Considering the large number of adverts inundating the average consumer every day, the marketing industry is seeking methods to reach clients in a more subtle manner than traditional marketing messages. One such tool is product placement. The article addresses issues of effectiveness of product placement in comparison to a traditional commercial. The objective of the study was to check how participants would recall the content of persuasive messages in conditions of artificially-inducted cognitive load (in conditions of (...) traditional advertisement and product placement). Two studies were conducted – a pilot study intended to assess the usefulness of the selected stimuli, and the main experiment. The experiment devoted to this question was planned using an ANOVA scheme 2 (Type of advert: traditional vs. product placement) x 2 (neutral conditions vs. cognitive load). It turned out that the commercial was better retained in neutral conditions than in conditions of cognitive load. The traditional commercial was remembered better than product placement. From the perspective of the study’s ecological validity, of importance is also comparison of retention of brands viewed in a traditional commercial in conditions of cognitive load with retention of brands in conditions of product placement without load. These comparisons indicate the superiority of product placement – brands presented in this manner were more frequently recalled by viewers. (shrink)

We provide an overview of the development of product placements within traditional and newer electronic media, followed by a critique of current regulations where they exist and highlight the challenges this form of brand promotion presents to regulators. We note the weaknesses in current theoretical perspectives on the way product placements impact more than awareness and argue that a failure to recognise the increasingly diverse nature of product placement within entertainment media content means that awareness campaigns (...) and warnings regarding the presence of product placements are unlikely to be effective in countering any negative effects of the practice on vulnerable groups such as children and young adults. While we focus on the impact of product placement activity on children and young adults, using primarily the examples of alcohol and tobacco products, we also raise concerns regarding a failure to act on the presence of a number of harmful products that fall beyond the current list of restricted products even in countries where some form of specific regulation exists. In order to aid those considering the necessity for, or scope of, any future restrictions on this form of marketing communication, it is important to determine not only what is known, but what also needs to be determined about the impact of product placements across the range of existing and evolving communication channels. (shrink)

Product placement, the practice of placing brands into non‐advertising media, is a growing marketing phenomenon, which has received relatively little attention from business ethicists. Such attention is timely because the UK regulatory framework for television product placement is under review at the time of writing. In this paper, we seek to locate product placement in relation to traditional frameworks of marketing ethics. We suggest that this location is problematic because product placement is (...) a form of marketing communication in which the message, the sender and the precise intention behind a brand seen in a television (TV) show, movie or computer game are often implicit. We suggest that the possibilities for an ethically principled regulation of product placement rest on two key issues: (1) the extent to which programme makers, media owners and brand owners make their product placement strategies explicit to audiences, and (2) the degree of commercial sophistication, which regulators attribute to non‐expert entertainment audiences. (shrink)

Product placement, the practice of placing brands into non‐advertising media, is a growing marketing phenomenon, which has received relatively little attention from business ethicists. Such attention is timely because the UK regulatory framework for television product placement is under review at the time of writing. In this paper, we seek to locate product placement in relation to traditional frameworks of marketing ethics. We suggest that this location is problematic because product placement is (...) a form of marketing communication in which the message, the sender and the precise intention behind a brand seen in a television (TV) show, movie or computer game are often implicit. We suggest that the possibilities for an ethically principled regulation of product placement rest on two key issues: (1) the extent to which programme makers, media owners and brand owners make their product placement strategies explicit to audiences, and (2) the degree of commercial sophistication, which regulators attribute to non‐expert entertainment audiences. (shrink)

This article uses the case of pregnancy testing in Britain to investigate the process whereby new and often controversial reproductive technologies are made visible and normalized in mainstream entertainment media. It shows how in the 1980s and 1990s the then nascent product placement industry was instrumental in embedding pregnancy testing in British cinema and television's dramatic productions. In this period, the pregnancy-test close-up became a conventional trope and the thin blue lines associated with Unilever's Clearblue rose to prominence (...) in mainstream consumer culture. This article investigates the aestheticization of pregnancy testing and shows how increasingly visible public concerns about ‘schoolgirl mums’, abortion and the biological clock, dramatized on the big and small screen, propelled the commercial rise of Clearblue. It argues that the Clearblue close-up ambiguously concealed as much as it revealed; abstraction, ambiguity and flexibility were its keys to success. (shrink)

