While there is a significant amount of research investigating managerial ethical judgments, a limited amount examines consumer judgments of unethical corporate behavior and its impact on the marketplace. This study examines how consumers' commitment to a company impacts not only their ethical judgment of corporate behavior but also the outcomes of that judgment. The authors test hypotheses with data from 334 consumers and find that consumers' level of commitment attenuates the level of perceived fairness. More specifically, highly committed consumers may (...) forgive companies for behaviors when perceived harm is low, but become progressively dissatisfied as the level of perceived harm increases. Results of the study point to the importance of considering ethical behavior from a consumer perspective. If corporate actions are perceived as unethical, the company stands to lose favor with their most committed customers. Considering that more time, effort and investment is required to gain a new customer as to retain an old, this study shows that engaging in behavior perceived as unethical by consumers risks alienating the most committed customers. (shrink)

Cutting a cake, dividing up the property in an estate, determining the borders in an international dispute - such problems of fair division are ubiquitous. Fair Division treats all these problems and many more through a rigorous analysis of a variety of procedures for allocating goods, or deciding who wins on what issues, when there are disputes. Starting with an analysis of the well-known cake-cutting procedure, 'I cut, you choose', the authors show how it has been adapted in a number (...) of fields and then analyze fair-division procedures applicable to situations in which there are more than two parties, or there is more than one good to be divided. In particular they focus on procedures which provide 'envy-free' allocations, in which everybody thinks he or she has received the largest portion and hence does not envy anybody else. They also discuss the fairness of different auction and election procedures. (shrink)

Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur were two of the most important hermeneutical philosophers of the twentieth century. Gadamer single-handedly revived hermeneutics as a philosophical field with his many essays and his masterpiece, Truth and Method. Ricoeur famously mediated the Gadamer-Habermas debate and advanced his own hermeneutical philosophy through a number of books addressing social theory, religion, psychoanalysis and political philosophy. This book brings Gadamer and Ricoeur into a hermeneutical conversation with each other through some of their most important commentators. Twelve (...) leading scholars deliver contemporary assessments of the history and promise of hermeneutical philosophy, providing focused discussion on the work of these two key hermeneutical thinkers. The book shows how the horizons of their thought at once support and question each other and how, in many ways, the work of these two pioneering philosophers defines the issues and agendas for the new century. (shrink)

This paper reports on an ongoing ARC Discovery Project that is conducting design research into learning in collaborative virtual worlds (CVW).The paper will describe three design components of the project: (a) pedagogical design, (b)technical and graphics design, and (c) learning research design. The perspectives of each design team will be discussed and how the three teams worked together to produce the CVW. The development of productive failure learning activities for the CVW will be discussed and there will be an interactive (...) demonstration of the project's CVW. (shrink)

Understanding spoken words involves a rapid mapping from speech to conceptual representations. One distributed feature-based conceptual account assumes that the statistical characteristics of concepts’ features—the number of concepts they occur in and likelihood of co-occurrence —determine conceptual activation. To test these claims, we investigated the role of distinctiveness/sharedness and correlational strength in speech-to-meaning mapping, using a lexical decision task and computational simulations. Responses were faster for concepts with higher sharedness, suggesting that shared features are facilitatory in tasks like lexical decision (...) that require access to them. Correlational strength facilitated responses for slower participants, suggesting a time-sensitive co-occurrence-driven settling mechanism. The computational simulation showed similar effects, with early effects of shared features and later effects of correlational strength. These results support a general-to-specific account of conceptual processing, whereby early activation of shared features is followed by the gradual emergence of a specific target representation. (shrink)

What is the significance of the Father in psychoanalysis today? This book constructs a much needed framework to allow psychoanalysts to consider the difficulties of a generation without a solid anchor in the Father. _The Dead Father: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry_ provides a necessary addition to decades of work on the role of the mother in development. The editors bring together world renowned scholars to discuss current observations in their fields, in terms of the Father’s changing but essential functions, both in (...) the lives of the individual and collective. Divided into four parts, chapters focus on: The Lost Father The Father Embodied The Father in Theory Father Culture. Exploring the role of the father in individual psychology, everyday interpersonal and social experience and cultural phenomena writ large, this book will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, as well as psychologists, social workers and scholars in the humanities. (shrink)

Zizek Studies: The Greatest Hits (So Far) assembles and presents the best work published in the field of Zizek Studies over the last ten years, providing teachers, students, and researchers with a carefully curated volume of leading-edge scholarship addressing the unique and sometimes eclectic work of Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek. The chapters included in this collection have been rigorously tested in and culled from the (virtual) pages of the International Journal of Zizek Studies, a leading open access (...) journal that began publication in 2007. The book is organized into three sections or subject areas where Zizek and his seemingly indefatigable efforts have had significant impact: philosophy, politics, and popular culture. As a "greatest hits," the book offers the long-time fan and uninitiated newcomer alike a comprehensive overview of the wide range of opportunity in the field of Zizek studies and a remarkable collection of truly interdisciplinary "hits" from a diverse set of innovative and accomplished writers. (shrink)

While there is a significant amount of research investigating managerial ethical judgments, a limited amount examines consumer judgments of unethical corporate behavior and its impact on the marketplace. This study examines how consumers’ commitment to a company impacts not only their ethical judgment of corporate behavior but also the outcomes of that judgment. The authors test hypotheses with data from 334 consumers and find that consumers’ level of commitment attenuates the level of perceived fairness. More specifically, highly committed consumers may (...) forgive companies for behaviors when perceived harm is low, but become progressively dissatisfied as the level of perceived harm increases. Results of the study point to the importance of considering ethical behavior from a consumer perspective. If corporate actions are perceived as unethical, the company stands to lose favor with their most committed customers. Considering that more time, effort and investment is required to gain a new customer as to retain an old, this study shows that engaging in behavior perceived as unethical by consumers risks alienating the most committed customers. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss the conduct of an interview that was done as a demonstration of the character of interviews in hermeneutic research. This interview was conducted within the context of a graduate course on hermeneutics and involved one of the course professors and a volunteer doctoral student in the class. Although the interview did not occur within a research study, the content of the interview is genuine and not fabricated or acted. Offering the course in an online platform (...) of Zoom allowed for the opportunity to record it and, as a result, we are able to discuss it as well as offer a link to the viewing of the actual interview. Keywords Hermeneutic research, interviewing, Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics. (shrink)

British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Volume 19, Issue 6, Page 1223-1226, December 2011.

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is a top-level ontology consisting of thirty-six classes, designed to support information integration, retrieval, and analysis across all domains of scientific investigation, presently employed in over 350 ontology projects around the world. BFO is a genuine top-level ontology, containing no terms particular to material domains, such as physics, medicine, or psychology. In this paper, we demonstrate how a series of cases illustrating common types of change may be represented by universals, defined classes, and relations employing the (...) BFO framework. We provide discussion of these cases to provide a template for other ontologists using BFO, as well as to facilitate comparison with the strategies proposed by ontologists using different top-level ontologies. (shrink)

This book takes a fascinating look at the linguistic, psychological, and anthropological implications of Sue Savage-Rumbaugh's work with Kanzi--a bonobo who has achieved stunning cognitive and linguistic skills.