Much existing economic theory overlooks ethics. Rather than situating the market and values at separate extremes of a continuum, Ethics and the Market contends that the two are necessarily and intimately related. This volume brings together some of the best work in the social economics tradition, with contributions on the social economy, social capital, identity, ethnicity and development, the household, externalities, international finance, capability, and pedagogy. Proceeding from an examination of the moral implications of markets, the book goes on to (...) explore such themes as the institutional arrangements of social economies, individual and household decision-making, and economic development in a global context. Ethics and the Market illuminates the diverse and dynamic theoretical approaches that are employed in social economics, reflecting on their continuously evolving relationship with neoclassical economics. This book will prove vital reading for students and academics in the fields of Economics, Sociology, Gender Studies, and Public Policy. (shrink)

This paper reviews studies of corporate ethical codes published since 2000 and concludes that codes be can effective instruments for shaping ethical behavior and guiding employee decision-making. Culture and effective communication are key components to a code’s success. If codes are embedded in the culture and embraced by the leaders, they are likely to be successful. Communicating the code’s precepts in an effective way is crucial to its success. Discussion between employees and management is a key component of successful ethical (...) codes. (shrink)

What are the implications of living in a gender system that recognizes “two and only two” genders? For those individuals whose “gender displays” are inappropriate, there can be a variety of consequences, many of them negative. In this article, the author provides an analysis of her experiences as a woman whose appearance often leads to gender misattribution. She discusses the consequences of the gender system for her identity and her interactions. The author also examines Lorber's assertion that “gender bending” actually (...) serves to perpetuate gender categories rather than to break them down, and she suggests how her experiences might contradict Lorber's argument. Using her biography to examine the social construction of gender, she both illustrates and extends theoretical work in this area. (shrink)

The Gold and the Dross: Althusser for Educators is an introduction to the philosophy of Louis Althusser for educators, activists, and those who are new to theory in general.

The comprehension of living organisms in all their complexity poses a major challenge to the biological sciences. Recently, systems biology has been proposed as a new candidate in the development of such a comprehension. The main objective of this paper is to address what systems biology is and how it is practised. To this end, the basic tools of a systems biological approach are explored and illustrated. In addition, it is questioned whether systems biology ‘revolutionizes’ molecular biology and ‘transcends’ its (...) assumed reductionism. The strength of this claim appears to depend on how molecular and systems biology are characterised and on how reductionism is interpreted. Doing credit to molecular biology and to methodological reductionism, it is argued that the distinction between molecular and systems biology is gradual rather than sharp. As such, the classical challenge in biology to manage, interpret and integrate biological data into functional wholes is further intensified by systems biology’s use of modelling and bioinformatics, and by its scale enlargement. (shrink)

Futile treatment. Do not resuscitate. These terms and the thoughts they evoke may be unfamiliar to families with ill children. Similarly, laws, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act or the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, are probably unfamiliar. Yet these terms and laws, and, more important, their implications, are part of a new world of health care into which more families are thrust—the world of wrenching and complicated decisions.Although the number of these situations is increasing and even (...) predictable, the infrastructure of support services for families dealing with these medical decisions for seriously ill children has not been adequately addressed or developed. Parents know that some children are born with or develop serious illnesses and die. Amid absorbing large amounts of new information and interpreting the parameters and implications of what they are learning about their child's condition, families are forced by circumstances to assess—and to act on—their most critical, and perhaps previously unexamined, values. (shrink)

