This article argues that corporate social responsibility (CSR) may contribute to product differentiation in export markets and thus improve export performance. We test this argument by observing a period of decreasing export competitiveness in a leading emerging economy (Brazil). Using a large-scale survey design with 252 questionnaires completed by medium- and large-sized Brazilian exporters, we used structural equations modelling to test our hypotheses. The results suggest that CSR product differentiation predicts export performance better than product quality differentiation and almost as (...) well as product innovation differentiation. Multi-group analysis further revealed that the positive and significant effect of CSR product differentiation on export performance is likely to be contingent on the number and type (developing vs. developed) of countries that are targeted. Our study contributes to the literature on CSR and export performance by developing and empirically validating a model that explains under which conditions CSR-based product differentiation may lead to improved export performance. (shrink)

This paper reassesses the domain of the business ethics curriculum and, drawing on recent shifts in the business environment, maps out some suggestions for extending the core ground of the discipline. It starts by assessing the key elements of the dominant English-language business ethics textbooks and identifying the domain as reflected by those publications as 'where the law ends' and 'beyond the legal minimum'. Based on this, the paper identifies potential gaps and new areas for the discipline by drawing on (...) four main aspects. First, it argues that the domain of business ethics requires extensions dependent on the particular geographic region where the subject is taught. A second factor for broadening the scope is the impact of recent scandals, which arguably direct the focus of ethical inquiry towards the nature of the business systems in which individuals and corporations operate. Third, the impact of globalization and its result on growing corporate involvement in regulatory processes is discussed. Fourth and finally, business ethics reaches beyond the traditional constituencies of 'economic stakeholders' as new actors from civil society enter the stage of ethical decision making in business. We conclude by suggesting that a reconsideration of the domain of business ethics, especially in Europe, is timely, but that to do so represents a major challenge to business ethics educators. (shrink)

Via a historical reconstruction, this paper primarily demonstrates how the societal debate on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) gradually extended in terms of actors involved and concerns reflected. It is argued that the implementation of recombinant DNA technology out of the laboratory and into civil society entailed a “complex of concerns.” In this complex, distinctions between environmental, agricultural, socio-economic, and ethical issues proved to be blurred. This fueled the confusion between the wider debate on genetic modification and the risk assessment of (...) transgenic crops in the European Union. In this paper, the lasting skeptical and/or ambivalent attitude of Europeans towards agro-food biotechnology is interpreted as signaling an ongoing social request – and even a quest – for an evaluation of biotechnology with Sense and Sensibility. In this (re)quest, a broader-than-scientific dimension is sought for that allows addressing the GMO debate in a more “sensible” way, whilst making “sense” of the different stances taken in it. Here, the restyling of the European regulatory frame on transgenic agro-food products and of science communication models are discussed and taken to be indicative of the (re)quest to move from a merely scientific evaluation and risk-based policy towards a socially more robust evaluation that takes the “non-scientific” concerns at stake in the GMO debate seriously. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Rhetorical Sense of Philosophy by Donald Phillip VereneJeffrey Dirk WilsonVERENE, Donald Phillip. The Rhetorical Sense of Philosophy. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2021. xiii + 139 pp. Cloth, $49.95Rhetoric gives philosophy the ability to speak. Philosophy gives rhetoric something to say. They are mutually indispensable, and their rivalry at times descends into enmity. There are also occasions when only the one can rescue the other from (...) catastrophe. Those are the overarching dynamics of Verene's book.There is an introduction, then two parts, "Prolegomena Philosophiae," comprising four chapters, and "Three Rhetorics," comprising three chapters, followed by an epilogue, notes, and an index.Though Verene does not mention Hume in the introduction—and only twice in the book otherwise—it is difficult not to think of him when Verene speaks of philosophy as "a theater of memory," as if correcting Hume's "theater of the mind." It is also corrective to presentism, often attributed to Hume, when Verene claims that a chief task of the philosopher "is to keep us from always living in the present. For this labor to be accomplished the philosopher must go to school with both the poets and the orators." Rhetoric, rightly understood, helps philosophy to remain philosophy and prevents it from becoming sophistry.In chapter 1, "Philosophical Thinking," Verene reminds the reader that mortality is not a choice. The bounded nature of human life leads to the pursuit of happiness and, therefore, also to the pursuit of meaning. The human responds in two ways, by creating both arguments and stories, but arguments as well as stories need words.The "and yet" comes in the second chapter, "Philosophy and the Muses." Verene writes, "The philosopher knows that the real always outstrips language." Philosophy and its kin, poetry, point beyond themselves. Writing is remembering, but what is written, even at its best, can never capture all that is remembered, and memory, even at its best, can never capture all that is.In "Philosophy and Eloquence," Verene maps a way of escaping Kant. Modern philosophy rejects rhetoric and memory in its pursuit of novelty as progress. Verene introduces the concept of ingenium, "a power philosophy shares with rhetoric." It "is the ability to perceive similarity in dissimilars.... the power to produce metaphor" and irony. Metaphor and irony are philosophy's response to the stale univocal predication of critical thinking that Verene sees as the reduction of reality to an analytic concept.In "Philosophical Style," he shows that as soon as a subject is joined to a predicate, the subject ceases to be only what it was. The predicate is an [End Page 369] otherness that is pulled into the subject such that ever after the subject has an inner dialectic. "The ball is red" is generative of a ball that is not merely a ball but also something else, something foreign to its ballness. The ball gives up nothing of what it was but, rather, gains something that it was not, and yet not in the deterministic way of necessity. The ball does not have to be red, but if it is red, then "ball" and "red" constitute an inner dialectic. The ball is red predicatively and not tautologically, but separating out the kinds of predication does not exhaust all the mystery of the inner dialectic; nothing can.The three rhetorics are of "Self-Discourse," "Absolute Thought," and "The Philosophical Frontispiece." These are chapters respectively about speech appertaining to man, God, and the political entity, though each considered slant rather than head-on.Verene juxtaposes Descartes and Vico with respect to self-discourse. Descartes reframes the human being in terms of the first-person singular pronoun, thereby transforming the personal into the categorical. Vico responds by writing not an "autobiography" but, rather, The Life of Giambattista Vico Written by Himself, thereby transforming the pronoun for the other, "he," into the self-identifier. There follows an essay on the essay and especially on the essays of Montaigne as autobiography. "To think," Verene writes, "is to move ideas in relation to each other and thus to illuminate what comes before the mind in experience." What emerges is a dialectic between the "I" and... (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Jahrgang: 101 Heft: 1 Seiten: 61-91.

