Abstract:Calvin Warren talks about Heidegger's influence on Afropessimism, and about the philosophical significance of the Harlem Renaissance.

Pancreatitis is a complex, progressively destructive inflammatory disorder. Alcohol was long thought to be the primary causative agent, but genetic contributions have been of interest since the discovery that rare PRSS1, CFTR and SPINK1 variants were associated with pancreatitis risk. We now report two associations at genome-wide significance identified and replicated at PRSS1-PRSS2 and X-linked CLDN2 through a two-stage genome-wide study. The PRSS1 variant likely affects disease susceptibility by altering expression of the primary trypsinogen gene. The CLDN2 risk allele is (...) associated with atypical localization of claudin-2 in pancreatic acinar cells. The homozygous CLDN2 genotype confers the greatest risk, and its alleles interact with alcohol consumption to amplify risk. These results could partially explain the high frequency of alcohol-related pancreatitis in men. © 2012 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Many developing and transitional countries have grown faster than advanced countries in the past decade, resulting in a shift in the distribution of world income in their favor. China is now the second largest economy in the world, behind the United States and ahead of Japan. As the relative economic weight of China and several others has come to match or exceed that of the middle-ranking G7 economies, the world economy has shifted from “unipolar” toward “multipolar,” less dominated by the (...) G7. How is this change being translated into changes in authority and influence within multilateral organizations like the G20, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund? Alarm bells are ringing in G7 capitals about G7 loss of influence. According to a WikiLeaks cable from the senior U.S. official for the G20 process, from January 2010, “It is remarkable how closely coordinated the BASIC group of countries [Brazil, South Africa, India, China] have become in international fora, taking turns to impede US/eu initiatives and playing the US and EU off against each other.” This essay suggests that the shift in power is much smaller than the headlines or private alarm bells suggest. The United States remains the dominant state, and the G7 states together continue to exercise primacy, but now more fearfully and defensively. China is split between asserting itself as “the wave of the future” and defending itself as too poor to take on global responsibilities. The combination of G7 defensiveness and emerging states’ jealous guarding of sovereignty produces a spirit of Westphalian assertion in international fora, or “every state for itself.” On the assumption that the world economy is in a transitional period, the article suggests reforms in the G20 and the World Bank that would boost their role and legitimacy as multilateral organizations in a more multipolar world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Robert C. Solomon IN DEFENSE OF SENTIMENTALITY "A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it." —Oscar Wilde, De Profundis. 66TA That's Wrong with Sentimentality?"1 That tide of Mark JefV V ferson's 1983 Mindessay already indicates a great deal notonly about the gist of his article but about a century-old prejudice that has been devastating to ethics and literature (...) alike. According to that prejudice, it goes without saying that there is something wrong with it, even if it is difficult to put one's finger on it. To be called "sentimental" is to be ridiculed, or dismissed. Sentimentality is a weakness, it suggests hypocrisy. Or, perhaps it is the fact that sentimental people are so... so embarrassing. (How awkward it is talking or sitting next to someone weeping or gushing, when one is dry-eyed and somber.) Or, perhaps it is the well-confirmed fact that sentimentalists have such poor taste, and sentimental literature is, above all, literature that is cheap, superficial, and manipulative—in other words, verbal kitsch. Such mawkish literature jerks tears from otherwise sensible readers, and sentimentalists are those who actually enjoy that humiliating experience. Perhaps that is why Oscar Wilde thought that sentimentalists were really cynics ("Sentimentality is merely the bank holiday of cynicism").2 Or, perhaps what bothers us is what bothered Michael Tanner, that sentimental people indulge themselves in their feelings instead of doing what should be done.3 It is often said that the problem is that sentimentality and sentimental literature alike give us a false view of the world, distort our thinking and substitute a "saccharine" portrait of the world in place ofwhat we all know to be the horrible realities. Moreover, as Jefferson more than merely suggests, the "simple-minded sympathies " ofsentimentality might actually promote fascism and racism. Mary Midgley similarly suggests that sentimentality leads to brutality.4 But Philosophy and Literature, © 1990, 14: 304-323 Robert C. Solomon305 even where sentimentality is a harmless diversion—a Daphne du Maurier novel on a sad Saturday afternoon—it seems to be all but agreed that sentimentality is no virtue even ifit is not, like cruelty and hypocrisy, intrinsically vicious. Something is wrong with sentimentality; the only question is, what is it that is wrong? In this essay, I will argue that there is nothing wrong with sentimentality. Of course, like any quasi-ethical category, it admits of unwarranted excesses and hypocritical abuses, and is prone to various pathological distortions. But the prejudice against sentimentality, I want to argue, is ill-founded and in fact is an extension ofthat all-too-familiar contempt for the passions in Western literature and philosophy. Our disdain for sentimentality is the rationalist's discomfort with any display of emotion, warranted as well as unwarranted, appropriate as well as inappropriate. It is as ifthe very word, "sentimentality," has been loaded with the connotations of "too much"—too much feeling and too litde common sense and rationality, as if these were opposed instead of mutually supportive. It is as if sentimentality and its sentiments are never warranted and always inappropriate. The word has come to be used as the name of a deficiency or a weakness if not, as some critics have written, a malaise. But I take sentimentality to be nothing more nor less than the "appeal to tender feelings," and though one can manipulate and abuse such feelings (including one's own), and though they can on occasion be misdirected or excessive, there is nothing wrong with them as such and hence nothing (in that respect) wrong with literature that provokes us, that "moves" us, to abstract affection or weeping. Sentimentality implies no deficiency in one's rational faculties and does not imply any inappropriateness, unwillingness, or lack of readiness to act. Sentimentality does not involve any distortion of the world and it does not impede but rather prepares and motivates us to react in "the real world." It is not an escape from reality or responsibility, but, quite to the contrary, provides the precondition for ethical engagement rather than an obstacle to it. Historically, I want to trace the fate of sentimentality to... (shrink)

