While studies have investigated the moral issue associated with downsizing, little research attention has been directed to leaders’ behaviors that result in organizational decline and eventually lead them to make a downsizing decision. This study tests a sequence-based model to assess (1) the impact of leaders’ risk-aversion and self-centeredness on organizational decline and downsizing and (2) the impact of organizational and industry decline on organizational downsizing. We address a gap in the decline literature that has only implicitly alluded to leadership (...) characteristics as forerunners of decline. Data collected from 85 firms indicate that both leadership risk-aversion and self-centeredness are significantly related to organizational decline. This results in intensified organizational downsizing. However, industry decline affects downsizing more significantly. (shrink)

This study of internal auditors and auditees, who engage in both financial and operational internal audits in Israel, extends theory and research on internal audits in organizational units. It develops and tests a model that examines the role of top management and internal auditors in facilitating learning from internal audits and driving perceived performance improvement. We argue that support from the top management for the internal audit as well as the auditor’s capacity facilitate learning from audits and help audited units (...) to improve ethicality, efficiency, and effectiveness in organizations. The results of time-lagged survey data provide general support for the hypothesized indirect relationships between auditor capacity, auditor–auditee relational exchanges, learning from audits, and three different perceived performance measures: ethical behavior, efficiency, and effectiveness. We discuss the implications for research on internal audits, proactive learning, ethics, and performance improvement of organizational units in the public sector. (shrink)

The article asserts that verses 124–130 in the second sūrah of the Qurʾān (al-Baqara/“the Cow”) alludes to the biblical precept (Genesis 17) but presents the practice as a custom that has no special virtues, and certainly not those the Jews ascribed to it. It then claims that circumcision is identified as one of Abraham’s trials, which are mentioned in the Qurʾān and thus part of early Islam, and that this idea did not arise in the Middle Ages.

The newest innovation in assisted reproduction is oocyte cryopreservation, more commonly known as egg freezing, which has been developed as a method of fertility preservation. Studies emerging from around the world show that highly educated professional women are turning to egg freezing in their late thirties to early forties, because they are still searching for a male partner with whom to have children. For these women, egg freezing may be a new “hope technology” for future romance; but it may also (...) be a “technology of despair,” as women navigate the ends of a failing relationship. Based on the largest ethnographic study to date, undertaken with 150 women who froze their eggs for nonmedical reasons in the United States and Israel, we examine egg freezing at the end of romance. Relationship dissolution—involving divorce, separation, broken engagements, and relationship breakups from men who are unfaithful, controlling, rejecting, uncommitted, or unready for fatherhood—is one of the major pathways to egg freezing. When such relationship dissolution ruptures a woman’s reproductive life course, egg freezing may become a “technology of repair,” allowing women to find new strengths and opportunities as well as new visions for the future. (shrink)

An innovative literary analysis of Freud's "Wolf Man.".

It is questionable whether counterfeiting in many areas of life contributes to unethical behavior to a wider extent. If the notion is supported by data, then the moral damage in a society could be prevented by reducing the counterfeit self and behavior to a bare minimum. This study aimed at empirically testing the measurement model of counterfeit self of Wood et al. (2008) among Indonesians as well as theoretically reviewing counterfeit self roles in unethical behavior. The participants of this study (...) were 1,655 high school students (764 males, 891 females; Mage = 15.76 years old; SDage = 1.08 years) recruited through a purposive sampling technique in North Sumatera and West Kalimantan, Indonesia. The data analysis technique used was Confirmatory Factor Analysis. The results showed that the counterfeit self model--comprised of counterfeit self dimensions, namely Self-alienation (ALIEN), Inauthentic Living (LIVE), and Accepting External Influence (EXT)--was supported by the empirical data. However, the dimension of EXT could not be represented by its indicators. The study contributed to the psychological body of knowledge that the EXT dimension might need to be excluded from the measurement of counterfeit self on teenagers, especially in Indonesia and other Eastern countries. (shrink)