BackgroundApproximately 7% of the general population is affected by an orphan disease, which, in the United States, is defined as affecting fewer than 1 in 1500 people. Disease awareness is often low and time-to-diagnosis delayed. Different legislations worldwide have created incentives for pharmaceutical companies to develop drugs for orphan diseases. A journalistic article in Bloomberg Businessweek has claimed that pharmaceutical companies have tried marketing orphan drugs by placing a specific disease into the popular television series “House, M.D.” which features diagnostic (...) journeys and was produced between 2004 and 2012. This study aimed to describe the presentation of orphan diseases in the television series “House, M.D.”, to test in an exploratory fashion the hypothesis that treatable orphan conditions are overrepresented in “House, M.D.” and to discuss whether such marketing practices may or may not be ethical.MethodsA list of all medical cases depicted in the television series “House, M.D.” was obtained and classified as orphan or non-orphan according to the Orphanet database. The ratios of orphan diseases among all diseases, such with an orphan drug designation and such with an orphan drug approval by the FDA were then compared with conservative approximations of real world conditions (chi-squared tests for equality of proportions). STROBE criteria were respected.ResultsOut of a total of n = 181 different medical diagnoses, n = 42 (23.2%) were orphan diseases. The difference in percentages in between “House, M.D.” and reality was not statistically significant for orphan diseases overall (p = 0.96), yet was statistically significantly higher for both orphan diseases with one or more orphan drug designations (p = 0.0192) and such with one or more approved orphan drugs (p < 0.0001).ConclusionsOrphan diseases with a designated and/or approved orphan drug were overrepresented in the television series “House, M.D.” with statistical significance while orphan diseases overall were not. This may be explained by (so far) undocumented efforts of pharmaceutical companies to place their orphan drugs in the television series, as described in the article in Bloomberg Businessweek. Further research is needed into marketing practices in popular and emerging media formats. (shrink)

The concept of a Liberal Proviso introduced in “Neutrality and Perfectionism in Public Health” provides some ideas on how to limit excessive or unjustified interventions from...

Este trabalho analisa a publicidade na relação dialógica e interativa que se estabelece entre os produtores de séries sob demanda e consumidores alcançados pela estratégia de Product Placement. As teorias são: identidade, posicionamento e imagem de marca, com base em Khauaja e Mattar, Pinho, Tavares, Depexe e Petermann, dentre outros. Como caso, será observada a produção estadunidense “House of Cards”, criada para o serviço de streaming Netflix, que se utiliza da técnica para arrecadar fundos.

The ethics of advertising to children has been identified as one of the most important topics worthy of academic research in the marketing field. A fast growing advertising technique is product placement, and its use in children's films is becoming more and more common. The limited evidence existing suggests that product placements are especially potent in their effects upon children. Yet regulations regarding placements targeted at children are virtually non-existent, with advertising guidelines suggesting that it remains the (...) prime responsibility of the parents to provide guidance for children. This study measured the ethical evaluations of parents in the UK and Canada regarding product placements in children's films. After exposing parents to a four-type typology of product placements, results show that explicit placements of ethically charged products were perceived as the most unethical type of placements. Parents in the UK were more sensitive to the use of the technique and there was a significant difference in relativism between the two groups. Both sets of respondents would like to see more regulation on the use of placements, especially placements of alcohol, tobacco and fast foods. (shrink)

This article explores cynicism as an ethical issue associated with the blurring of content and advertising in mass media. From a communitarian perspective and adapting Hardin's (1968) metaphorical use of “commons” to the domain of broadcasting, we surveyed the attitudes of individuals toward two phenomena of media saturation (product placement and video news releases) and three constructs (cynicism directed toward government, cynicism directed toward marketers, and the individual's assessment of their marketing literacy). Respondents were highly cynical about government (...) regulation of advertising and nearly as cynical of the ability of marketer's to self-regulate. (shrink)

The ethics of advertising to children has been identified as one of the most important topics worthy of academic research in the marketing field. A fast growing advertising technique is product placement, and its use in children's films is becoming more and more common. The limited evidence existing suggests that product placements are especially potent in their effects upon children. Yet regulations regarding placements targeted at children are virtually non-existent, with advertising guidelines suggesting that it remains the (...) prime responsibility of the parents to provide guidance for children. This study measured the ethical evaluations of parents in the UK and Canada regarding product placements in children's films. After exposing parents to a four-type typology of product placements, results show that explicit placements of ethically charged products were perceived as the most unethical type of placements. Parents in the UK were more sensitive to the use of the technique and there was a significant difference in relativism between the two groups. Both sets of respondents would like to see more regulation on the use of placements, especially placements of alcohol, tobacco and fast foods. (shrink)