The second edition of Doing Ethics in Media continues its mission of providing an accessible but comprehensive introduction to media ethics, with a theoretical grounding in moral philosophy, to help students think clearly and systematically about dilemmas in the rapidly changing media environment. Each chapter highlights specific considerations, cases, and practical applications for the fields of journalism, advertising, digital media, entertainment, public relations, and social media. Six fundamental decision-making questions - the "5Ws and H" around which the book is organized (...) - provide a path for students to articulate the issues; understand applicable law and ethics codes; consider the needs of stakeholders; work through conflicting values; integrate philosophic principles; and pose a "test of publicity." Students are challenged to be active ethical thinkers through the authors' reader-friendly style and use of critical early-career examples. While most people will change careers several times during their lives, all of us are life-long media consumers, and Doing Ethics in Media prepares readers for that task. Doing Ethics in Media is aimed at undergraduate and graduate students studying media ethics in mass media, journalism, and media studies. It also serves students in rhetoric, popular culture, communication studies, and interdisciplinary social sciences. The book's companion website-doingethicsin.media, or www.doingmediaethics.com-provides continuously updated real-world media ethics examples and collections of essays from experts and students. The site also hosts ancillary materials for students and for instructors, including a test bank and instructor's manual. (shrink)

Abstract:This essay aims to bring two important lines of inquiry and criticism together. It first lays out an institutionally enriched account of what a just world economic order will look like. That account prescribes, via the requisites to that mechanism which most directly instantiates the account, “three realms of equal treatment and market completion”—the global products, services, and labor markets; the global investment/financial markets; and the global preparticipation opportunity allocation. The essay then suggests how, with minimal if any departure from (...) familiar canons of traditional international legal mandate interpretation, each of the Bretton Woods institutions—particularly the GATT/WTO and the IMF—can be viewed at least in part as charged with the task of fostering equal treatment and ultimate market completion within one of those three realms. The piece then argues that one of the institutions in particular—the World Bank—has, for reasons of at best negligent and at worst willful injustice on the part of influential state actors in the world community, fallen farthest short in pursuit of what should be viewed as its proper mandate. The article accordingly concludes that a fuller empowerment of the Bank to effect its ideal mission will press the Bretton Woods system more nearly into ethical balance, and with it the world into justice; and that full empowerment of the GATT/WTO and IMF should be partly conditioned upon the fuller empowerment of the Bank. (shrink)

Management and non-management employees of a northeastern bank read a description of a manager who engaged in a breach of confidentiality. Subjects were asked to evaluate the acceptability of 27 excuses. Results showed that subjects' ratings of acceptability were affected by their individual perception of the severity of the stimulus manager's breach of confidentiality. Subjects' rank did not affect acceptability of accounts.

PurposeBanks spend thousands of dollars on several CSR activities and communicating the same to defined stakeholders becomes a strategic task that must be artfully managed by the banks. Bank web sites now represent a useful communication platform in the reportage of CSR activities. This paper aims to report on CSR reportage amongst four leading banks in Ghana. Two of them have won CSR industry awards while the others have not.Design/methodology/approachA case study approach was adopted using Hinson et al.'s (...) online CSR framework to analyze CSR reportage in the four banks. Two of them had previously won CSR awards at a Ghana Banking Awards ceremony in the last five years, and two had not. The data drawn from the banks were analyzed within and across the four cases.FindingsAgricultural development bank, the bank with the most socially responsible bank of the year awards, has the weakest online CSR reportage in the study with just one CSR report online.Originality/valueCSR communication is a rapidly evolving field of scholarship and this study adds to the extant literature from a developing economy banking perspective. (shrink)

The emergence of abstract art, first in the early part of the century with Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian, and then in the much more celebrated case of America in the fifties (Rothko, Pollock, and others) remains puzzling. Such a great shift in aesthetic standards and taste is not only unprecedented in its radicality. The fact that nonfigurative art, without identifiable content in any traditional sense, was produced, appreciated, and, finally, eagerly bought and, even, finally, triumphantly hung in the lobbies of (...) banks and insurance companies, provokes understandable questions about both social and cultural history, as well as about the history of art. The endlessly disputed category of modernism itself and its eventual fate seems at issue. (shrink)

