between (...) property and the environment. This is shown using Locke’s theory of appropriation, as well as the real-life case of instream water appropriation. (shrink)

The use of big data to investigate the spread of infectious diseases or the impact of the built environment on human wellbeing goes beyond the realm of traditional approaches to epidemiology, and includes a large variety of data objects produced by research communities with different methods and goals. This paper addresses the conditions under which researchers link, search and interpret such diverse data by focusing on “data mash-ups”—that is the linking of data from epidemiology, biomedicine, climate and environmental science, (...) which is typically achieved by holding one or more basic parameters, such as geolocation, as invariant. We argue that this strategy works best when epidemiologists interpret localisation procedures through an idiographic perspective that recognises their context-dependence and supports a critical evaluation of the epistemic value of geolocation data whenever they are used for new research purposes. Approaching invariants as strategic constructs can foster data linkage and re-use, and support carefully-targeted predictions in ways that can meaningfully inform public health. At the same time, it explicitly signals the limitations in the scope and applicability of the original datasets incorporated into big data collections, and thus the situated nature of data linkage exercises and their predictive power. (shrink)

Thanks to the advent of social media, large numbers of Americans believe outlandish falsehoods that have been widely debunked. Many of us have a tendency to fault the individuals who hold such beliefs. We naturally assume that the individuals who form and maintain such beliefs do so in virtue of having violated some epistemic obligation: perhaps they failed to scrutinize their sources, or failed to seek out the available competing evidence. I maintain that very many ordinary individuals who acquire outlandish (...) false beliefs thanks to their use of popular social media platforms (and other similar internet technologies) deserve little or no blame for believing these falsehoods. Such individuals would be fully blameworthy only if they had formed or maintained the relevant beliefs partly in virtue of violating some epistemic obligation and had no excuse for violating that obligation. However, the nature of these internet technologies provides excuses for violating the relevant epistemic obligations, and so individuals are excused for holding the resulting false beliefs. (shrink)

The importance of religious cosmology for environmental ethics is explored in a case-study of enchanted and disenchanted world-views in the Sert o of North-east Brazil. Popular Catholicism is shown to have retained an enchanted world-view of humans interacting with saints, souls and animist spirits. In order to differentiate themselves from Catholics, evangelical Protestants pursue a disenchanted view of the natural environment but hold a highly supernatural view of human society. Afro-Brazilian cult members are Catholics who graft an enchanted view (...) of human society on to an enchanted view of nature, producing a hyper-enchanted world-view. The relationship between religious world-view, agricultural modernisation, deforestation and social disparity is evaluated, showing how the process of disenchantment has been highly uneven with the selective elimination of certain enchanted beliefs alongside the persistence of others and their re-adaptation to the contemporary needs of the local population. (shrink)

The importance of religious cosmology for environmental ethics is explored in a case-study of enchanted and disenchanted world-views in the Sertão of North-east Brazil. Popular Catholicism is shown to have retained an enchanted world-view of humans interacting with saints, souls and animist spirits. In order to differentiate themselves from Catholics, evangelical Protestants pursue a disenchanted view of the natural environment but hold a highly supernatural view of human society. Afro-Brazilian cult members are Catholics who graft an enchanted view of (...) human society on to an enchanted view of nature, producing a hyper-enchanted world-view. The relationship between religious world-view, agricultural modernisation, deforestation and social disparity is evaluated, showing how the process of disenchantment has been highly uneven with the selective elimination of certain enchanted beliefs alongside the persistence of others and their re-adaptation to the contemporary needs of the local population. (shrink)

The world is looking toward organizations for social responsibility to contribute to a sustainable environment. Employees’ organizational citizenship behavior for the environment is a voluntary environmental-oriented behavior that is important for organizations’ environmental performance. Based on social learning theory, this study examined the effects of responsible leadership in connection with OCBE by using a sample of 520 employees in the manufacturing and service sectors in China including engine manufacturing, petroleum plants, banking, and insurance sector organizations. Further, the roles (...) of psychological ownership and employee environmental commitment were used as mediators and moderators simultaneously. The direct, mediation, and moderation model results exposed a positive relationship between responsible leadership and OCBE via employee psychological ownership and employee environmental commitment. The study also revealed that the indirect effect is stronger when employees hold a higher employee environmental commitment. The theoretical and practical implications for environmental sustainability in respect of organizations as well as future research directions are discussed. (shrink)