Many who write about the playwright Maria Irene Fornes’s work comment with reverence about the experience of watching those productions she herself directed.1 Managing somehow to combine frank depictions of cruelty and violence with an odd, otherworldly charm, Fornes’s direction conveyed a distinct sui generis quality that has deflected analytic scrutiny—the exterior operates in such an exquisite fashion one hesitates to lift the hood and look beneath. The set is a wooden room which sits on an earth promontory. The promontory (...) is five feet high and covers the same periphery as the room. The wood has the color and texture of bone that has dried in the sun. It is ashen and cold. In Mud’s opening notes.. (shrink)

Marketers are increasingly relying on promotional practices (variously labeled as stealth marketing, hybrid messages, covert advertising) based on the diffusion of product information by third parties that appear to be independent of advertisers. In this paper, we examine to what extent the media treat their advertisers favorably, providing these advertisers’ products extra visibility in supposedly neutral editorial content. Empirically, we model the determinant of media coverage of Italian fashion products in an extended dataset of consumer magazines in Italy, France, (...) Germany, UK, and the USA. Research findings show that advertising is an important determinant of product placements in editorial content, and this result is consistent across countries and publishers. Our results imply that resource-rich advertisers engaging in compensatory advertising (that is, advertising investments that compensate poor product quality) might bias media coverage in their favor. Consumers will consequently be exposed twice to favorable messages about those products, in both advertisements and media content, resulting in higher purchases and reduced consumer welfare. (shrink)

This article examines the construction of parenthood, drawing on Brazilian cisgender, heterosexual, and homosexual couples' experiences in using assisted reproduction technologies (ART), particularly the surrogacy. For that purpose, we interviewed: 1) a lesbian woman who had her daughter through her partner's pregnancy, using ART with anonymous donor semen; 2) a gay man who, together with his partner, used a surrogacy service under contract via a specialised offshore agency; 3) a woman who was a surrogate, in Brazil, for her sister-in-law and (...) brother who lived abroad and, from abroad, sent an embryo fertilised for surrogacy; 4) a woman who resorted to her sister-in-law in order to be a mother by surrogacy, with ovules from the woman herself fertilised with semen from her husband; and 5) the sister-in-law mentioned in 4), who acted as surrogate for her brother and his wife. These interviews made it possible to think about the discursive construction of the legitimacy of such parenthoods, as it is produced by access to, and manipulation and circulation of, reproductive technologies and persons. This biomedical management of bodies sets up a material and discursive circuit that, in turn, produces a complex web of personal, normative, legal, professional and market relationships, particularly with a view to construction of a parenthood anchored in a notion of biologically-constituted origin. In this respect, biological, affective and social bonds merge to produce a precise placement of who is the father and/or who is the mother, as well as who are the important others and how they are linked to the child in a broader web of parenthood. (shrink)

on copyright and product placement, their ubiquity.

This content analysis explores how often implicit brand integrations occur in YouTube videos that were created for child viewers. The study also investigates how often advertising disclosures appear along with the videos that include brand integration. Results indicate that brand integration occur the most often as a branded product becomes a prop or in the background (i.e. product placement), and this type of brand integration tends to have the least advertising disclosure. Brand integration with influencers actively using/interacting (...) with the branded products in the video (i.e. product integration) followed the official advertising disclosure policy the most. Moreover, product integration was more likely to show the disclosure of advertising at the beginning and the end of the videos than product placement. The blind spot in advertising disclosure policy for implicit brand integration techniques on child-friendly YouTube channels should be reconsidered. (shrink)

Researchers in the area of children and advertising have been working for decades to determine exactly how children process commercial messages. While a great deal of work has focused on cognitive advertising literacy, research regarding the development of children’s moral advertising literacy is lacking. Given the popularity of social media platforms among youth today, this study examined age differences in children’s moral evaluations of product placement in a YouTube video displaying various forms of disclosures. Results revealed that more (...) prominent disclosures are associated with greater judgments of the appropriateness of the advertising tactic, which in turn is associated with more positive evaluations of the promoted brand. While the former relationship was particularly strong among younger children, older children were more likely to consider how others and society broadly are impacted by covert advertising, resulting in more negative evaluations of the promoted brand. (shrink)

This case describes the background of cigarette product placement in commercial movies and the emergence of the Smoke Free Movies Initiative. It draws onresearch by tobacco control activists on the impact of smoking in movies on youth smoking initiation. Voluntary and mandated restrictions on the use of cigarettes in film productions are discussed. Historic documents from tobacco industry archives reveal the explicit goals and intentions of tobacco companies to use films to market their products to unsuspecting observers.