Unter dem Eindruck einer "Renaissance des Religiösen" einerseits und der zunehmenden Politisierung von Religionen andererseits rückt die Verhältnisbestimmung von Politik und Religion im staatlichen wie im internationalen Kontext verstärkt in den Fokus des politischen und gesellschaftlichen Interesses. In den letzten Jahren trägt auch die politische Philosophie dieser Situation vermehrt Rechnung, was sich in einer steigenden Zahl von Veröffentlichungen zu diesem Thema niederschlägt. Dabei kann sie auf eine reiche Tradition philosophischer Modelle zum Neben-, Mit- oder Gegeneinander von Politik und Religion zurückblicken. (...) Was in dieser Diskussion bisher jedoch fehlt, ist eine differenzierte Darstellung der für die Verhältnisbestimmung von Philosophie, Politik und Religion klassischen Modelle, angefangen von der griechischen Antike bis in die Liberalismus-Kommunitarismus-Debatte des ausgehenden letzten Jahrhunderts. Diese Lücke schließt der vorliegende Band: In 15 Beiträgen namhafter Experten werden klassische Modelle der Verhältnisbestimmung von Philosophie, Politik und Religion, beginnend mit Platon bis hin zu Charles Taylor, eingehend behandelt. (shrink)

This review traces recent developments in German Hobbes scholarship. Relevant publications are discussed along three major fields of inquiry: Hobbes and Liberalism, Hobbes on Politics and Religions, and Hobbes on the Passions, Politics, and Education.