Agency is talked about by many as something that people living with dementia lose, once they've lost much else—autonomy, identity, and privacy, among other things. While the language of loss may capture some of what transpires in dementia, it can obscure how people living with dementia and their loved ones share agency through sharing capacities for memory, language, and decision‐making. We suggest that one consequence of adopting a framework of loss is that it makes the default response to changes in (...) agency the substitution of a family member's agency for the purported lost agency of someone living with dementia. We argue for an alternative framework in which sharing agency is recognized as a central feature of living with dementia. Building on the work of relational theorists, we argue for the value of thinking about agency in dementia as fundamentally shared, and explore potential implications for treatment, caregiver support, and building dementia‐friendly environments. (shrink)

The increasing demographic changes of populations in many countries require an approach for managing the complexity of sociocultural differences. Such an approach could help healthcare organizations to address healthcare disparities and inequities, and promote cultural safety for healthcare providers and patients alike. Almutairi's critical cultural competence (CCC) is a comprehensive approach that holds great promise for managing difficulties arising from sociocultural and linguistic issues during cross‐cultural interactions.CCChas addressed the limitations of many other cultural competence approaches that have been discussed in (...) the literature. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to define the construct ofCCCand the theoretical components of theCCC. (shrink)

The paper presents a biosemiotic approach to the study of the built environment, its representations and practices in social media. First, it outlines the main developments that make semiotics hold a significant position in the study of urban space and the built environment. It then goes on to overcome the limitations of the binary opposition paradigm: in particular, nature/culture is reconsidered as a category in which the two terms are in a relation of mutual participation rather than being (...) exclusive to each other. Following this, the paper explores three participatory categories that can be useful for the study of the built environment and its social media representations and practices: life/semiosis, natural environment/built environment, text/practice. Finally, it identifies five main topics representing the interplay between the natural and built environment: the interaction of nature and architecture, urban parks, urban agriculture, digital environmentalism and ecotourism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & The Environment 25th Anniversary Issue:Introduction from the EditorPiers H.G. StephensAt the time that Vicky Davion conceived of and launched Ethics and the Environment twenty-five years ago, environmental philosophy was still struggling for acceptance and respectability as a philosophical subdiscipline. For most of the period since 1979 just one journal, Environmental Ethics, had been the primary beacon of the field, and a second, the United Kingdom-based (...) Environmental Values, had only started up in 1992. Much of the surrounding professional atmosphere at the time was less than congenial, especially in relation to any attempt to engage in philosophical radicalism via environmental thought, with much institutional pressure pushing towards seeing all the concerns of our nascent field as questions to be shuffled off into a subsection of applied ethics. As someone who was beginning my doctoral studies in Britain around that time, I well recall the pressures and the struggle for respectability that was involved, and such conditions made the bar for success in launching a new journal that much higher. Vicky's actions in beginning the journal thus required not only imagination and creativity, but a significant amount of intellectual courage.This courage manifested itself most obviously in the new ground that Ethics and the Environment set out to break. Environmental Ethics had tended to take much of its inspiration from the American conservation and preservation movements as well as debates over intrinsic value, while Environmental Values took a perspective that bridged these concerns to predominantly British political and economic theory, Ethics and the Environment responded to the institutional challenges facing the new field by broadening the range of voices and critique that environmental [End Page 1] philosophy articulated. From the earliest stages, radical perspectives that were unrepresented or underrepresented in the other journals—especially ecofeminism, deep ecology, indigenous and non-Western thought—were central to the identity and mission of Ethics and the Environment, and gave it a distinctive place and appeal. It was a risky strategy to take in the mid 1990s, yet it proved to be not only the right thing to do, broadening the debate and adding new protagonists, but also a path to produce a highly successful journal over time.Ethics and the Environment is today one of the top journals in environmental philosophy, still growing in its subscriptions and influence, and a living tribute to the quality of Vicky Davion's vision. As editor, I am often astounded at the range, diversity, and quality of the manuscript submissions we receive from a global audience, and though I remain saddened at the circumstances under which I took over the editorship, I am proud and grateful to be in charge of such a publication, and holding fast as best I can to its founding vision as the journal nears its 25th anniversary. Within the field of environmental philosophy Ethics and the Environment is deeply associated with our department and with the University of Georgia, and I hope that it may continue to be so for many a long year yet. [End Page 2]Copyright © 2020 The Trustees of Indiana University... (shrink)