Ambiguous terms are applicable to different kinds of things, but so are general terms, since a general kind may include various species. Thus a bank may be the side of a river or a certain kind of financial institution, and an animal may be a dog or a cat. Similarly, an ambiguous sentence is true in different kinds of situations, and so is a general sentence in that different specific situations may make the same general sentence true. Thus the sentence, (...) The bank collapsed yesterday,’ can be true of different varieties of banks, and the sentence, The animal is untrained,’ can be true of different varieties of animals. These similarities of ambiguity and generality have led many linguists and philosophers to confuse the two. Basic to this confusion is a failure to notice a difference in the scopes of disjunctions involved in ambiguity and generality. (shrink)

Ambiguous terms are applicable to different kinds of things, but so are general terms, since a general kind may include various species. Thus a bank may be the side of a river or a certain kind of financial institution, and an animal may be a dog or a cat. Similarly, an ambiguous sentence is true in different kinds of situations, and so is a general sentence in that different specific situations may make the same general sentence true. Thus the sentence, (...) The bank collapsed yesterday,’ can be true of different varieties of banks, and the sentence, The animal is untrained,’ can be true of different varieties of animals. These similarities of ambiguity and generality have led many linguists and philosophers to confuse the two. Basic to this confusion is a failure to notice a difference in the scopes of disjunctions involved in ambiguity and generality. (shrink)

Since publication of Hetzel's The Monetary Policy of the Federal Reserve, the intellectual consensus that had characterized macroeconomics has disappeared. That consensus emphasized efficient markets, rational expectations and the efficacy of the price system in assuring macroeconomic stability. The 2008–9 recession not only destroyed the professional consensus about the kinds of models required to understand cyclical fluctuations but also revived the credit-cycle or asset-bubble explanations of recession that dominated thinking in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth (...) century. These 'market-disorder' views emphasize excessive risk taking in financial markets and the need for government regulation. The present book argues for the alternative 'monetary-disorder' view of recessions. A review of cyclical instability over the last two centuries places the 2008–9 recession in the monetary-disorder tradition, which focuses on the monetary instability created by central banks rather than on a boom-bust cycle in financial markets. (shrink)

There is a distinct lack of research into the relationship between corporate governance and corporate social responsibility (CSR) in the banking sector. This paper fills the gap in the literature by examining the impact of corporate governance, with particular reference to the role of board of directors, on the quality of CSR disclosure in US listed banks’ annual reports after the US sub-prime mortgage crisis. Using a sample of large US commercial banks for the period 2009–2011 and controlling (...) for audit committee characteristics, board meeting frequency, and banks’ profitability, size and risk, we find evidence that board independence and board size, the two board characteristics usually associated with the protection of shareholder interests, are positively related to CSR disclosure. This indicates that, with regard to CSR disclosure, more independent boards of directors and larger boards are the internal corporate governance mechanisms which promote both shareholders’ and other stakeholders’ interests. Contrary to our expectations, CEO duality also impacts positively on CSR disclosure. From an agency-theoretical viewpoint, this suggests that powerful CEOs may promote transparency about banks’ CSR activities for their private benefits. While this could indicate that powerful CEOs are under particular pressure to appease stakeholders’ concerns that they might abuse their power by providing a high degree of CSR disclosure, it could also be a sign of managerial risk aversion or managers’ private reputational concerns. (shrink)

Nineteen eighty-seven was a year of financial paradox. During the 1980s there was the strong perception that the Americans, the Europeans, and the Japanese were living well, contrasting with the accounting data that suggested the house of cards was about to fall. Three factors dominated the financial economy of 1987: the 25-percent drop in equity prices in mid-October, the apparent collapse of the U.S. dollar in the foreign exchange market, and the formal recognition by the major international banks that (...) their losses on developing country loans would amount to at least $250 billion. The key question at the end of that year was whether the world economy was moving into a period of inflation or deflation. This essay identifies three possible scenarios. First, the decline in the foreign-exchange value of the U.S. dollar would lead to a rapid increase in U.S. net exports, an excessively large increase in demand for U.S. goods, and a run on the U.S. dollar, which would prompt more contractive monetary policies from the Federal Reserve and an increase in interest rates on U.S. dollars. Second, an increase in U.S. net exports would offset the decline in domestic spending from the smaller fiscal deficit and the less rapid growth of consumer spending. Interest rates on U.S. dollar assets would fall, which in turn would facilitate the expansion of income, and the U.S. fiscal deficit would automatically decline. Or, third, a second stock market meltdown might cause consumer and investment spending to decline more than the increase in net exports, resulting in a recession and a decline in the inflation rate and interest rates. (shrink)