When discussing the problem of evil, philosophers often distinguish between physical evil (harm caused within the natural world such as natural disasters, disease, and the like), and moral evil (harm caused by human agency). Mapping this traditional distinction is mapped onto the third section of Fichte’s The Vocation of Man would at first seem fairly straightforward: for Fichte, evil arising from nature occurs through “blind mechanism” and is unfree; in contrast, evil done by human beings arises out of free agency. (...) The answer may be more complicated, however, in two different ways. First, Fichte holds that nature is to be cultivated and controlled by human beings so that it is no longer a source of harm; this may imply that the continuing harm done by nature is the result of humans’ failure to have sufficiently tamed nature. In that case, some of the harm caused by nature may be attributable to free human causality and thus no longer be a clearcut instance of natural evil. Second, Fichte repeatedly states that those who fail to act morally and who fail to conform their wills to the moral law are still be in the power of the mechanisms of nature. Even though we must think of them as free, Fichte compares their actions to the operation of nature and its mechanism of necessity. By presenting a careful and nuanced Fichtean account of the traditional distinction between physical and moral evil, we can better appreciate how Fichte understood the meaning and scope of human responsibility. (shrink)

Not much has been written about how the ethics of U.S. business executives are perceived by the American public, yet the perception of integrity is important to both businesses and their investors. This study examines the U.S. public’s perceptions of the ethics of American business executives using Gallup Poll data for the past thirty years. Organizations with unethical executives have trouble attracting investors, customers, and new managerial talent. They suffer lawsuits, market share deterioration, and often prison time for the once-revered (...) leaders. This study also looked at the U.S.’s relative standing on the Corruption Perceptions Index and the Edelman Trust Barometer. Confidence in the ethics of the U.S. business executive remains fairly low on the Gallup Poll surveys and the U.S. has declined on the CPI and Edelman Trust Barometer. (shrink)

Greta Garbo named herself. It was she who invented the name “Garbo” and officially registered the change from Greta Gustafsson to Greta Garbo at the Ministry of Justice in Sweden on 4 December 1923. The name had the metonymic virtue of suggesting the nature of her screen presence. The Swedish meaning of garbo, “wood nymph,” suggests the association with otherworldly forces that became part of her image; while the Spanish meaning of the word, “animal grace sublimated,” combines the animal passion (...) and spiritual grace that were part of her power.1 And yet in most accounts of Garbo’s life and work the legend still persists that it was Swedish director Mauritz Stiller who named her after a seventeenth-century Hungarian king. The extent to which the legend has obscured Garbo’s initial act of self-naming is symptomatic of the larger tendency in film theory and criticism to mask the creative power of the actress by treating her as the blank sheet upon which the director inscribes his own signature.What is particularly misleading about the Svengali metaphor as it has figured in studies of Garbo is that it so deliberately masks the evidence. In her article “Gish and Garbo: The Executive War on the Stars,” Louise Brooks suggests that the popular image of Garbo—the “dumb Swede” transformed by Stiller’s art—was perpetuated by Hollywood executives eager to play down the very real power that Garbo already exhibited in the rushes for her first American film, The Torrent . “The whole MGM studio, including Monta Bell, the director, watched the daily rushes with amazement as Garbo created out of the stales, thinnest material the complex, enchanting shadow of a soul upon the screen.” Although recent accounts of Garbo’s life and work have advanced beyond the “dumb Swede” publicity of Photoplay magazine, critics still reveal a similar, almost vampish determination to deprive Garbo of her creative power. “Her contribution,” states Kenneth Tynan, “is calm and receptiveness, an absorbent repose which normally, in women, coexists only with the utmost vanity. Tranced by the ecstasy of existing, she gives to each onlooker what he needs” . Comparing Garbo to a “watermark in a blank sheet of paper,” David Thomson says in an essay in honor of her seventy-fifth birthday: “She must be no one in herself if she is to signify so much to so many others…. All the moods and moments of love are encompassed because the appearance is hollow. We are to inhabit it, to flesh it out.” In these accounts, Garbo is presented not as an active shaping power but as a passive female vessel, ready to receive the impress of male voyeuristic fantasy. Betsy Erkkila, assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, is author of Walt Whitman among the French: Poet and Myth and editor of Ezra Pound: The Critical Reception. She is currently working on a book, Whitman the Political Poet, and a collection of essays, American Women Poets Musing. (shrink)