Ein Ziel der Neuregelungen der Insolvenzordnung war es, die Anfechtungsmöglichkeiten auszuweiten. Zugunsten der Gläubiger sollten im Rahmen der neuen Ordnungsfunktion des Insolvenzrechts vermehrt Ansprüche zur Masse gezogen werden, die von den Insolvenzverwaltern gerichtlich durchgesetzt werden müssen. Wegen unzulänglicher Massen sind die Insolvenzverwalter, wie auch bereits zu Zeiten der Konkursordnung, jedoch meist auf eine Fremdfinanzierung angewiesen: Entweder durch staatliche Prozesskostenhilfe oder mit Hilfe der Finanzierungsbereitschaft von Insolvenzgläubigern. Da beide Finanzierungsmöglichkeiten in der Praxis eher theoretischer Natur sind, blieb den Insolvenzverwaltern oftmals nur (...) noch die Möglichkeit, das Klageverfahren auf eigene Kosten und eigenes Risiko zu führen und damit in unzulässiger Weise privates Vermögen mit dem Insolvenzverfahren zu verbinden. Seit der Jahrtausendwende haben sich nun gewerbliche Prozessfinanzierer auf dem Markt etabliert und stellen für Insolvenzverwalter eine sinnvolle Finanzierungsalternative dar. Die vorliegende Arbeit befasst sich mit den Problemen, die sich im Zusammenspiel des Insolvenzverwalters mit der gewerblichen Prozessfinanzierung und der staatlichen Prozesskostenhilfe ergeben. Sie soll all denjenigen Verfahrensbeteiligten eine sinnvolle Hilfe sein, die in der täglichen Praxis mit den aufgezeigten Problemen konfrontiert werden. (shrink)

In their recent paper on “Challenges in mathematical cognition”, Alcock and colleagues (Alcock et al. [2016]. Challenges in mathematical cognition: A collaboratively-derived research agenda. Journal of Numerical Cognition, 2, 20-41) defined a research agenda through 26 specific research questions. An important dimension of mathematical cognition almost completely absent from their discussion is the cultural constitution of mathematical cognition. Spanning work from a broad range of disciplines – including anthropology, archaeology, cognitive science, history of science, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology – we (...) argue that for any research agenda on mathematical cognition the cultural dimension is indispensable, and we propose a set of exemplary research questions related to it. (shrink)

When making an assessment of animal welfare, it is important to take environmental (housing) or animal-based parameters into account. An alternative approach is to focus on the behavior and appearance of the animal, without making actual measurements or quantifying this. None of these tell the whole story. In this paper, we suggest that it is possible to find common ground between these (seemingly) diametrically opposed positions and argue that this may be the way to deal with the complexity of animal (...) welfare. The model will have to be acceptable for the different parties that will be affected by it and real benefits for the animal should result from it. This will be the basis of a practical ethical approach. All this can be condensed into a model that essentially is made up out of three basic elements: the classical welfare analysis with an existing welfare assessment tool, an assessment of the stockholder, and an implementation of the Free Choice Profiling technique. This new framework does not pretend to be a different or better animal welfare matrix; it is intended to integrate existing knowledge and to provide a practical tool to improve animal welfare. It identifies whether there are welfare problems on a farm, if present whether these problems are caused by the housing system or the stockholder, and what can be done to improve the situation. (shrink)

Jonathan Wolff is Professor of Philosophy at University College London. He is the author of Robert Nozick (1991), An Introduction to Political Philosophy (1996) and Why Read Marx Today (2002). He is currently working on a number of topics at the intersection of political philosophy and public policy.

In this paper I analyze Hegel’s concept of life in the Phenomenology of Spirit and Heidegger’s critical comments regarding this concept of life in his 1930/31 Lecture Course on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. I claim that Heidegger's lecture course shows his continued fascination with life, despite his official distance to Dilthey and the then contemporary life-philosophy. I argue that one of the fundamental tenets of life-philosophy, the opposition of "life" to "reason," still motivates Heidegger’s critique of Hegel’s supposedly logocentric concept (...) of life. I begin the paper with a brief review of Heidegger’s life-philosophical starting point after World War One (Section I)and, drawing on Hans Jonas, suggest some meta-reflections on the reasons behind the renewed interest in "life" in the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century (section II). After a sketch of Hegel’s concept of life in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Section III), I then turn to Heidegger’s interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in 1930/31 (Section IV), in particular Hegel’s conception of the correlation of life and time. (shrink)