The Spellings Commission recommends widespread critical-thinking testing to help determine the “value added” by higher education institutions—with the data banked and made available (“transparent”) in order to enable parents, students, and policy makers to compare institutions and hold them accountable. Because of the likely and desirable promotion of critical thinking that would result from the Commission’s program, I recommend cooperation by critical-thinking faculty and administrators, but only if there is much less comparability and considerably deeper transparency of the tests and (...) their justification than the Commission recommends, and only if vigilance in handling the many problems and dangers elaborated herein is successful. (shrink)

The current ethical norms of genomic biobanking creating and maintaining large repositories of human DNA and/or associated data for biomedical research have generated criticism from every angle, at both the practical and theoretical levels. The traditional research model has involved investigators seeking biospecimens for specific purposes that they can describe and disclose to prospective subjects, from whom they can then seek informed consent. In the case of many biobanks, however, the institution that collects and maintains the biospecimens may not itself (...) be directly involved in research, instead banking the biospecimens and associated data for other researchers. Moreover, the future uses of biospecimens may be unknown, if not unknowable, at the time of collection. Biobanking may thus stretch the meanings of inform and consent to their breaking point: if you cannot inform subjects about what their biospecimens will be used for, what can they consent to? Given that informed consent by individual subjects is the ethical gold standard, the seeming dilution of the concept in the context of biobanking is a profound problem. (shrink)

A burgeoning policy shift from neo-liberal economics is underway, with leadership by presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio). His platform positions stem in part from his negative experiences with neo-liberalism when he was Mayor of Cleveland more than 30 years ago. Although his response as Mayor was based on confrontation politics, examples of community-based economies built on collaborative planning, ownership, and management have since become more widely known. We can now show that the successful Grameen Bank and the Mondragon Cooperatives were (...) constructed on principles consistent with Integral Science. (shrink)

Over the past year, aggressive billing practices have been exposed at a number of hospitals in the United States. Despite the fact that a widower had paid $16,000 of his late wife's bill of $18,740, some 20 years after the incurrence of the bill a teaching hospital held a lien on his home for $40,000 in interest. Many years earlier the hospital had seized his bank account, and now the 77-year-old man was destitute. Only tremendous publicity caused the hospital to (...) back down. That same week, another nonprofit teaching hospital reportedly drove a 25-year-old uninsured woman from New York City while dunning her for a $19,000 bill for a two-day stay for an appendectomy. In California, a patient was forced into bankruptcy in 2000 by a for-profit hospital from a day-and-a-half stay in the hospital that did not include any surgery but totaled $48,000 in hospital bills. These have become common stories as hospitals aggressively market, bill, collect, and foreclose, just like any other corporation. The uninsured are facing the brunt of the hospital industry's billing practices. (shrink)

PurposeThe deployment and strategic use of e‐business, from basic e‐mail utilization to total enterprise integration, involves the commitment of financial and technical resources. The resources have to be financed. The purpose of this paper is to ascertain the views of trade promotion organizations, donors, export associations and banks on e‐business financing in Ghana's non‐traditional export sector, with the view to making policy contributions to the e‐business financing phenomenon in a developing economy context.Design/methodology/approachThe research design is qualitative since this is (...) an exploratory study and deep preliminary insights were sought about a hitherto under‐researched information systems topic from a developing country perspective. Officials from the trade promotion; export association, donor and financial communities were interviewed to generate insights to help understand the phenomenon under investigation.FindingsSome banks find it difficult financing e‐business in NTE firms because it is considered a new area with relatively higher risks and uncertainties. Banks would rather grant small loans to a few select small and medium enterprise exporters in an attempt to limit their default risk. The trade promotion organization is helping with up‐skilling for the improvement in e‐competencies in Ghana's NTE sector. The export product association in collaboration with the donor interviewed is in the throes of designing e‐business interventions in Ghana's NTE sector after recently completing an e‐readiness survey in the same sector.Originality/valueThis paper presents a modest contribution to the export firm‐electronic business literature from a resource‐centered perspective, in a DE context. Studies on e‐business financing in DEs are virtually non‐existent and the policy prescriptions could apply with minor modifications to other related contexts in respect of e‐business financing. (shrink)

