Corporate governance is increasingly becoming an issue of global concern, not least because we are more and more living in a corporate world that transcends international boundaries. The main purpose and motivation of this study is to determine how the international community should motivate businesses in fostering exemplary corporate governance, therefore eliminating obstacles to ethically exemplary behavior. The empirical approach utilized here has been applied to 161 businesses, both listed and over-the-counter (OTC) companies, with the results indicating that ethical considerations, (...) corporate governance and organizational performance are inextricably linked and, to an extent, demonstrably proportional. This study also indicates a major finding that family management is a significant mediating variable of the ethical considerations of corporate governance and organizational performance. Finally, this study has developed an operational model of ethical considerations of corporate governance as a consultancy aid for businesses that wish to implement and/or boost their performance in respect to corporate governance. (shrink)

Epistemological foundationalism can be generally characterized as the thesis that in order for there to be any genuine knowledge at all, there must be some self-authenticating instances of knowledge which epistemically ground the whole edifice. This position can be seen to involve three distinct claims: there are self-authenticating, noninferential pieces of knowledge; these privileged instances can be infallibly recognized as such so as to be able to function in grounding other knowledge claims; and without some such instances functioning in this (...) way, knowledge would have no foundation and skepticism would ensue. Although adherents of this ideal run the gamut from Aristotle to Husserl, it is usually identified with the epistemological problematic introduced by Descartes and Locke. The particular formulations of this general ideal differ to the extent that the self-authenticating instances are recognized as being sense-data, phenomenological essences, or intellectual principles. (shrink)

In this age when idealistic themes such as contextualistic theories of meaning and coherence theories of truth are again becoming commonplace in epistemology and philosophy of science, it should be profitable to recall some of the great representatives of the idealistic tradition in order to reexamine their views on the issues of epistemology and their interpretations of science. The purpose of this paper is to examine, if only partially, idealistic views on this latter issue, i.e., on the nature of science.

This paper takes up again the perennial issue of the foundations of empirical knowledge. the general issue is seen to have three distinct though interrelated facets: those of "meaning", "justification", and "truth". first, how is it that our statements about the world acquire meaning; secondly, how is it that our beliefs about the world are justified; and thirdly, in what precisely consists the truth or falsity of the propositional content of our beliefs? answers to these questions are invariably interdependent, and (...) both classically and on the contemporary scene "the foundationalist" and "the coherentist" pictures of knowledge have been the dominant alternatives. after discussing each of these clear though stark views in some detail, i endeavor to construct and defend what i characterize as a mitigated foundational account of knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper a semantics for dynamic predicate logic is developed that uses sequence valued assignments. This semantics is compared with the usual relational semantics for dynamic predicate logic: it is shown that the most important intuitions of the usual semantics are preserved. Then it is shown that the refined semantics reflects out intuitions about information growth. Some other issues in dynamic semantics are formulated and discussed in terms of the new sequence semantics.

Originally published in 1954, on behalf of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, this book presents a general review of British economic statistics in relation to the uses made of them for policy purposes. The text begins with an examination, in general terms, of the ways in which statistics can help in guiding or assessing policy, covering housing, coal, the development areas, agricultural price-fixing, the balance of external payments and the balance of the economy. The problems of statistical (...) application are then separately discussed under the headings of quality, presentation and availability, and organization. A full bibliography and reference table of principal British economic statistics are also included. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in British economic history and statistics. (shrink)

Companies do have ethical responsibility and are not protected by limited liability from the consequences of their actions. A company's record and the preception of its ethics affect its reputation and ensure long term success or failure.The financial community has a history of placing moral considerations above legal or opportunistic expedients. But we are often exposed to moral dangers and the dangers of contamination are increasing. Deregulation and the technological revolution are sharpening ethical conflicts.

Tradition in either of its two senses—the act of handing on , and what is handed on—is a particular instance of a law of human existence that men live in dependence on one another and by the processes of giving and receiving. So a sociologist can write, ‘If we are able to speak of real tradition, we must find the past spontaneously taken into account as the meaning of the present, without any discontinuity of social time, and without any consideration (...) of the past as irrelevant’ . ‘If democracy’, wrote Chesterton, ‘means that I give a man a vote even though he is my chauffeur, tradition means that I give a man a vote even though he is my great-great-grandfather’. What is handed on, however, is not existence of a purely biological kind, to remain always what it has been or to change very slowly over a space of aeons. Except in primitive tribes even tradition is not simply passed on as something static and timeless, and it is received by men who, though themselves in time, are not totally time-bound or restricted by what they receive. They believe themselves to be capable of significant action which is more than the repetition and reproduction of what has gone before. They are able to grasp a span of time and to call it history; they believe themselves to have a history, and they write history. (shrink)