ABSTRACTChristopher Achen and Larry Bartels argue, in Democracy for Realists, that voters tend to be not only politically ignorant but irrationally attached to group identities. That they use group identities is not in dispute, but the irrationality of doing so is questionable. The instability and malleability of group identities suggests that they are more than primal, illogical attachments. While Achen and Bartels assume that they must be affective, they may in fact be rational. They may, for example, serve as heuristics (...) for individual interests. (shrink)

Don Green and Ian Shapiro's Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory, despite the impressive amount of work that has gone into it, is undercut by a number of serious misunderstandings of the use of the rational choice approach by students of American politics. Furthermore, Green and Shapiro adopt an extremely pinched notion of an empirical contribution and an outmoded and idealized view of the scientific method. If their standards were adopted, it would be difficult to allow that anyone in political science (...) has made an empirical contribution, or that political science is a scientific enterprise. (shrink)

We used a new method called “Ghost-in-the-Machine” (GiM) to investigate social interactions with a robotic bartender taking orders for drinks and serving them. Using the GiM paradigm allowed us to identify how human participants recognize the intentions of customers on the basis of the output of the robotic recognizers. Specifically, we measured which recognizer modalities (e.g., speech, the distance to the bar) were relevant at different stages of the interaction. This provided insights into human social behavior necessary for the development (...) of socially competent robots. When initiating the drink-order interaction, the most important recognizers were those based on computer vision. When drink orders were being placed, however, the most important information source was the speech recognition. Interestingly, the participants used only a subset of the available information, focussing only on a few relevant recognizers while ignoring others. This reduced the risk of acting on erroneous sensor data and enabled them to complete service interactions more swiftly than a robot using all available sensor data. We also investigated socially appropriate response strategies. In their responses,the participants preferred to use the same modality as the customer’s requests, e.g., they tended to respond verbally to verbal requests. Also, they added redundancy to their responses, for instance by using echo questions. We argue that incorporating the social strategies discovered with the GiM paradigm in multimodal grammars of human–robot interactions improves the robustness and the ease-of-use of these interactions, and therefore provides a smoother user experience. (shrink)

The environment impacts human health in profound ways, yet few theories define the form of the relationship between human physiology and the environment. It is conjectured that such complex systems cannot interact directly, but rather their interaction requires the formation of an intermediary “interface.” This position contrasts with current epidemiological constructs of causation, which implicitly assume that two complex systems transfer information directly while remaining separate entities. Further, it is contended that dynamic, process‐based interfaces incorporate components from all the interacting (...) systems but exhibit operational independence. This property has many consequences, the foremost being that characteristics of the interface cannot be fully resolved by only studying the systems involved in the interaction. The interface itself must be the subject of inquiry. Without refocusing the attention on biodynamic interfaces, how the environment impacts health cannot be discerned. Also see the video abstract here https://youtu.be/XeyjeZeyo4o. (shrink)

How is time framed in corporate social responsibility (CSR) talk? The literature mostly fails to analyze how multiple CSR activities are framed from a temporal perspective. Moreover, those researchers who undertake temporal framing tend to overlook the role of home-country cultural characteristics. Using a mixed-method analysis of 2,720 CSR reports from developing country companies, we show that CSR talk is mostly framed in the future tense when firms communicate complex human rights issues such as slavery or child labor, while the (...) past and present tenses are more frequent when they report on philanthropy and other cause-related activities. We find that these effects are stronger when firms are from countries characterized by greater uncertainty avoidance. We contribute to the CSR communication literature by showing that temporal references in CSR talk tend to differ, depending on the company-level control of CSR activities, and by highlighting uncertainty avoidance’s role as a boundary condition for aspirational talk’s performativity. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractWe can, for example, understand intimately how the human endocrine systems works, and likewise the chemical nature of compounds present in our environment; but the result of the interaction cannot be deduced from any simple combination of the two knowledge sets: it's not the interacting entities that we should be studying, but the process that creates the phenomena that we witness as a result of this interaction. This is the “biodynamic interface” to which Manish Arora, Alessandro Giuliani and (...) Paul Curtin refer in their article in this issue, and it is a conceptual structure that comes into being upon interaction of entities: a new way to study interactions in complex systems and better understand emergent phenomena. (shrink)