Futile treatment. Do not resuscitate. These terms and the thoughts they evoke may be unfamiliar to families with ill children. Similarly, laws, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act or the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, are probably unfamiliar. Yet these terms and laws, and, more important, their implications, are part of a new world of health care into which more families are thrust—the world of wrenching and complicated decisions.Although the number of these situations is increasing and even (...) predictable, the infrastructure of support services for families dealing with these medical decisions for seriously ill children has not been adequately addressed or developed. Parents know that some children are born with or develop serious illnesses and die. Amid absorbing large amounts of new information and interpreting the parameters and implications of what they are learning about their child's condition, families are forced by circumstances to assess—and to act on—their most critical, and perhaps previously unexamined, values. (shrink)

The dramatic increase in the number of corporate ethical codes over the past 20 years has been attributed to the Watergate scandal and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Ethical codes differ somewhat from profesional codes and mission statements; yet the terms are frequently interchanged and often confused in the literature. Ethical code studies are reviewed in terms of how codes are communicated to employees and whether implications for violating codes are discussed. Most studies use content analysis to determine subjects in (...) codes. Little information is available about how codes are communicated, whether they are accepted and used by employees, and whether they affect employee/corporate behavior. More research on ethical codes is needed to answer some of these questions. (shrink)

Alongside recent world-historical dates such as 11 September 2001, we would place 15 February 2003. On that day, around 10 million people—some estimates are much higher—demonstrated on the streets of the world's cities in opposition to the US war on Iraq, then being merely threatened. Sartre's study of the elements of history in Critique of Dialectical Reason and its unpublished ethical sequel, Morality and History, illuminate, and are illuminated by, the movements that contest today's global system. From the Critique, we'll (...) engage his notions of negative universality as threat of death and the "fusing" of "series" into "groups" as response. From Morality and History, we'll take "integral humanity" as a goal and standard; it seems to us built into the global act of February 15 and into the wider movement of which that day was a moment. After comparing a Sartrean take on February 15 with the famous Habermas-Derrida appeal inspired by that day, we'll close with some reciprocal illuminations between Sartre's theories and Zapatista practice. (shrink)

The question whether, in the interim, the "socialist morality" allows adequate restraint on revolutionary action, cannot fairly be answered in abstraction from history, in this case our epoch. We submit that the group of projects called corporate "globalization" - imposing free trade, privatization, and dominance of transnational corporations - shapes that epoch. These projects are associated with polarization of wealth, deepening poverty, and an alarming new global U.S. military domination. Using 9/11 as pretext for a "war on terror," this domination (...) backs corporate globalization. If Nazi occupation of France and French occupation of Algeria made Sartre and Beauvoir assign moral primacy to overcoming oppressive systems, then U.S. global occupation should occasion rebirth of that commitment. Parallels among the three occupations are striking. France's turning of colonial and metropolitan working classes against each other is echoed by globalization's pitting of (e.g.) Chinese against Mexican workers in a race to lower wages to get investment. Seducing first-world workers with racial superiority and cheap imports from near-slavery producers once again conceals their thralldom to their own bosses. Nazi and French use of overwhelming force and even torture are re-cycled by the U.S. and its agents, again to hide the vulnerability of their small forces amidst their enemies. (shrink)