Marriage is one of the most important topics in the education field since life in this world is structured by interaction among families and between families and other social institutions. Dissatisfaction and unsustainability of marriage have led the urgency of premarital education in various countries. The problem is that the spread of virtual reality has made marriage itself to become more complex and experience reinterpretation and reconfiguration, moreover with the emergence of new kind of marriage in the digital era, i.e. (...) virtual marriage. Everybody who has observed, known, or even tried, certainly asks the question, “Could (or: should) I accept virtual marriage?” . This study was aimed to investigate the role of tolerance of ambiguity and illusion of intimacy in online dating in predicting the acceptance of virtual marriage. There were 420 adolescents and young adults (212 males, 208 females; Mage=21.10 years old, SDage=1.459 years; 338 students, 82 employees or entrepreneurs) in the Greater Jakarta, Indonesia, participated in this study. It was found that the acceptance was not predicted by the ambiguity tolerance, but by the illusion of intimacy in online dating. The psychometric issues, substantive discussion, and recommendation are presented at the end of this article. The trend of virtual marriage should not be allowed to roll away, by autopilot, without loaded by strategies in designing an online game as one of the pivotal educational technologies that needs to shape appropriate character and attitude for it. (shrink)

This book examines reason and unreason in the legal and political responses to terrorism. Terrorism is often perceived as sheer madness, unreasonable use of extreme violence and senseless, futile political action. These assertions are challenged by this book. Combining ‘traditional’ thought on reason and unreason in terrorism with empirical explorations of post-modern terrorism and its use of communication platforms the work uses interdisciplinary and cross disciplinary dimensions to provide a multidimensional picture of critical issues in current politics and a deeper (...) examination of their implications than previously available. The book looks at various aspects of modern politics, from terrorism to protest, from decision-making to political discourse, applying the perspective of philosophical thought. To do so, political issues and actions are examined by using concepts such as reason, emotions, madness, magic, morality, absolutism, extremism, psychopathology, rationality and others. The analysis is rooted in theories and concepts derived from history, philosophy, religion, art, sociology, psychology, and political science. This book, which was mostly written by the late Abraham Kaplan, an American philosopher, and edited and updated by Gabriel Weimann, will be of much interest to students of political violence/terrorism, philosophy, war and conflict studies and political science in general. (shrink)

In the early twentieth century Walter Benjamin introduced the idea of epochal and ongoing progression in interaction between mind and the built environment. Since early antiquity, the present study suggests, Benjamin’s notion has been manifest in metaphors of gender in city-form, whereby edifices and urban voids have represented masculinity and femininity, respectively. At the onset of interaction between mind and the built environment are prehistoric myths related to the human body and to the sky. During antiquity gender projection can be (...) detected in western perceptions linking natural and built environments, commencing with Plato’s Atlantis and his Myth of Er, and later as a likely import of the Chinese yin-yang mythology. Culminating with the Age of Discovery, alongside advances in experiential awareness of the Earth’s sphericity, respective feminine and masculine earmarks can be detected in early modern perspicacity of the Earth’s southern and northern hemispheres. Our conceptions of natural and built environments inherently continue to contain gender traits. Yet urban voids, as the feminine face of city-form, have been severely understated in the built environment. Through design and configuration of urban voids, allegories of femininity in city-form ought to be celebrated, not discarded. (shrink)

This present study aims at exploring the meaning of the building of Santa Maria de Fatima Catholic Church (abbreviated as: SMFCC) or Toasebio Parish located in District Glodok, Jakarta, Indonesia. The author exposes in advance the meaning of the physical elements of the building SMFCC as understood by history writers and building experts. These meanings are not inseparable from the elements of human activities in the building. Through qualitative methods and literature review, the author describes in the Results section, how (...) those meanings can be further interpreted through the existing studies and expressions of the SMFCC Parish Head. It is found that these meanings are contested − from the direction of religious faith and of culture − but complete our understandings of the church which is well-known as an Indonesian cultural heritage and dominated by Chinese and pastors from Europe. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, Kowalik argues that compulsory vaccination unjustifiably infringes on the autonomy of vaccine refusers. While accepting Kowalik’s central premises, we argue that, when appropriately expanded in scope, autonomy considerations do not undermine the justifiability of compulsory vaccination. Vulnerable individuals—including the very old, the very young and those with compromised immune systems—face an omnipresent risk of contracting a potentially fatal vaccine-preventable illness and are thus prevented from accessing public goods by coercive pressure. Consequently, when we (...) consider an appropriately broad scope of autonomy constraints, autonomy considerations do not undermine the case for mandating vaccination. (shrink)