The primary objective of this research is to examine the potential influence of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure on cash holdings. Additionally, the study explores the role of earnings management (EM) practices as a mediating factor in this relationship. The sample comprises 797 companies listed on financial markets across 19 European countries, and the data spans from 2013 to 2019. The outcomes indicate a significant negative correlation between ESG disclosure and cash holdings, implying that ESG performance can be used (...) by management to resolve disputes with stakeholders. The outcomes further indicate that the existence of EM practices partially mediates the link between ESG disclosure and cash holdings. Moreover, they are robust by substitute cash holdings specification, three distinct initiatives of ESG disclosure (i.e., environment, social, and governance), and a two-stage least squares assessment. Therefore, the findings document that nonfinancial reporting in the form of ESG disclosure can assist in controlling agency conflict, leading to better valuations of company performance by stakeholders. (shrink)

One influential approach to environmental problems holds that their solution requires the definition of full liberal property rights over goods that will enable their value to be registered in actual or hypothetical markets. How adequate is that solution? In this paper I offer reasons to be sceptical, by placing recent liberal arguments in the context of older debates about property, in particular those concerned with the distribution of care. Although proposals for the extension of liberal property rights over environmental goods (...) often appeal to arguments from the need to distribute care, I show that there are conflicts between them. Care for particular places that embody the life of a community that has an existence over time is often expressed through resistance to liberal property rights. We express mutual obligations to members of a community through a denial of exclusive property rights over certain common goods. Also, what constitutes care for environmental goods itself is contested across class, occupation, culture, and history. Conflicts between those with different conceptions of care are often expressed through conflicts in property rights. The justification of property rights by appeal to particular accounts of proper care has, from the time of Locke to the present, been invoked to legitimate the appropriation of goods. The introduction and maintenance of liberal property-rights regimes involves the creation and sustenance of a particular distribution of social power, and should be understood as such. (shrink)

The medical and social model of disability is discussed and debated among researchers, scholars, activists, and people in general. It is common to hold a mixed view and believe that some disabled people suffer more from social obstacles and others more from medical problems inherent in their bodies or minds. Rachel Cooper discusses possible ‘test environments’, making explicit an idea which likely plays an implicit part in many disability discussions. We place or imagine placing the disabled person in a range (...) of different environments. If there is a relevant test environment in which they do fine, their problem was societal/external; if there is not, it was medical/internal. Cooper admits that deciding on the appropriate range of test environments is an ethical and political question. In this chapter, I argue that we often ought to widen our scope when discussing psychiatric disabilities. (shrink)

Hilde Lindemann argues that personhood is the shared practice of recognizing and responding to one another. She calls this practice holding. Holding, however, can fail. Holding failure, by stereotyping for example, can inhibit others’ epistemic confidence and ability to recall true beliefs as well as create an environment of racism or sexism. How might we avoid holding failure? Holding failure, I argue, has many epistemic dimensions, so I argue that moral encroachment has the theoretical (...) tools available to avoid holding failures. The goal of this paper, therefore, is to articulate and understand the epistemology of holding in an attempt to remedy holding failure. I show that the virtue of wokeness emerges from an epistemic environment tainted with moral encroachment. I argue that as long as an individual is woke, she will have a tendency to avoid holding failures. Wokeness and moral encroachment, consequently, are fundamental to the epistemology of holding and consistent proper holding. (shrink)

Based on the person-organization fit theory, this research aims to investigate how socially responsible HRM positively affects employees’ organizational citizenship behaviors toward the environment by increasing person-organization fit. This study also captures the moderating effect of the perceived role of ethics and social responsibility in influencing the indirect effect of SRHRM on OCBE via person-organization fit. Data were collected from 302 employees in a state-owned chain hotel in Shanghai, China. The results indicated that SRHRM indirectly influenced employee’s engagement in (...) OCBE through person-organization fit. The positive relationship between SRHRM and person-organization fit and the indirect effect of SRHRM on OCBE via person-organization fit were more significant when employees hold high rather than low levels of RESR. Research implications and prospects were also explored in this study. (shrink)