Gulick’s description and analysis of my The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism is largely on target, but in this response I point out several of his misperceptions and elaborate on several points made in my book. For instance, I note that Polanyi’s monetary prescription for stimulating the economy is no longer relevant when so many US jobs have moved offshore. Polanyi’s interest in achieving full employment has been replaced by Federal Reserve policies that keep risk-taking banks solvent.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Truth Shall Make You FreireRobert CanterTeaching Contemporary Theory to Undergraduates, edited by Dianne F. Sadoff and William E. Cain; 271 pp. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1994; $19.75, paper.IThe newest title in the MLA’s Options for Teaching series, this publication is well-timed. Concerns about “classroom advocacy” and “politicized teaching” have recycled into near-critical mass, even in the mass media. The book is well-arranged, too, with a (...) solid sample of deconstructionist, New Historicist, Marxist, feminist, and cultural studies, and more mix-and-match theorists describing their classroom aims and means in twenty-one essays grouped into four sections. Sadoff and Cain offer elegantly evasive introductions—not only to these essays per se, but to the issues these essays purport to address. In “Surveying Theory,” David B. Downing, John Kucich, Susan S. Lanser, Lynette Felber, Donald G. Marshall, and Gary Waller lay broadly “anti-foundational” groundwork. In “Focusing,” Diana Fuss, Sandra A. Grayson, Beverly Lyon Clark, Evan Carton, Laurie A. Finke, Jonathan Arac, and Cary Nelson deconstruct things in more detail. In “Theory and Culture,” Huston Diehl, Cannon Schmitt and Donald Ulin, Lindon Barrett, Simon Gikandi, D. N. Rodowick, and Jan Gorak again widen the scope of “theorized teaching,” aiming regulation anticanonical shrapnel at every bastion of coded convention. And while readers may pause over [End Page 336] its backcover promise of “lively and accessible prose,” on the whole, the book is unusually readable for an MLA publication about theory.Since Teaching Contemporary Theory to Undergraduates is a how-to directed at true-believers, it might seem like critical blindsiding to address its fundamental assumptions rather than its tactical suggestions, to focus on its “theory” rather than on its pedagogy. Yet such a focus is not only fair but necessary. The pedagogy is in this book a pawn of the theory. And the theory is, at best, a lesson in how not to teach students how to learn. For despite all its noisy celebrations of methodological, cultural, ontological, and occasionally even human “difference,” the anthology is really a chorus of self-defeating dogma. 1 Like the virtue of variety, even the relative absence of jargon here works as much against as for the book, revealing self-contradictions so perfectly unwitting that they are twice as funny. It is a good thing, then, that the authors eventually contradict these claims, too—even if they know not that they do.The canon? In accordance with postmodern tradition, “the canon” can be calibrated to be whatever best attacks whatever other tradition a particular theorist is aiming at. It is a very modular “monolith.” And theorists never try to “overdetermine” definitions, anyway. The classroom? As an “overdetermined” site of class-struggle, “the classroom (and the academy at large) is... a social institution designed to reproduce the interests, values, and politics of the dominant social classes” (p. 104). Convention? Anything “mainstream” is so polluted with “the notion of mastery, of total and complete knowledge” that even assigning “mainstream” theorists in a theory class “reproduces that hegemony, no matter how critically we read them” (pp. 105, 61). The runoff of mainstream theorists quoted here—conventional MLA Style—makes the same point. Culture? As always already—and only—“a struggle between power and its disenfranchised shadow,” culture “systematically excludes and marginalizes disenfranchised social members” (pp. 263–64, 20–21).Education? As Paulo Freire has revealed, 2 on the one, bad, goatish, wrong Right-wing hand of God, there is the repressive “banking” model of education; on the other, good-shepherdish, right Left-wing side, there is the liberating “problem-posing” model. You are either a droning clerk bent on subduing students into serfdom, or you are a resistance fighter lighting fuses of freedom. “Instrumental activity” does “pedagogical violence,” making the teacher a tyrant and the student a victim, a “submissive imitator” in a “system” that’s “abidingly committed [End Page 337] to the vision of a white-supremacist oligarchy.” Even asking students what level of “guidance” they feel they need is imposing “rhetorical control” (pp. 32, 23, 222, 135).Facts? The fact is, they are “the discursive gestures of the dominant groups” (p. 222). Unless they are... (shrink)

Hayek's reputation has gone through a remarkable cycle. An eminent exponent of the Austrian theory of business cycles in the 1930s, he was worsted in the controversy over Keynes' _Treatise on Money_. Following this defeat, Hayek retreated into capital theory, an esoteric branch of economics in which few economists then took an active interest. He gave up economics altogether after the war and turned to psychology, political philosophy, philosophy of law and the history of ideas. However, in 1974 he won (...) the Nobel Prize and returned to mainstream economics as a leading critic of Keynesianism and an advocate of free banking as the answer to inflation. Today Hayek reigns supreme as the kind of moral philosopher and political economist that economics has not seen since Adam Smith. Also forthcoming in this series is _Paul A. Samuelson, 2nd Series_. (shrink)

Creative accounting involves accountants in making accounting policy choices or manipulating transactions in such a way as to convey a preferred and deliberately chosen impression in the accounts. Although it is regarded as unethical by most observers, a defense of creative accounting can be based on the assumption that users of accounts can identify bias in accounting policy choices and make appropriate adjustments. In this paper we take the example of the Barcelona Football Club where the club management made three (...) key accounting policy choices that resulted in the presentation of a favourable position, and a supporters club presented an alternative report choosing three alternative accounting policies that presented an unfavourable position. We presented each of these financial reports to one of two groups of Spanish bank loan officers: we found that the more favourable set of accounts was significantly more likely to attract a positive response to a loan request. This result undermines the validity of defending creative accounting based on the argument that accounts users can identify manipulation. (shrink)