How do firms make sense of creating shared value projects? In their sense-making processes, do they extend the meaning spectrum to include human rights? What are the dominant cognitive frames through which firms make sense of CSV projects, and are some frames more likely to have transformative power? We pose these questions in the context of small-scale firms in a low-to-middle income country—a context where CSV policies have been promoted extensively over the last decade in the expectation of improved economic (...) competitiveness, growth, and sustainable development processes. We employ a grounded theory approach to identify three dominant cognitive frames used by our respondents to make sense of CSV. The most prevalent frame prioritizes economic over social and environmental goals, and considers social, environmental, and human rights benefits to trickle down from economic growth and wealth generation. In the second frame, economic actors follow a win–win logic according to which environmental sustainability is pursued only if there are clear and foreseeable economic payoffs. The third frame is a niche that emphasizes the attainment of certain human rights goals, despite a perceived lack of immediate economic returns. Our work casts doubt on the capacity of CSV projects to stimulate sustainable development processes without radically changing entrepreneurs’ cognitive frames from growth first to humanizing the business. (shrink)

Greenwashing (GW) is a complex, dynamic, interdisciplinary, multidimensional, and multifaceted phenomenon. There are more theoretical than empirical studies on GW because of several difficulties in collecting accurate data and obtaining objective GW measures. After disentangling the multifaceted GW phenomenon by describing its main dimensions, this study provides a systematic methodological literature review on empirical research papers published from 1990 to 2022 in journals of Business, Management, and Accounting to understand how empirical researchers are operationalizing GW and how our methodological choices (...) affect our understanding of this phenomenon. Our results show that the actual GW operationalization is challenging and that scholars are highly uncertain about how such operationalization should be designed and implemented to provide an effective GW measurement instrument. Further, a growing number of studies investigate hypothetical GW cases adopting perception-based measures, while limited research explores real GW cases. (shrink)

A recent preoccupation in scholarly research is the capacity of firms in developing country industrial clusters to comply with international corporate social responsibility policies and codes of conducts. This research is at an early stage and draws on several—often quite distinct—scholarly traditions. In this paper, we argue that future work in this area would benefit from a more explicit examination of the connection between cluster firms and human rights defined according to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent (...) covenants and treaties. We argue that cluster firms’ adoption of CSR policies, often indiscriminately imposed by global buyers, should be differentiated from firms’ actual human rights practices. Based on this distinction, we elaborate a typology of industrial clusters and identify a set of factors likely to influence their practice. Against this background, we discuss an agenda for future research and elaborate on the potential methodological intricacies related to research on the interface between industrial clusters and human rights. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 218 Seiten: 91-117.

Studies performed in absence of gravitational constraint show that a living system is unable to choose between two different phenotypes, thus leading cells to segregate into different, alternative stable states. This finding demonstrates that the genotype does not determine by itself the phenotype but requires additional, physical constraints to finalize cell differentiation. Constraints belong to two classes: holonomic (independent of the system's dynamical states, as being established by the space‐time geometry of the field) and non‐holonomic (modified during those biological processes (...) to which they contribute in shaping). This latter kind of “constraints”, in which dynamics works on the constraint to recreate them, have emerged as critical determinants of self‐organizing systems, by manifesting a “closure of constraints.” Overall, the constraints act by harnessing the “randomness” represented by the simultaneous presence of equiprobable events restraining the system within one attractor. These results cast doubt on the mainstream scientific concept and call for a better understanding of causation in cell biology. (shrink)