Living in rural areas has been described as a driver for behaving in a pro-environmental way, mainly due to the more frequent contact with nature that people from rural areas have. However, the processes that link living in a rural area and behaving in a more ecological manner have not been systematically studied. Moreover, most studies have focused on adults living in developed countries. Given the importance that the actions conducted by people in developing countries have for the future of (...) the environment, as well as the relevance of children’s pro-environmentalism for nature conservation, we present a brief research report examining the relationship between Mexican children’s place of residence and self-reported pro-environmental behavior. Participants were 200 children from Mexican rural areas (less than 1.000 inhabitants) and 200 from a Mexican urban city (more than 150.000 inhabitants). Children were between 9 and 12 years old. Children’s connection to nature was considered as a mediator in the relationship between children’s place of residence and pro-environmental behavior. Our findings revealed that rural children hold a stronger sense of connection to nature and behave in a more pro-environmental way than urban children. In addition, the place of residence was directly and positively linked to their pro-environmental behaviors, and this relationship was mediated by children’s connection to nature. The relationship between connection to nature and pro-environmental behavior was stronger for girls than for boys. The model explained 45% of the variance of children’s self-reported pro-environmental behaviors. (shrink)

Embodiment matters to perception and action. Beyond the triviality that, under normal circumstances, we need a body in order to perceive the world and act in it, our particular embodiment, right here, right now, both enables and constrains our perception of possibilities for action. In this chapter, we provide empirical support for the idea that the structural and morphological features of the body can narrow the set of our possible interactions with the environment by shaping the way we perceive (...) the possibilities for action provided. We argue that this narrowing holds true in the perception of what we call strongly embodied affordances, that is, relevant micro-affordances that have a genuinely demanding characteristic, as well as in the perception of actions performed by others. In particular, we show that perceptual contents are shaped by fine-grained morphological features of the body, such as specific hand-shapes, and that they change according to our possibility to act upon them with this body, in this situation, at this moment. We argue that these considerations provide insight into distinguishing a variety of experienced affordance relations that can aid us in better understanding the relevance of embodiment for perception and experience. (shrink)

Modern ethical perspectives toward the environment often emphasize the connection of humans to a broader biotic community. The full intimacy of this connectedness, however, is only now being revealed as scientific findings in developmental biology and genetics provide new insights into the importance of environmental interaction for the development of organisms. These insights are reshaping our understanding of how organism-environment interaction contributes to both consistency and variation in organism development, and leading to a new perspective whereby an “organism” (...) is not solely viewed as the adaptive product of evolutionary selection to an external environment over generations, but as continuously being constructed through systems of interactions that link an organism’s characteristics developmentally to the physical and social influences it experiences during life. This newfound emphasis on “interaction” leads to an interdependency whereby any change to an “environment” impacts the interacting “organism,” and an alteration to the “organism” eventually affects its “environment.” The causal reciprocity embedded within this organism-environment interdependency holds implications for our moral obligations to environments, given their compulsory role in shaping all organisms including ourselves. (shrink)

The environmental crisis—because of its complexity, urgency, unpredictability, and scale—requires a defence of the educational role of philosophy and an account of how to implement philosophical pedagogy in the exploration of environmental issues. This is the aim of this paper. As we face an uncertain future, all educators must consider what knowledge and “know-how” young people need, and what kind of people they need to become, if they are to survive and thrive in this changing world. Philosophical educators cannot assume (...) the ongoing utility of their practice, nor can they expect that their practice should remain the same. In the context of the current crisis, the philosophical exploration of emerging environmental issues raises challenges for those who work in the spirit of Community of Enquiry and these challenges require both discipline and flexibility from practitioners and participants. This paper outlines some of the adaptations that I have used to try and respond flexibly to this predicament. But I also defend an issue on which I believe philosophical educators should hold the line—namely the importance of being non-directive on matters that are philosophically contentious. I defend the view that despite the existential nature of this emergency and its profound urgency, it is not the role of philosophical educators to convince or coerce philosophical learners to adopt particular views on the philosophical questions that this crisis raises. This is because all philosophical enquiry involves creating an environment of freedom and responsibility with respect to what participants believe to be right and true and what they do as a result. Participants in enquiry must be epistemically free to explore and evaluate philosophical questions as they see fit, but they must also be epistemically responsible for the evidence and arguments on which their provisional judgements rest. Equally, participants in enquiry must be ethically free to respond to philosophical problems in ways that express and cultivate their authentic character and commitments, but they remain ethically responsible for their true motivations, their professed values and for the real-life consequences of their words and actions, and their silences and inaction. This paper explores some ways to optimise freedom and responsibility in all forms of philosophical enquiry, drawing specifically on examples of my work with young people on philosophically contentious environmental issues. These examples also highlight some of the adaptations that I have developed to address the challenges that environmental enquiry brings. (shrink)