The ethics of advertising to children has been identified as one of the most important topics worthy of academic research in the marketing field. A fast growing advertising technique is product placement, and its use in children's films is becoming more and more common. The limited evidence existing suggests that product placements are especially potent in their effects upon children. Yet regulations regarding placements targeted at children are virtually non-existent, with advertising guidelines suggesting that it remains the (...) prime responsibility of the parents to provide guidance for children. This study measured the ethical evaluations of parents in the UK and Canada regarding product placements in children's films. After exposing parents to a four-type typology of product placements, results show that explicit placements of ethically charged products were perceived as the most unethical type of placements. Parents in the UK were more sensitive to the use of the technique and there was a significant difference in relativism between the two groups. Both sets of respondents would like to see more regulation on the use of placements, especially placements of alcohol, tobacco and fast foods. (shrink)

Over the past 50 years, rock music has been the prime mover of an emergent national recording industry in Australia. This is a story in turn of increasing size, complexity, diversity, and sophistication, before its ultimate decline into the 21st century. This story has not been told in full previously and this article is a first step to make good this gap in the historical and cultural sociology of popular music. In this study, which has two parts, we survey record (...) labels, recording techniques and forms, and the music that was bought and sold. In Part One we chronicled the emergence of modern record production, the rise of rock music, and the development of a local recording industry in Australia between 1945 and 1970. In Part Two we narrate the rise and fall of Australian local, regional and national rock music cultures and the ebb and flow of independent labels and their labyrinthine relations to the transatlantic centre of the world-system of rock music industry. In particular we focus on four aspects: 1) technological change: the dominance of the vinyl album in the 1970s but its eventual usurpation by cassettes and then compact discs before the ultimate decline of all formats in the rise of the internet and the i-pod; 2) infrastructure: the development of the recording industry as a system of recording studios and record factories; as a system of impresarios and musician management; and also as a system that integrates performance circuits, radio, television, film, and eventually computer, product placement, advertising, and promotion through the cultivation and manipulation of taste markets in consumer culture etc.; 3) business logistics and markets: the tracking of the record labels, their struggles for markets and copyright control, local and global; and 4) musical production and repertoire. Since the digital revolution started eating away firstly and most conspicuously at the recording industry, the 50 years from 1945 to 1995 can now more clearly be seen as the rise and fall of rock music and its major technological form, the vinyl record. This is why we call it ‘the vinyl age’. (shrink)

Revenues from television spot-advertising can be viewed as a kind of indirect financing of editorial content. This applies still further to endeavours to incorporate advertising messages into programming. In order to identify problems associated with doing away with the separation principle, it is meaningful to adopt a perspective that brings together theories and findings which are genuinely embedded in economics and communication science. Such a perspective shows that appealing to the self-regulating forces of the market is nonsensical in a sector (...) where market failure is the rule as opposed to the exception. And when it comes to media competence of television viewers, audience research and research on media effects indicates that expectations with respect to the advertising effectiveness of product placement are unlikely to be met. (shrink)

We apply Benacerraf’s distinction between mathematical ontology and mathematical practice to examine contrasting interpretations of infinitesimal mathematics of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, in the work of Bos, Ferraro, Laugwitz, and others. We detect Weierstrass’s ghost behind some of the received historiography on Euler’s infinitesimal mathematics, as when Ferraro proposes to understand Euler in terms of a Weierstrassian notion of limit and Fraser declares classical analysis to be a “primary point of reference for understanding the eighteenth-century theories.” Meanwhile, scholars like (...) Bos and Laugwitz seek to explore Eulerian methodology, practice, and procedures in a way more faithful to Euler’s own. Euler’s use of infinite integers and the associated infinite products are analyzed in the context of his infinite product decomposition for the sine function. Euler’s principle of cancellation is compared to the Leibnizian transcendental law of homogeneity. The Leibnizian law of continuity similarly finds echoes in Euler. We argue that Ferraro’s assumption that Euler worked with a classical notion of quantity is symptomatic of a post-Weierstrassian placement of Euler in the Archimedean track for the development of analysis, as well as a blurring of the distinction between the dual tracks noted by Bos. Interpreting Euler in an Archimedean conceptual framework obscures important aspects of Euler’s work. Such a framework is profitably replaced by a syntactically more versatile modern infinitesimal framework that provides better proxies for his inferential moves. (shrink)