Human–robot interactions are often affected by error situations that are caused by either the robot or the human. Therefore, robots would profit from the ability to recognize when error situations occur. We investigated the verbal and non-verbal social signals that humans show when error situations occur in human–robot interaction experiments. For that, we analyzed 201 videos of five human–robot interaction user studies with varying tasks from four independent projects. The analysis shows that there are two types of error situations: social (...) norm violations and technical failures. Social norm violations are situations in which the robot does not adhere to the underlying social script of the interaction. Technical failures are caused by technical shortcomings of the robot. The results of the video analysis show that the study participants use many head movements and very few gestures, but they often smile, when in an error situation with the robot. The results suggest that participants do not see the robot as a social interaction partner with comparable communication skills. Our findings have implications for builders and evaluators of human–robot interaction systems. The builders need to consider including modules for recognition and classification of head movements to the robot input channels. The evaluators need to make sure that the presence of an experimenter does not skew the results of their user studies. (shrink)

The development of researches on thermo- and galvanomagnetic effects in Italy between 1911 and 1926 has been studied by taking into account several factors: a partial isolation of the Italian physics community; its delay in adopting the microscopic and statistical approach to the conduction properties of metals; a choice of a dualistic theory of conduction in a context of a predominance of theories in which the only mobile carrier was the electron; and an epistemological stand that considered the theory-experiment relation (...) more relevant than the theory's compatibility with background knowledge. (shrink)

English summary: The present work demonstrates the important influence of Heidegger on the philosophical thought of Walter Benjamin, on his philosophy of history, as well as his philosophy of art and language. Concentrating on the formative periods for both philosophers, the work examines their early education, as well as the interlacing of the philosophy of art and history in their concept of art. The final section treats works by both philosophers on the philosophy of art from their early years. French (...) description: L'objectif principal de ce livre est de demontrer de quelle maniere la lecture de certains textes de jeunesse de Heidegger marqua profondement la pensee philosophique de Benjamin. Celui-ci aurait subi l'influence heideggerienne aussi bien au niveau de sa propre philosophie de l'histoire que de sa philosophie du langage et de sa philosophie de l'art. Le fondement theorique est l'approche de la periode de formation, encore peu etudiee, des deux philosophes. La philosophie neokantienne est le principal courant philosophique a l'epoque dans toutes les universites allemandes. C'est pourquoi le point de depart de la recherche, notamment pour la premiere et la deuxieme partie (histoire et langage), se centre sur la formation des jeunes Benjamin et Heidegger aupres de maitres tels que Heinrich Rickert, Edmund Husserl et Emil Lask. L'entrecroisement de philosophie de l'histoire et de philosophie du langage aura une projection decisive dans le debat concernant le concept d'art chez les deux philosophes. Le troisieme axe d'etude porte quant a lui sur la philosophie de l'art. Il traite du livre de Heidegger date de 1929 sur Kant et le probleme de la metaphysique, et du texte de jeunesse de Benjamin intitule L'arc-en-ciel. Entretien sur l'imagination (1915). (shrink)

In A Centaur in Auschwitz, Massimo Giuliani sheds new light on Primo Levi's rational, demythologizing approach to suffering and survival. Whether working in narrative or poetic form, Levi grappled with the ambiguities and complexities of innocence and guilt, triumph and loss. This unique book, with its concise overview of Levi's expression and development as a writer, reveals Primo Levi for what he was: scientist, intellectual, Jew, and dedicated seeker of the roots of human dignity.

We examine whether, relative to their global peers, the financial performance of firms from developing countries leads to increases in human rights abuses. We also study the institutional conditions that qualify this relationship. Based on a combination of behavioral and neo-institutional theories, we suggest there is a positive relationship between financial performance and human rights misbehavior as home country liabilities motivate firms to misbehave to achieve their primary goal of economic leadership. We also suggest that strong regulatory and normative pressures (...) attenuate the abovementioned positive relationship, as failure to comply with norms endangers such firms’ secondary goal of achieving international legitimacy. Our analysis, based on a sample of 245 large companies from eight developing countries studied over a 20-year period, supports our hypotheses. Our empirical results suggest that such companies misbehave when they endeavor to strike a balance between maintaining their global economic leadership and sustaining their social legitimacy. (shrink)

The 1930-60s saw the beginning of a fertile stream of research based on a historical-comparative methodology focused on case-law viewed as the paradigm of the true living law. Today, the new frontier is in the information age and in thinking law as information.