The Organization Department of the Communist Party of China announced the Opinions on Further Regulation on Party and Political Leaders and Cadres Working Part-Time in Enterprises to force the resignation of government officials holding the position of independent director in listed companies. This paper empirically examines the impact of the GID resignation on firm performance using a difference-in-differences model, which is an exogenous event with a “natural experiment.” The study finds that after the promulgation of the Opinions, firms that (...) lose some of their political resources and their corporate performance decreases significantly compared to firms that do not experience GID resignations. A good external governance environment, while somewhat weakening, is not sufficient to offset the negative impact of the loss of political resources on firm performance. This paper further explores the mechanism by which the GID resignation affects firm performance: one important way in which the resignation of GIDs cause the loss of political resources on which the firm's development depends is that the loss of the firm's tax benefits after GID resignation directly leads to a decline in performance; it also leads to a reduction in the firm's financial subsidy income and a reduction in the amount of bank loans, but both of these do not have a significant effect on the decline in firm performance. The study suggests that GIDs play more of a resource-providing “official” role than an “independent director's” supervisory and advisory role in Chinese listed companies. The findings of this paper reveal the phenomenon of “Political-Business Spin” in China, which has some implications for developing countries, represented by China, to improve the independence of the board of directors and the corporate governance. (shrink)

With A Theory of General Ethics Warwick Fox both defines the field of General Ethics and offers the first example of a truly general ethics. Specifically, he develops a single, integrated approach to ethics that encompasses the realms of interhuman ethics, the ethics of the natural environment, and the ethics of the built environment. Thus Fox offers what is in effect the first example of an ethical "Theory of Everything."Fox refers to his own approach to General Ethics as (...) the "theory of responsive cohesion." He argues that the best examples in any domain of interest--from psychology to politics, from conversations to theories--exemplify the quality of responsive cohesion, that is, they hold together by virtue of the mutual responsiveness of the elements that constitute them. Fox argues that the relational quality of responsive cohesion represents the most fundamental value there is. He then develops the theory of responsive cohesion, central features of which include the elaboration of a "theory of contexts" as well as a differentiated model of our obligations in respect of all beings. In doing this, he draws on cutting-edge work in cognitive science in order to develop a powerful distinction between beings who use language and beings that do not.Fox tests his theory against eighteen central problems in General Ethics--including challenges raised by abortion, euthanasia, personal obligations, politics, animal welfare, invasive species, ecological management, architecture, and planning--and shows that it offers sensible and defensible answers to the widest possible range of ethical problems. (shrink)

The traditional, and still standard, view of psychological phenomena in some empirical sciences holds that they take place inside the organism’s body and can be individuated independently of external factors. The organism’s behaviors are, according to this view, mere effects, rather then constituents, of psychological phenomena. And the fact that, for example, an organism is desiring something instead of something else is taken to be a matter entirely of what is inside the organism. The current versions of the view are (...) usually couched in materialistic terms, identifying psychological phenomena with brain phenomena. However, as Noë, in this book, and some other authors point out, such approaches are still Cartesian in spirit. Despite doing away with the nonphysical dimension of Descartes’ doctrine, they too believe our psychological phenomena are inner causes of behavior and can be, in pri .. (shrink)

RFID tags, small microchips no bigger than grains of rice, are currently being embedded in product labels, clothing, credit cards, and the environment, among other sites. Activated by the appropriate receiver, they transmit information ranging from product information such as manufacturing date, delivery route, and location where the item was purchased to (in the case of credit cards) the name, address, and credit history of the person holding the card. Active RFIDs have the capacity to transmit data without (...) having to be activated by a receiver; they can be linked with embedded sensors to allow continuous monitoring of environmental conditions, applications that interest both environmental groups and the US military. The amount of information accessible through and generated by RFIDs is so huge that it may well overwhelm all existing data sources and become, from the viewpoint of human time limitations, essentially infinite. What to make of these technologies will be interrogated through two contemporary fictions, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Philip K. Dick's Ubik. Cloud Atlas focuses on epistemological questions — who knows what about whom, in a futuristic society where all citizens wear embedded RFID tags and are subject to constant surveillance. Resistance takes the form not so much of evasion (tactical moves in a complex political Situation) but rather as a struggle to transmit information to present and future stakeholders in a world on the brink of catastrophe. Ubik, by contrast, focuses on deeper ontological questions about the nature of reality itself. Both texts point to the necessity to reconceptualize information as ethical action embedded in contexts and not merely as a quantitative measure of probabilities. (shrink)