Widespread reliance on representationalist understandings commit social scientists to either partially or totally decouple belief from reality, limiting the domain of phenomena that can be treated by belief as an analytic concept. Developing the contrastive notion of practical belief, we introduce the hysteresis effect as a situational phenomenon involving the systematic production of agent-environment mismatches and argue for its placement as a central problem for the theory of action. Revealing the dynamic, embodied conservation of belief in the temporality of (...) practice, hysteresis appears when environmental contexts change in a way that leaves actors without an ontologically complicit relationship to institutions as scaffolds of action. Under these circumstances, a past-inflected reflexiveness replaces a forward-inflecting practical belief in the actor's temporal relation to the world. Drawing from a variety of historical case studies, we locate hysteresis in routine disjunctures between the temporality of practice and the temporality of environments. Our analysis reveals four distinct types of reflexiveness produced the hysteresis effect, each with a unique dispositional impact on actors and extensions to group-level phenomena. We conclude the article by emphasizing the non-eliminativist relationship between belief as disposition and belief as representation. (shrink)

John Reiss is a practicing evolutionary biologist (herpetology) who by his own account happened to be in the right place (Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology) at the right time (the 1980s) to hear echoes of the debate about sociobiology that had been raging there between E. O. Wilson and, on the other side, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin (xiv). Reiss is not concerned with sociobiology, at least in this book, but with the adaptationism that Gould and Lewontin saw in (...) the sociobiologists’ approach to cooperative behavior. At Harvard, Reiss was guided by Pere Alberch, in whose laboratory Gould’s stress on developmental constraints was being transformed into a now influential version of the Evo-devo movement (xiv, 327). On Alberch’s view, which Reiss accepts, variation in the rate, timing, placement, and intensity of gene products during the ontogenetic process, rather than mutation in structural genes, constitutes the proximate source of the phenotypic variation on which natural election works (327-29). Reiss does not think that Evo-devo, at least as he construes it, does away with natural selection. Rather, he seeks to identify the role played by selection in retaining or eliminating the variation generated in the developmental process. Selection, he argues, enables organisms, populations, species, and other lineages to maintain the presumptively adapted conditions of existence to which their very persistence already testifies. “Adaptedness,” Reiss writes, “is not a product of evolution; it is a condition for evolution” (22). He thinks that this fact, as he takes it to be, belies the adaptationist assumption that organisms are collections of independently optimal adaptations that arise by way of concerted spurts of directional selection. “It is a mistake,” he writes, “to atomize organisms and to explain each part as the solution of a problem raised by the environment” (295). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Questioning the Motives of Habituated Action:Burke and Bourdieu on PracticeDana AndersonThe British official's habit, in the Empire's remotest spots, of dressing for dinner is in effect the transporting of an idol, the vessel of a motive that has its sanctuary in the homeland.—Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives, 44In his recent Kenneth Burke and the Conversation after Philosophy, Timothy Crusius locates Burke in the context of "PostPhilosophical" thought by (...) describing Burke's expansive Dramatistic project as a praxis—as a program encompassing "any act whatsoever, including symbolic action (i.e., expression, whether artistic or discursive), in behalf of a better life." When praxis is conceived broadly as a dialectical perspective on human action—that agents and structures interact in mutually determining ways—the term becomes, in fact, an accurate summary of the entire Burkean corpus: "If we understand it as Burke does," Crusius continues, "all that he wrote is praxis" (1999, 198). This panoramic scope of Burke's dialectical inquiry is certainly one reason it remains rhetorical theory's perhaps most flexible and productive framework for considering human action; the Dramatistic pentad and its ratios for discussing the attribution of motive continue to invite theoretical "ways of placement" as multifaceted as human motives themselves.Speaking of Burke's work in terms of praxis, however, at least in the term's contemporary critical usage,1 raises a question regarding a cognate concept that the idea of praxis entails: in what sense is Burke's pentadic grammar of action equipped to consider the habituated actions characteristic of human practice?Practice, as a conceptual descendant of Marxian praxis, retains a connection with what Marx called "human sensuous activity" (1968, 28-30).2 In its most general sense, practice refers to the regular and repeated activities of agents that, in their quotidian enactment, dialectically [End Page 255] constitute an agent's sense of self and of reality in relation to external conditions of existence. While the activities of agents will tend to reify the dominant external conditions in which agents act, these external conditions are nonetheless open to change inasmuch as the evolving practices of individuals might come to challenge them. This perspective of the determined, yet determining nature of human practice is aptly summarized in The German Ideology, where Marx and Engels famously argue that "circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances" (2000, 189).3 As Michel de Certeau's seminal studies of practice have demonstrated (de Certeau 1984; de Certeau, Giard, and Mayol 1998), the power of this relationship of mutual constitution between individuals and their worlds of external circumstances owes directly to the banality of the actions through which such constitution is accomplished—actions ranging from the way bread is served in a given household, to the way cosmetics are purchased in department stores, to the general "ways of operating" in urban spaces, including simply walking in one's own neighborhood (de Certeau, Giard, and Mayol 1998; Mayol 1998, 7-13). As Judith Butler very poignantly summarizes, it is through precisely such "embodied rituals of everydayness," however "taken-for-granted" they may be, that "a given culture produces and sustains belief in its own 'obviousness' " (1999, 113-14).The constitutive dynamics of such practical actions should surely figure prominently into any conception of Burke's work as praxis. Indeed, this dynamic is already implicit in the fact that, for Burke, it is only through the possibility of mutually transforming both ourselves and our worlds through actions material and symbolic that we might begin to move toward a better life. But while Dramatism and practice rest on similar perspectives of the dialectically constitutive nature of human action, several aspects of the grammar through which Burke investigates motive might appear to limit, or even to preclude, the Dramatistic examination of practice as a kind of motivated action. More specifically, Burke's consistent "anti-Behaviorist" emphasis on the conscious or purposive nature of action questions the extent to which Dramatism can account for the dispositional and habituated actions characteristic of practice, actions for which agents would be least able to articulate conscious purposes. To cast the issue in the context of my epigraph above... (shrink)