Creative accounting involves accountants in making accounting policy choices or manipulating transactions in such a way as to convey a preferred and deliberately chosen impression in the accounts. Although it is regarded as unethical by most observers, a defense of creative accounting can be based on the assumption that users of accounts can identify bias in accounting policy choices and make appropriate adjustments. In this paper we take the example of the Barcelona Football Club where the club management made three (...) key accounting policy choices that resulted in the presentation of a favourable position, and a supporters club presented an alternative report choosing three alternative accounting policies that presented an unfavourable position. We presented each of these financial reports to one of two groups of Spanish bank loan officers: we found that the more favourable set of accounts was significantly more likely to attract a positive response to a loan request. This result undermines the validity of defending creative accounting based on the argument that accounts users can identify manipulation. (shrink)

Computer abuse by employees is a critical concern for managers. Misuse of an organization’s information assets leads to costly damage to an organization’s reputation, decreases in sales, and impositions of fines. We use this opportunity to introduce and expand the theoretic framework proffered by Thong and Yap to better understand the factors that lead individuals to commit CA in organizations. The study uses a survey of 449 respondents from the banking, financial, and insurance industries. Our results indicate that individuals who (...) adhere to a formalist ethical perspective are significantly less likely to engage in CA activities than those following a utilitarian ethical framework. In addition, the results provide evidence that employees with individualistic natures are linked to increased CA incidents, whereas collectivist tendencies are associated with decreases in CA behaviors. Our results also show that collectivism acts as a strong moderator that further decreases the relationships between formalism and CA, and utilitarianism and CA. Finally, we offer detailed suggestions on how organizations and researchers can leverage our findings to decrease CA occurrences. (shrink)

California is a landmark setting for studying produce recovery efforts and policy implications because of its global relevance in agricultural production, its complex network of food recovery organizations, and its environmental and public health regulations. Through a series of focus groups with organizations involved in produce recovery (gleaning organizations) and emergency food operations (food banks, food pantries), this study aimed to deepen our understanding of the current produce recovery system and determine the major challenges and opportunities related to the (...) produce recovery system. Operational and systematic barriers to produce recovery were highlighted by both gleaning and emergency food operations. Operational barriers, such as the lack of appropriate infrastructure and limited logistical support were found to be a challenge across groups and were directly tied to inadequate funding for these organizations. Systematic barriers, such as regulations related to food safety or reducing food loss and waste, were also found to impact both gleaning and emergency food organizations, but differences were observed in how each type of regulation impacted each stakeholder group. To support the expansion of food recovery efforts, participants expressed need for better coordination within and across food recovery networks and more positive and transparent engagement from regulators to increase understanding of the specifics of their unique operational constraints. The focus group participants also provided critiques on how emergency food assistance and food recovery are inscribed within the current food system and for longer term goals of reducing food insecurity and food loss and waste a systematic change will be required. (shrink)

In today's business world, ethics is not simply a peripheral concern of executive boards or a set of supposed constraints on free enterprise. Ethics stands at the very core of our working lives and of society as a whole, defining the public image of the business community and the ways in which individual companies and people behave. What people do at work--and how they think about work--determines their attitudes and aspirations, affecting and even structuring their personal lives and habits. Working (...) from this premise, Honest Work: A Business Ethics Reader provides a practical overview of business ethics that concentrates on the ethical problems and dilemmas students are most likely to face in their prospective work environments. Classic and recent articles and cases cover a broad spectrum of issues and concerns--from private ethical dilemmas to larger considerations of corporate values--and propose guidelines for thinking about the business world in a moral context. Each reading and case is followed by lively questions for discussion. Offering a welcome alternative to the impersonal tone of most business ethics texts, the editors address students in an appealing and conversational manner. They provide engaging chapter introductions that include personal narratives and also present the ideas of great philosophers in a unique way--as emails. Ideal for introductory undergraduate and MBA courses in business ethics, Honest Work: A Business Ethics Reader can be read as a coherent narrative but also offers instructors great flexibility, as its various chapters, readings, and cases can be pursued in almost any order. A Companion Website featuring chapter objectives and summaries, study questions, self-tests, and off-site links of interest will soon be available. An Instructor's Manual with Test Bank is available to adopters. (shrink)

Organizational virtue orientation (OVO), an organizational-level construct, refers to the integrated set of beliefs and values that support ethical character traits and virtuous behaviors. To advance the study of organizational virtue, we examine OVO in firms making their initial public offerings (IPOs), with respect to key external stakeholders that serve as financial intermediaries (i.e., venture capital firms and underwriting banks). Drawing on stakeholder and resource dependence theories, we argue that mutual interdependencies occur between financial intermediaries and IPO firms such (...) that venture capital firms’ ownership levels and underwriter reputation are positively associated with the selection of more virtuous IPO firms. We also argue for the moderating relationship of IPO firm age on these main relationships; since IPO firms have more history and information availability, less importance will be placed on OVO in the selection process. In support of our hypotheses, the results of this study suggest the organizational virtue of IPO firms influences the selection decisions of financial intermediaries by reflecting positively on these key stakeholders to improve legitimacy and reputation. (shrink)