I review and appraise Eugene C. Hargrove’s account of the adverse impacts of Western philosophy on attitudes to the environment. Although significant qualifications have to be entered, for there are grounds to hold that philosophical traditions which have encouraged taking nature seriously are not always given their due by Hargrove, and that environmental thought can draw upon deeper roots than he allows, his verdict that the history of philosophy has discouraged preservationist attitudes is substantially correct. Environmental philosophy thus has (...) a significant role to play in the reconstruction of many of the traditional branches of philosophy, as weIl as in the protection of the natural world. (shrink)

The article focuses on the text of Genesis 1:27-28 within its broader context where the author, the Jahwist, describes humankind as charged with the responsibility to fill and to subdue the earth, which has generally been misunderstood by wealth prospectors. Our methodology is a simplified historical and exegetical study of the two verses of the creation narrative in order to join other contemporary theologians to argue the right of humans to treat the nonhuman as private property as source of material (...) wealth is immoral. As we re-read the text, our findings resonate with the contemporary clarion call for respect and protection of the environment such as COP 2015 in Paris. This provides the justification of our title 'Preaching the green gospel', especially in the Nigerian oil-rich states and in Africa in general. Whilst the paper presents a disquisition of the global efforts of the church through sensitisation of their members to appreciate the magnitude of the environmental pollution and the apocalypse it holds for the world, it draws attention to the possibility of the envisaged doomsday that may descend on Nigeria and other parts of Africa if the crass environmental degradation and the rate of pollution of flora and fauna are not checked. The paper takes cognisance of the positive views expressed by the evangelists of the 'New Theology' in Africa. Whilst the paper raises Biblically friendly ecological awareness in modern Africa, using Nigeria as a contact point, it concludes, inter alia, that the text demands humankind to partake in God's will for order and peace in the universe as it struggles to maintain the ecological sustainability of mother earth. (shrink)

The small- and medium-sized tourism and hospitality enterprises are the main forms of enterprises in Macao. This study put forward a new framework of survival and sustainable development from the perspective of competitive advantage and regional soft environment, which significantly holds theoretical and practical research value. The study obtained cross-sectional data of 317 small- and medium-sized tourism and hospitality enterprises in Macao through a large-scale questionnaire survey. This article used exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis to test the (...) reliability and validity of each factor system and its measurement scale. The variance analysis is used to judge the differences between the elements. The regression analysis is used to verify the hypothesis of a causal relationship between factors. The structural equation analysis is used to fit the model and make necessary amendments. The results reveal that the government service environment has a significant positive impact on the ability of an entrepreneur. In addition, the regional soft environment significantly impacts the competitive advantage of small- and medium-sized tourism and hospitality enterprises in Macao. Contrary, the impact of laws of Macao on the acquisition of financial resources and the promotion of entrepreneur ability and innovation ability is found insignificant. In conclusion, the results showed that market of Macao lacks venture investors where enterprises cannot obtain funds through angel financing or risk financing. (shrink)

The survival and success of organizations increasingly depend on creativity. A Supervisor Creative Feedback Environment is of special value in enhancing team creativity, but few studies have explored the relationship between the supervisor creative feedback environment and creativity and how it affects creativity. Based on feedback intervention theory and triadic reciprocal determinism, this paper explores the process mechanism and boundary conditions of the supervisor creative feedback environment affecting team creativity from the perspectives of ambidextrous learning and team (...) creative cognitive style. With 506 team members from 115 work teams in domestic enterprises as research samples, regression analysis was used to test the theoretical hypotheses. Feedback intervention, according to the feedback intervention theory, is a complicated process. There are various influencing factors, such as the feedback provider, means of feedback intervention, the content of the feedback information, situational factors, and the feedback recipients. The leading creative feedback loop includes important feedback receiver's factors which are not mentioned above. Triadic reciprocal determinism holds that individual behavior is formed by the interaction and interconnection of individual, environment, and behavior. The two above-mentioned theories can explain why the leadership creative feedback environment can affect team creativity by influencing ambidextrous learning. The results also show that the feedback environment of supervisor creativity has positive effects on team creativity. Ambidextrous learning mediates the relation between supervisor creative feedback environments and team creativity. Team creative cognitive style has a positive moderating effect on the indirect relationship between a supervisor creative feedback environment and team creativity through ambidextrous learning. This study validates feedback intervention theory and triadic reciprocal determinism, expands the application of feedback environment factors in the research field of team creativity, provides a theoretical framework for the influence of the creative feedback environment on team creativity, and also provides theoretical support for managers to apply the management tool of a supervisor creative feedback environment to organizational context to improve team creativity. Based on the research results, this paper puts forward corresponding management suggestions from the aspect of creating a supervisor creative feedback environment, attaching importance to team ambidextrous learning, and making good use of creative cognitive style. (shrink)