Widespread reliance on representationalist understandings commit social scientists to either partially or totally decouple belief from reality, limiting the domain of phenomena that can be treated by belief as an analytic concept. Developing the contrastive notion of practical belief, we introduce the hysteresis effect as a situational phenomenon involving the systematic production of agent-environment mismatches and argue for its placement as a central problem for the theory of action. Revealing the dynamic, embodied conservation of belief in the temporality of (...) practice, hysteresis appears when environmental contexts change in a way that leaves actors without an ontologically complicit relationship to institutions as scaffolds of action. Under these circumstances, a past-inflected reflexiveness replaces a forward-inflecting practical belief in the actor's temporal relation to the world. Drawing from a variety of historical case studies, we locate hysteresis in routine disjunctures between the temporality of practice and the temporality of environments. Our analysis reveals four distinct types of reflexiveness produced the hysteresis effect, each with a unique dispositional impact on actors and extensions to group-level phenomena. We conclude the article by emphasizing the non-eliminativist relationship between belief as disposition and belief as representation. (shrink)

To address substandard working conditions in global value chains, companies have adopted private regulatory systems governing worker rights. Scholars agree that without onsite factory audits, this private regulation has limited impact at the point of production. Companies, however, audit only a subset of their suppliers, severely restricting their private regulatory attempts. Despite the significance of the placement of suppliers inside or outside firms’ “responsibility boundaries” and despite scholars’ having called for more research into how firms prioritize what suppliers to (...) audit, few, if any, systematic studies have examined the topic. This is problematic, as the placement of firms’ responsibility boundaries determines what suppliers and workers are included in firms’ private regulatory attempts. Based on a study of 12 Swedish firms and the theory of moral disengagement, this paper starts to fill this research gap by exploring how firms’ responsibility boundaries are placed. The paper illustrates how firms’ responsibility boundary placement is best described as a patchwork with firms defining and delimiting their responsibilities differently. The paper also demonstrates that three supplier types are particularly likely to be placed inside firms’ responsibility boundaries, while a fourth type is likely be placed outside. (shrink)