A vast stream of empirical work has revealed that coach and athlete leadership are important determinants of sport teams’ functioning and performance. Although coaches have a direct impact on individual and team outcomes, they should also strive to stimulate athletes to take up leadership roles in a qualitative manner. Yet, the relation between coach leadership behavior and the extent of high-quality athlete leadership within teams remains underexposed. Based on organizational justice theory and the social identity approach, the present research tested (...) whether perceived justice of the coach positively predicts the quality of athlete leadership. Furthermore, we examined the role of group dynamic processes within this relation. Belgian volleyball and basketball players were asked to rate the justice of their coach, their team identification, the task cohesion, and the athlete leadership quality in the team. Structural equation modeling indicated that coaches’ perceived justice positively predicted the quality of athletes’ leadership, and that this relation was established through three intermediate steps. These results suggest that fair coach behavior does not only bridge the gap between leadership and followership, it also has the potential to improve the quality of athletes’ leadership within sport teams. More specifically, findings suggest that coaches’ perceived justice cultivates a shared social identity characterized by high levels of players’ identification with their team, which in turn increased their perceptions of the team’s task cohesion. Finally, this increased task cohesion encouraged the athlete leaders to demonstrate high-quality leadership. (shrink)

The editors of the JRE collected short essays from scholars of religion in response to a recent incident at Hamline University that made national headlines. Last fall, Hamline University administrators refused to extend a contract to an adjunct professor of art history after a Muslim student accused her of Islamophobia for showing a 14th‐century image of Mohammad in an online class. The event provoked intense conversations about issues of academic freedom, religious diversity, the status of contingent faculty, and race. These (...) essays bring together scholarly and personal reflections about the incident at Hamline and what it means for the pedagogy of religious studies. (shrink)

This is part of a complete set of Jane Austen's novels collating the editions published during the author's lifetime and previously unpublished manuscripts. The books are illustrated with 19th century plates and incorporate revisions by experts in the light of subsequent research.

In _Vibrant Matter_ the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we (...) to acknowledge that agency always emerges as the_ _effect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events. Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy. (shrink)

Communicating ethical values is a serious issue for a number of organizations. While ethical codes are useful, they cannot exist alone. Organizations must make certain codes reflect the ideals of individuals in the organization and the ethical expectations must be clearly communicated. This study examined the sources (people) and channels (ways messages were received) that affected how employees learned about ethics. Results showed that training and orientation programs were affirmed as sources of learning along with teaching others. Codes and handbooks (...) were also identified as ways employees learned about ethics in their organization. Ethical issues were discussed more frequently with fellow employees than with supervisors suggesting that managers could be more proactive about discussing ethics with employees. (shrink)

Class I PI 3‐kinases signal by producing the signaling lipid phosphatidylinositol(3,4,5) trisphosphate, which in turn acts by recruiting downstream effectors that contain specific lipid‐binding domains. The class I PI 3‐kinases comprise four distinct catalytic subunits linked to one of seven different regulatory subunits. All the class I PI 3‐kinases produce the same signaling lipid, PIP3, and the different isoforms have overlapping expression patterns and are coupled to overlapping sets of upstream activators. Nonetheless, studies in cultured cells and in animals have (...) demonstrated that the different isoforms are coupled to distinct ranges of downstream responses. This review focuses on the mechanisms by which the production of a common product, PIP3, can produce isoform‐specific signaling by PI 3‐kinases.Editor's suggested further reading in BioEssays: Phosphatidylinositol 4,5‐bisphosphate: Targeted production and signaling AbstractHow does SHIP1/2 balance PtdIns(3,4)P2 and does it signal independently of its phosphatase activity? Abstract. (shrink)

Many of our children are poorly prepared to face the challenges of school and growing up in our complex society. The term readiness is misrepresented in the field of education; this book implies a different type of readiness involving a process that can be taught and nurtured within each child. Going beyond what our schools typically assess to determine readiness to attend school, which is often based upon age, this book addresses the synergistic aspects of readiness, learning, and adaptation that (...) allow children to be optimally ready to learning and capable of handing for challenges and transitions. This more holistic and interactive understanding of readiness involves not only the typical physical development, but also psychological aspects including the cognitive, emotional, spiritual, behavioral, and environmental pieces. The goal of this book is to provide the necessary lens through which we can see what is really hindering many children in schools today, along with possible approaches and interventions typically not seen as educational in nature, but what may be just the needed prescription for our ailing youth. (shrink)