The present study examined the factors influencing job satisfactionin the context of factory workers in Malaysia. The major purpose of thestudy was to identify the main problems faced by those factory workers. Thestudy also aimed to examine the influence of demographic variables on jobsatisfaction and the relationships of family income, individual well-being, andperceptions of the working environment with overall job satisfaction amongthose factory workers. A survey was distributed among 551 factory workers working in the Klang Valley area. Results from (...) the survey indicated that thetwo main problems faced by the factory workers are, fear of the influx offoreign workers that may threaten their jobs, and the relatively low pay, takinginto account the high cost of living in the Klang Valley. Findings also indicatedthat while gender and race did not significantly influence perceptions of theworking environment and job satisfaction, job positions did. Those working assecurity and logistics staff were significantly more satisfied with their workingenvironment than those holding administrative or technical/production posts.Job satisfaction also varied significantly across job positions; those working insecurity and logistic positions were significantly more satisfied with their jobscompared to the other employees. Finally, using hierarchical linear regression, with familyincome as the control variable, the findings suggested that both individualwell-being and perceptions of the working environment emerged as positive.Both of these are significant predictors of perceived job satisfaction amongfactory workers. The implication of these findings will be discussed within theframework of organizational satisfaction and individual well-being. (shrink)

In concert with the selective pressures affecting protein folding and function in the extreme environments in which they can exist, proteins in Archaea have evolved to present permanent molecular adaptations at the amino acid sequence level. Such adaptations may not, however, suffice when Archaea encounter transient changes in their surroundings. Post‐translational modifications offer a rapid and reversible layer of adaptation for proteins to cope with such situations. Here, it is proposed that Archaea further augment their ability to survive changing growth (...) conditions by modifying the extent, position, and, where relevant, the composition of different post‐translational modifications, as a function of the environment. Support for this hypothesis comes from recent reports describing how patterns of protein glycosylation, methylation, and other post‐translational modifications of archaeal proteins are altered in response to environmental change. Indeed, adjusting post‐translational modifications as a means to cope with environmental variability may also hold true beyond the Archaea. (shrink)

Unethical behaviour, such as corruption and fraud, is a massive problem in today's business world. Research in the fields of business ethics and moral psychology has presented compelling evidence of a series of behavioural concepts that might influence an individual's propensity to engage in unethical conduct. Yet, it is still unknown how these concepts apply to more ecologically valid contexts such as real-world scandals on unethical behaviour. Motivated by this, we use empirical qualitative evidence from one of Denmark's largest corruption (...) scandals to explore how well renowned concepts within business ethics and moral psychology hold up in the real world, when looking into both what causes unethical behaviour and how it could be minimised. We find evidence that catalysts of immoral conduct in the case company are well supported by some of the most well researched concepts in the research area, and our research indicates a possible real-world interaction between concepts. (shrink)

Business and love appear to have little to do with each other. We hold the opposite to be true if the concept of love in business draws from two corresponding grammars. This paper contributes to the ‘agenda for growth and affirmation of people and the environment’ in business. By focusing on the grammars of love and business we operationalize the concept of love in ways that business executives, managers and employees can understand, adopt, and implement. With references to the (...) theory and practice of management and organizations, we aim to contribute to expanding the theory and practice of responsible organizations and their leaders caring for others. (shrink)

This paper identifies a new source that explains environmental behaviour: the presence of future tense marking in language. We predict that languages that grammatically mark the future affect speakers' intertemporal preferences and thereby reduce their willingness to address environmental problems. We first show that speakers of languages with future tense marking are less likely to adopt environmentally responsible behaviours and to support policies to prevent environmental damage. We then document that this effect holds across countries: future tense marking is an (...) important determinant of climate change policies and global environmental cooperation. The results suggest that there may be deep and surprising obstacles for attempts to address climate change. (shrink)