Robert C. Hockett’s “franchise view” argues, convincingly, that the capacity of banks or quasi-bank financial entities to create money rests on the laws, regulations, and guarantees of the state under which they operate. Fred Block advocates the use of this insight as a beachhead for establishing the legitimacy of locally embedded, nonprofit lenders whose investments would be dedicated to public purposes. However, given the pervasive influence of “everyday libertarianism,” which fosters blindness to the public character of private economic (...) power, this commentary warns of possible counterproductive consequences of this proposal unless it is fused to the democratization of central banking. An end to central bank independence would highlight the ineliminable role of the state in the market and make that role easier to reshape. It would also end the dynamic whereby monetary easing provides political cover for damaging fiscal austerity and thus lead to better democratic deliberation on the contours of policy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Literature: Why It Matters by Robert EaglestoneAihua ChenEaglestone, Robert. Literature: Why It Matters. Polity Press, 2019. 123pp.Is literature a worthy topic of study in an era fixated on science, technology, and information? This has become a subject of debate in recent years, especially as enrollment in college literature courses has declined. J. Hillis Miller has noted that “all who love literature are collectively anxious today about (...) whether literature matters” (13), insisting that it does since it has “three essential human functions: social critique, the pleasure of the text, and allowing a materialization of the imaginary or an endless approach to the unapproachable imaginary” (31). Other literary scholars concur with Miller, though from differing perspectives, including Dennis J. Sumara in Why Reading Literature in School Still Matters (2002) and Mark William Roche in Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century (2004). In his recent monograph, Literature: Why It Matters, Robert Eaglestone joins this discussion, offering a timely and judiciously formulated manifesto in defense of literary studies that is groundbreaking in the way it treats literature as a living object whose study can inspire ongoing conversation. Eaglestone presents his argument in four segments: “What is Literature?” “Studying Literature,” “Why Does Literature Matter?” and “What Does Literature Teach?”In his first chapter, Eaglestone reveals the limitations of traditional approaches to defining literature as fiction and narrative, that is, as something “made up.” He argues instead that literature is undefinable and exists as a kind of “living conversation” (6). For Eaglestone, literature, like a conversation, is a form of communication among many parties. In this case, the conversation engages the text, the reader, and the author in discussions of nearly everything. Learning about literature involves understanding the form of that discussion in the same way one comes to understand how speakers create meaning in dialogue with one another. And like conversation, readers’ creative response to a literary text fully engages their minds, their hearts, their feelings about the past, and their hopes for the future. In Eaglestone’s view, literature is “not timeless but time-full.” It involves “a past, visible in various ways, including the historical context of a work and the ‘family trees’ of influence and genre; a person (it’s always read now); and a future (that would be you, joining [End Page 118] the conversation)” (20). As in actual conversation, questions of equality and freedom matter a great deal since “literature is a crucial part of our constant dialogue about humanity’s ever-changing self-understanding — not about what we are but about who we are” (22).In the second chapter, Eaglestone asks questions concerning how we go about “Studying Literature.” Here, he extends the metaphor introduced in the preceding chapter of literature constituting a living conversation. He puts forward four ways of pursuing literary studies: as dialogue and dissensus, as a different model of education, as a kind of “knowledge-in-action,” and as craft and activity. For Eaglestone, literary study is an ongoing dialogue whose “aim is to help develop a continuing dissensus about the texts we study in order to root, explore and develop our own selves and distinctiveness” (29–30). He cites critics as diverse in outlook as F. R. Leavis, Q. D. Leavis, John Crowe Ransom, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Arthur Applebee in support of his claims. He further invokes Brazilian educationalist and activist Paulo Freire’s notions of critical pedagogy in forming the view that literary studies offer a different model of education. Rather than following the “banking” model of accruing knowledge and then dispensing it to students, Freire “insists that teaching must be a dialogue” (32). Eaglestone argues that literary study conforms to the image at the center of Freire’s vision of a different form of education because “in a discussion of literature, each person, teacher or student, brings themselves, their own ideas, creativity and understanding, to the discussion and, through dialogue, they invent new knowledge” (33). As for literary studies as a kind of “knowledge-in-action,” Eaglestone invokes American educational theorist Arthur Applebee’s study, Curriculum as Conversation (1996), further underscoring the importance of metaphor spotting and close reading in carrying out this sort of critical... (shrink)