: In this paper I analyze early Heidegger’s concept of history. First, I argue that early Heidegger makes use of three distinct concepts or spheres of history, namely (1) history as intergenerational process, (2) history as personal or autobiographical development, and (3) history as the real center and origin of all intentional acts in the intentional self. Second, I argue that an essential motif in Heidegger’s discussion is the re-appropriation of what he considers the externalized and expropriated historical reality in (...) all three spheres. I suggest that this constitutes an objective parallelism to similar moves in Marx and neo-Marxist thought, especially Lukaìcs and the Frankfurt School. I show that Heidegger is on his way towards an ethics of time. First, in opposition to theoretical historicism and historical aestheticism or determinism of his time, early Heidegger advocates the active historical participation in history, the engagement in one’s historical situation or praxis. Second, in opposition to the publically regimented and reified time frames, calendars and interpretations, Heidegger argues for the self-reflexive, historical shaping of one’s very own and unique lifetime. Third, because Heidegger finds the origin of all history in the historical enactments of intentions in the intentional self, he ultimately argues for the self-reflexive acknowledgment of this ultimate historicity at the very heart of human intentionality, calling for the always renewed accentuation of this inevitable and ultimate historicity as a necessary condition for authentic temporality. (shrink)

The importance of digital technologies for social and economic developments and a growing focus on data collection and privacy concerns have made the Internet a salient and visible issue in global politics. Recent developments have increased the awareness that the current approach of governments and business to the governance of the Internet and the adjacent technological spaces raises a host of ethical issues. The significance and challenges of the digital age have been further accentuated by a string of highly exposed (...) cases of surveillance and a growing concern about issues of privacy and the power of this new industry. This special issue explores what some have referred to as the “Internet-industrial complex”—the intersections between business, states, and other actors in the shaping, development, and governance of the Internet. (shrink)

The history of Heidegger's relationship to the neo-Kantians is still largely unwritten, despite the fact that in his formative period Heidegger was very close to the neo-Kantian school, especially Windelband and Rickert, Lask and Natorp. With regard to the concept of history and the importance of historical philosophizing, it is the received view that Dilthey was early Heidegger's main and only source of inspiration. This paper argues against this one-sided view by showing the historical and systematic connections between early Heidegger's (...) views on history and the philosophy of history developed by Windelband and Rickert. (shrink)

People undergo many idiosyncratic experiences throughout their lives that may contribute to individual differences in the size and structure of their knowledge representations. Ultimately, these can have important implications for individuals' cognitive performance. We review evidence that suggests a relationship between individual experiences, the size and structure of semantic representations, as well as individual and age differences in cognitive performance. We conclude that the extent to which experience-dependent changes in semantic representations contribute to individual differences in cognitive aging remains unclear. (...) To help fill this gap, we outline an empirical agenda that utilizes network analysis and involves the concurrent assessment of large-scale semantic networks and cognitive performance in younger and older adults. We present preliminary data to establish the feasibility and limitations of such empirical, network-analytical approaches. (shrink)

In the context of some criticism about social responsibility education in business schools, the paper reports findings from a survey of CSR education (teaching and research) in Europe. It analyses the extent of CSR education, the different ways in which it is defined and the levels at which it is taught. The paper provides an account of the efforts that are being made to mainstream CSR teaching and of the teaching methods deployed. It considers drivers of CSR courses, particularly the (...) historical role of motivated individuals and the anticipation of future success being dependent on more institutional drivers. Finally it considers main developments in CSR research both by business school faculty and PhD students, tomorrow''s researchers and the resources devoted to CSR research. The conclusion includes questions that arise and further research directions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:This article assesses the proliferation of international accountability standards (IAS) in the recent past. We provide a comprehensive overview about the different types of standards and discuss their role as part of a new institutional infrastructure for corporate responsibility. Based on this, it is argued that IAS can advance corporate responsibility on a global level because they contribute to the closure of some omnipresent governance gaps. IAS also improve the preparedness of an organization to give an explanation and a justification (...) to relevant stakeholders for its judgments, intentions, acts and omissions when appropriately called upon to do so. However, IAS also face a variety of problems impeding their potential to help address social and environmental issues. The contribution of the four articles in this special section is discussed in the context of standards’ problems and opportunities. The article closes by outlining a research agenda to further develop and extend the scholarly debate around IAS. (shrink)

We critically assess integrative social contracts theory (ISCT) and show that the concept particularly lacks of moral justification of substantive hypernorms. By drawing on Habermasian philosophy, in particular discourse ethics and its recent application in the theory of deliberative democracy , we further advance ISCT and show that social contracting in business ethics requires a well-justified procedural rather than a substantive focus for managing stakeholder relations. We also replace the monological concept of hypothetical thought experiments in ISCT by a concept (...) of practical discourse to better govern business activities on the macro-level of organizational actors such as firms, governments, and NGOs. (shrink)