Questo contributo esplora le connessioni esistenti tra un particolare sistema di produzione e il corrispondente modello di sfruttamento nel contesto dell'assegnazione del colore - o razzializzazione - delle popolazioni del Pacifico e di una concezione dell'Australia come spazio politico ‘bianco'. L'analisi si concentra sul fenomeno del, quel particolare sistema di reclutamento e sfruttamento della forza lavoro impiegato prevalentemente nelle piantagioni di canna da zucchero del Queensland e delle Isole Fiji che, tra il 1863 e il 1904, coinvolse uomini e donne, (...) adulti e ragazzi delle isole della Melanesia, della Micronesia e, in minor modo, della Polinesia. Il processo di reclutamento comprendeva quasi sempre la coazione e il servaggio, per quanto vi fossero tra i lavoratori reclutati anche coloro che si offrivano volontariamente. Il lavoro a contratto o, sottoposto a livelli di disciplina, controllo e coercizione molto elevati e senza reali garanzie di salario, condizioni e durata, aveva termini temporali precisi e difficilmente rinnovabili. (shrink)

Publié en janvier 2020, cet ouvrage de Claude Langlois puise son origine dans un « sentiment d’urgence, urgence civique et toute séculière, d’apporter [sa] part de vérité » (p. 7) après la publication, le 20 août 2018, de la Lettre au peuple de Dieu du pape François. Directeur d’étude à l’École pratique des hautes études, Claude Langlois est historien et sociologue, spécialiste du catholicisme contemporain. Il s’empare du sujet de la pédophilie après avoir déjà fait une incursion croisée dans...

Poor ability to regulate one's own food intake based on hunger cues may encourage children to eat beyond satiety, leading to increased risk of diet-related diseases. Self-regulation has multiple forms, yet no one has directly measured the degree to which different domains of self-regulation predict overeating in young children. The present study investigated how three domains of self-regulation (i.e., appetitive self-regulation, inhibitory control, and attentional control) predicted eating in the absence of hunger (EAH) in a community sample of 47 preschool-aged (...) children (Mage = 4.93, SD = 0.86). Appetitive self-regulation, as measured using a delay of gratification task, was significantly and negatively associated with EAH 1 year later (p< 0.5). Measures of inhibitory and attentional control did not significantly predict EAH. These results suggest that food-related self-regulation may be a better predictor of overeating behaviors than general measures of self-regulation. (shrink)

Il saggio presenta la definizione e l’interpretazione di Maimonide delle sette leggi noahidi come si trovano nel codice halakhico _Mishnè Torà, Hilkhot melakhim_, e come discusse ed elaborate dal pensatore ebreo contemporaneo (tedesco-americano) Steven S. Schwarzschild. Rispetto ad altre versioni rabbiniche, l’interpretazione di Maimonide aggiunge la condizione che l’osservanza di quelle leggi è valida solo se sono accettate e rispettate come leggi rivelate, non solo come _lex naturalis_. Su tale condizione esiste un disaccordo tra gli studiosi e i rabbini ebrei, (...) per esempio tra Marvin Fox e Aaron Lichtenstein (la loro posizione è un caso di studio presentato qui). Più specificamente, Schwarzschild argomenta a favore dell’interpretazione del Rambam e cerca di dimostrare che è coerente con la visione globale che Maimonide aveva dell’ebraismo in quanto tale. The essay presents Maimonides’ definition and interpretation of the seven Noahide laws as they are found in the halakhic code _Mishnè Torà, Hilkhot melakhim_, and as discussed and elaborated by the contemporary Jewish (German-American) thinker Steven S. Schwarzschild. In comparison with other rabbinical versions, Maimonides’ interpretation adds the condition that the observance of those laws is valid only if they are accepted and obeyed as revealed laws, not only as _lex naturalis_. About such a condition a disagreement exists among the Jewish scholars and rabbis, for example between Marvin Fox and Aaron Lichtenstein (their position is a case-study presented here). More deeply, Schwarzschild argues in favor of the Rambam’s interpretation and tries to demonstrate that it is consistent with the comprehensive vision Maimonides had on Judaism as such. (shrink)