The paper is a critique of traditional and formal models of theological education that historically have developed in the West and are generally adopted by Asian theological schools in Asia. Globalisation and the emergence of Asian Diasporas presented new problems and opportunities for rethinking appropriate models of contextual training. Building on works by Robert Banks, Ian Stackhouse and David Kelsey, the paper will explore contextual models for the Chinese Christian Diasporas in Britain, and suggest some contributions for the (...) renewal of theological education in Asia. (shrink)

In the premises, the author analyses how the different historiographical trends concerning the Atlantic world have reduced the centrality of the State, and recent researches which focused on the processes of State-building and on the financial revolutions between the Seventeenth and the Nineteenth centuries. Within this frame, the essay outlines an Atlantic history of the foundation of the U.S. through a reading of the Report on Public Credit (1782) of Robert Morris, Superintendent of Finances, and some writings of Alexander (...) Hamilton, Secretary of the Treasury. The author argues that the institution of public debt and the foundation of the national bank constituted an adequate response not only to the need of State which characterized European history, but also to the capitalistic practices which marked European economies. The author underlines the continuity between the processes of State-building and the transition to capitalism in Europe and America in the age of the democratic revolutions. (shrink)

This article has three main parts, Section 2 considers the nature and extent to which individuals who are well-off have a moral obligation to aid the worlds needy. Drawing on a pluralistic approach to morality, which includes consequentialist, virtue-based, and deontological elements, it is contended that most who are well-off should do much more than they do to aid the needy, and that they are open to serious moral criticism if they simply ignore the needy. Part one also focuses on (...) the United States, and illustrates both how incredibly wealthy the U.S. is and some of the spending habits of its citizens; however, its considerations apply to the well-off generally. Section 3 considers whether justice provides reasons for helping the needy. Noting that justice in an extremely complex notion, it discusses numerous considerations relevant to justices scope and implications, including an extended Rawlsian conception of justice, an absolute conception, a comparative conception, the distinction between natural and social justice, and various elements of common-sense morality. Section 2 also distinguishes between agent-relative justice-based reasons, which are relevant to whether we act justly, and agent-neutral justice-based reasons, which are relevant to whether we have reasons of justicefor acting. Correspondingly, it argues that even if one can ignore the needy without acting unjustly, as philosophers like Robert Nozick and Jan Narveson contend, there may be powerful reasons of justicefor addressing their plight. Section 4 briefly address the responsibilities of international organizations like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Trade Organization (WTO). Drawing on Section 2, it is suggested that in addition to standard reasons to act justlytowards needy members of the worlds community, there will be reasons of justicefor such organizations to aid the needy in both present, and future, generations. The article concludes by contending that the well-off in countries like the U.S. have reason to view international organizations like the World Bank, IMF, and WTO as their agents, and to seek to insure that they alleviate misfortunes amongst the worlds needy. (shrink)

Robert John Ackermann deals decisively with the problem of relativism that has plagued post-empiricist philosophy of science. Recognizing that theory and data are mediated by data domains (bordered data sets produced by scientific instruments), he argues that the use of instruments breaks the dependency of observation on theory and thus creates a reasoned basis for scientific objectivity. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished (...) backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Adams presents an in-depth interpretation of three important parts of Leibniz's metaphysics, thoroughly grounded in the texts as well as in philosophical analysis and critique. The three areas discussed are the metaphysical part of Leibniz's philosophy of logic, his essentially theological treatment of the central issues of ontology, and his theory of substance. Adams' work helps make sense of one of the great classic systems of modern philosophy.

This book represents the most comprehensive account to date of an important but widely contested approach to ethics--intuitionism, the view that there is a plurality of moral principles, each of which we can know directly. Robert Audi casts intuitionism in a form that provides a major alternative to the more familiar ethical perspectives. He introduces intuitionism in its historical context and clarifies--and improves and defends--W. D. Ross's influential formulation. Bringing Ross out from under the shadow of G. E. Moore, (...) he puts a reconstructed version of Rossian intuitionism on the map as a full-scale, plausible contemporary theory. A major contribution of the book is its integration of Rossian intuitionism with Kantian ethics; this yields a view with advantages over other intuitionist theories and over Kantian ethics taken alone. Audi proceeds to anchor Kantian intuitionism in a pluralistic theory of value, leading to an account of the perennially debated relation between the right and the good. Finally, he sets out the standards of conduct the theory affirms and shows how the theory can help guide concrete moral judgment. The Good in the Right is a self-contained original contribution, but readers interested in ethics or its history will find numerous connections with classical and contemporary literature. Written with clarity and concreteness, and with examples for every major point, it provides an ethical theory that is both intellectually cogent and plausible in application to moral problems. (shrink)

The term ‘social capital’ is a way of defining the intangible resources of community, shared values and trust upon which we draw in daily life. It has achieved considerable international currency across the social sciences through the very different work of Pierre Bourdieu in France and James Coleman and Robert Putnam in the United States, and has been widely taken up within politics and sociology as an explanation for the decline in social cohesion and community values in western societies. (...) It has also been adopted by policy makers, particularly in international governmental bodies such as the World Bank. (shrink)