Anton Wilhelm Rudolph Amo (1703–c. 1759 ce), philosopher and physician, was born at Axim, Ghana, and died at Fort Chama, Ghana. When he was four years old, the Dutch West Indies Company's preacher in Ghana sent him to Holland to be baptized and educated in the Bible for future service in Ghana. However, the Company headquarters, undesirous of any interference with its lucrative trade in slaves, turned little Amo over to the German Duke Anton Ulric‐Wolfenbuttel.

This study lays the groundwork for a constructive contribution to the contemporary debate regarding divine action. It charts the history of debate about divine action among key Anglophone philosophers of religion, and observes that they were largely committed to this erroneous understanding of divine action as a closed concept.

This volume argues that in order to understand divine action, one must begin with the array of specific actions predicated of God in the Christian tradition.

Volume III of a tetralogy devoted to Divine Agency and Divine Action articulates a comprehensive vision of systematic theology focused on divine action from creation to eschatology.

En la página 52 de su autobiografía Mi vida en la música Daniel Barenboin afirma no compartir la filosofía de Glenn Gould para quien la grabación es la única manera de producir música en el futuro. Baremboin define a su filosofía de la música un ¿naturalismo¿ para el que la música es sinónimo de vida, y lo que la singulariza es el tiempo, y el tiempo es lo que se pierde y jamás vuelve. El tiempo es lo que se pretende (...) expulsar de una sala de grabación. La música es tiempo y, por lo tanto no repetición, el metrónomo sólo repite la medida. A las notas las sigue el silencio sin el cual no existirían, y la duración del sonido es por eso intermitente, finita, mortal. Este efecto de vacío es también marcado en el mundo del lenguaje. Foucault decía que desde el punto de vista ¿arqueológico¿ los discursos son escasos, que lo que primero debe llamarnos la atención es la rareza de su existencia. Por eso mismo el sentido es también escaso, no constituye una abundancia que los hermeneutas deben interpretar. Así como hay más palabras que sentido, hay menos palabras que cosas, y en este orden de las carencias no olvidemos la primera lección de la economía política que define al ¿bien¿ por su rareza. El sonido es, entonces, una isla en un mar de silencio. Pero no fue sin duda este pequeño parágrafo en el libro de Barenboin lo que me marcó un interrogante llamado Gould. Hubo, además, una mención en la misma página referida a la muerte de Gould que le había impedido comparar las distintas versiones de sus Variaciones de Goldberg. Es posible que una cierta curiosidad por los espíritus trágicos haya detenido mi atención. (shrink)

Paralogismen betreffs der Leibnizschen Prädikatlehre werden aufgezeigt und widerlegt. Enthaltensein heißt die Inverse von Ableitung; den zwei Arten von Ableitung, die Leibniz kennt, entsprechen zwei Arten von Enthaltensein. Die beiden Arten von Enthaltensein bieten Leibniz die Möglichkeit zu der logischen und irreduziblen Unterscheidung zwischen notwendigen und bedingten Wahrheiten. Die Unterscheidung zwischen einem Individuum und einer Eigenschaft wird mit mengentheoretischen Methoden und auch mit Hilfe von epistemologischen Begriffen untersucht. Die besondere kategorische Form des Aussagesatzes impliziert, daß es für alle Aussagesätze nur (...) eine einzige Tiefen-Grammatik gibt, welche wesentlich verschiedene Ausdruckweisen von kategorischen Aussagen umfaßt. (shrink)