Some persons who believe provably false claims – such as that there were significant voter irregularities in the 2020 election – may nevertheless be evidentially rational for holding their false beliefs. I consider a person I call our average believer. In her daily life, she incidentally gathers evidence favoring the hypothesis that there were significant voter irregularities, but she does not investigate the matter. Her information environment, moreover, is such that it accidentally (through no fault of her own) (...) excludes counterevidence to the thesis that there were such irregularities and intensifies the flow of information that there were irregularities. As a consequence, she becomes convinced that there were significant voting irregularities in the 2020 U.S. election. I argue that while she is not zetetically rational, for she does not investigate the matter, she is evidentially rational in that she apportions her belief to the evidence. While she has no right to the Cliffordian, or assertoric, belief that there were such irregularities, she is not epistemically blameworthy for having the wagered belief it is true. (shrink)

Risks, including health and technological, attract a lot of attention in modern societies, from individuals as well as policy-makers. Human beings have always had to deal with dangers, but contemporary societies conceptualise these dangers as risks, indicating that they are to some extent controllable and calculable. Conceiving of dangers in this way implies a need to analyse how we hold people responsible for risks and how we can and should take responsibility for risks. Moral Responsibility and Risk in Societycombines philosophical (...) discussion of different concepts and notions of responsibility with context-specific applications in the areas of health, technology and environment. The book consists of two parts addressing two crucial aspects of risks and responsibility: holding agents responsible, i.e. ascribing and distributing responsibility for risks and taking responsibility for risk. More specifically, the book discusses the values of fairness and efficacy in responsibility distributions and makes distinctions between backward-looking and forward-looking responsibility as well as individual and collective responsibility. Additionally, it analyses what it means to take responsibility for technological risks, conceptualizing this kind of responsibility as a virtue, and furthermore, explores the notion of responsible risk communication and the implications for adult-child relationships. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental ethics, bioethics, public health ethics, engineering ethics, philosophy of risk and moral philosophy. (shrink)

Arguments implicating nature and science can arise in the most unlikely places. At the supermarket smoked salmon awaits shoppers: chinook salmon from British Columbia, and Atlantic salmon from B.C., New Brunswick, or Norway. They are priced the same, and look similar, but embedded in their diverse provenance is a controversy thirty years in the making. The “wild” chinook salmon were caught in the open ocean; the “farmed” Atlantic salmon were raised in pens in coastal inlets. The distinction has spawned an (...) intense debate over salmon farming —nowhere more so than in British Columbia. In some ways this coastal controversy is unique, epitomizing the symbolic significance of all things marine to British Columbians. But it shares a crucial feature with other controversies, such as those involving genetically modified organisms, nanotechnology, or climate change. Since the debate began, science has played an essential role as a source of information and authority. Scientific knowledge and practice can be said to have contributed to creating the controversy, have added to its intractability, and, perhaps hold some keys to its resolution. (shrink)

I review and appraise Eugene C. Hargrove’s account of the adverse impacts of Western philosophy on attitudes to the environment. Although significant qualifications have to be entered, for there are grounds to hold that philosophical traditions which have encouraged taking nature seriously are not always given their due by Hargrove, and that environmental thought can draw upon deeper roots than he allows, his verdict that the history of philosophy has discouraged preservationist attitudes is substantially correct. Environmental philosophy thus has (...) a significant (if not quite an unrivalled) role to play in the reconstruction of many of the traditional branches of philosophy, as weIl as in the protection of the natural world. (shrink)

This paper investigates the relationship between two outcomes of relationship marketing – affective commitment and behavioral loyalty – and consumers' unethical behavior. The main objective of the study is to assess whether affective commitment and behavioral loyalty to a store translate into more ethical behavior towards that store, controlling for the variables of age, gender, and ethical beliefs. The study does not rely on a single measurement tool, but is based on ten months' panel data and three different mail surveys (...) targeted at 359 Belgian households. The results provide support for our hypothesis that affective commitment is indeed negatively correlated with consumers' unethical behavior. The same conclusion could not be drawn for the relationship between behavioral loyalty and consumers' unethical behavior. No significant relationship was detected, not even in situations where affective commitment was high. The results hold major implications for retailing practice. (shrink)