The acquisition and evolution of speech production, discourse and communication can be negatively impacted by brain malformations. We describe, for the first time, a case of developmental dynamic dysphasia (DDD) in a right-handed adolescent boy (subject D) with cortical malformations involving language-eloquent regions (inferior frontal gyrus) in both the left and the right hemispheres. Language evaluation revealed a markedly reduced verbal output affecting phonemic and semantic fluency, phrase and sentence generation and verbal communication in everyday life. Auditory comprehension, repetition, naming, (...) reading and spelling were relatively preserved, but executive function was impaired. Multimodal neuroimaging showed a malformed cerebral cortex with atypical configuration and placement of white matter tracts bilaterally and abnormal callosal fibers. Dichotic listening showed right hemisphere dominance for language and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) additionally revealed dissociated hemispheric language representation with right frontal activation for phonology and bilateral dominance for semantic processing. Moreover, subject D also had congenital mirror movements (CMM), defined as involuntary movements of one side of the body that mirror intentional movements of the other side. Transcranial magnetic stimulation and fMRI during voluntary unimanual (left and right) hand movements showed bilateral motor cortex recruitment and tractography revealed a lack of decussation of bilateral corticospinal tracts. Genetic testing aimed to detect mutations that disrupt the development of commissural tracts correlating with CMM (e.g., Germline DCC mutations) was negative. Overall, our findings suggest that DDD in subject D resulted from the underdevelopment of the left inferior frontal gyrus with limited capacity for plastic reorganization by its homologous counterpart in the right hemisphere. Corpus callosum anomalies probably contributed to hinder interhemispheric connectivity necessary to compensate language and communication deficits after left frontal involvement. (shrink)

The emerging discipline of educational neuroscience stands at a crossroads between those who see great promise in integrating neuroscience and education and those who see the disciplinary divide as insurmountable. However, such tension is at least partly due to the hitherto predominance of philosophy and theory over the establishment of concrete mechanisms and agents of change. If educational neuroscience is to move forward and emerge as a distinct discipline in its own right, the traditional boundaries and methods must be bridged, (...) and an infrastructure must be in place that allows for collaborative and productive exchange. In the present paper, we argue that school psychologists have the potential to fulfill this need and represent important agents of change in establishing better connections between research and practice. More specifically, we use the National Association of School Psychologists Domains of Practice to highlight several areas where school psychology can actively support forging connections between neuroscience and educational practice. School psychologists represent untapped potential in their knowledge, skillset, and placement to serve a vital role in building the bridge between neuroscience and education. (shrink)

In contemporary poetry, devices serving the purpose of creative destruction are increasingly coming into use. Usually not considered as proper to art making, these tools create by dismantling what is already there rather than generating something entirely new from nothing. Such methods of text deletion are at stake in so-called »erasure poetry«. Erasure poetry designates a mode of poetic production, in which an existing text is edited with a black felt marker or painted over with other suitable office supplies according (...) to a set of given parameters. This essay explores what happens when texts are no longer written but crossed out. Examples from a variety of contexts of use illustrate both the wide spectrum of the phenomenon and different functions of erasure. As a collective practice the technique may be therapeutic or simply helpful in coping with life. However, as an artistic strategy, erasure is currently deployed in many poetry collections and artists’ books that question common ways of engaging with literature as well as certain practices of power. Here, erasure emerges as an aesthetic strategy that can in fact reveal contents that have been concealed, negated, or threatened with oblivion. Both in terms of production and of reception, the decisive aesthetic feature in such cases is a break with conventional modes of representation. This break manifests itself in the ways the remaining words or letters are arranged on the page and put into relation to the empty space that surrounds them: Word placement and white space management are the two central operations of post-avant-garde literature and its page design. (shrink)

In modern science, classifications occupy a special place. In many areas of knowledge, they are the canonized type of product of scientific activity. That is why all the information obtained by the researchers tends to formulate in the form of those or other classifications of the investigated objects themselves, their separately considered properties, composition, structure, genesis, placement, etc. However, the quality of already built classifications, as a rule, does not suit the specialists. When creating the same new, there (...) are numerous difficulties, which are impossible to overcome, because there are no theoretical and methodological means. The development of these tools is complicated by the lack of clarity of the very concept of classification, the lack of clear notions of classification as a special phenomenon of knowledge. (shrink)