Women are making a substantial impact on the employment market, both in terms of overall numbers as well as by appointment to male-dominated organizational roles. Research on women in leadership positions within organizations has concentrated on two main foci. Firstly, the identification of relevant individual and organizational characteristics and secondly, on the impact of these variables on the women in management roles. This paper presents the findings from a series of studies in relation to these broad dimensions.

The term Sustainable Development has been used in many different contexts and consequently has come to represent many different ideas. The purpose of this paper was to explore the underlying meaning of the term Sustainable Development, and to assess the dominant ethic behind such meaning. Through this exploration, we uncovered a change in the semantic meaning of the term, and described what that meaning entails. The term Sustainable Development had the potential, we argue, to stimulate discursive engagement with respect to (...) the future development of society within an ethical framework based around the values of inclusivity, diversity, and integration. The importance of philosophical context within which the term is used influences the definitional process of meaning, and has been simulated into the language of the dominant scientific-economic paradigm. We go on to explore how this meaning change has come about. In doing so we looked to the Enlightenment period and the resulting philosophies to explore the foundations of meaning, and then to the work of Jürgen Habermas to explain how the scientific-economic paradigm came to dominate the meaning of Sustainable Development. (shrink)

Dr Ian Ramsey has made considerable use of the word ‘disclosure’ in what he has to say about religion and in his attempts to give an account of the meaning of religious language. He sometimes speaks of ‘discernment’ or ‘insight’ but ‘disclosure’ is the word he normally favours. In what follows I shall ask: what a disclosure is, to what extent Dr Ramsey's use of the notion leads to confusions, and what questions have to be faced in order to resolve (...) these confusions. (shrink)

As the second part of a research agenda addressing the idea and meaning of Sustainable Development, this paper responds to the challenges set in the first paper. Using a Foucaudian perspective, we uncover and highlight the importance of discourse in the development of societal context which could lead to the radical change in our epistemological thought necessary for Sustainable Development to reach its potential. By developing an argument for an epistemological change, we suggest that business organizations have an ethical responsibility (...) towards revaluating Sustainable Development, leading to a discourse based on an integrated inclusive process of celebrating diversity in all its forms. The paper goes on to explore the argument for such a change. This exploration is based on three issues: the notion of over simplification in the promotion of development; the idea of an imbalance in the interaction of business and government operating in the larger context of society; and the notion of increasing responsibility with increasing influence in terms of the business organization within society. Having established the argument for an ethical choice by business organizations, we then reflect on how such a change could be incorporated into an organization. (shrink)

In an article in Philosophy R. G. Swinburne set out to argue that none of Hume's formal objections to the design argument ‘have any validity against a carefully articulated version of the argument’ . This, he maintained, is largely because Hume's criticisms ‘are bad criticisms of the argument in any form’ . The ensuing controversy between Swinburne and Olding 1 has focused upon the acceptable/unacceptable aspects of the dualism presupposed in Swinburne's defence of the design argument; upon whether any simplification (...) is achieved by reducing scientific explanation to agent explanation; and upon the problems which arise from taking a man's acting upon his body as the analogy for understanding a disembodied agent acting upon matter. In this article I shall refer to the Swinburne-Olding controversy when appropriate but my main concern is to return to Swinburne's original article and argue, seriatim , that Hume's individual criticisms of the design argument are for the most part a great deal more powerful than Swinburne allowed. I shall contend that cumulatively they destroy the design argument as any sort of rational foundation for theistic belief. But first I shall indicate briefly the character of the argument together with one or two of the distinctions and refinements in terms of which it has been found helpful to carry on the discussion in recent years. (shrink)

Are you familiar with Michael Sandel’s work?Yes I am. In the nineties I read several books on communitarianism, including Michael Sandel’s Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy.What do you think of communitarianism?I discussed communitarianism in my books Five Essays from 1999 and, especially, Historical Ontology more than ten years ago. My thoughts have not changed since then. Simply put, I think communitarianism is the product of developed countries with long traditions of liberalism. It has referential value, but (...) if directly or indiscriminately adopted in other societies it can be quite dangerous.In recent years Sandel has become very... (shrink)

We present a dynamic programming model which is used to investigate hypothermia as an adaptive response by small passerine birds in winter. The model predicts that there is a threshold function of reserves during the night, below which it is optimal to enter hypothermia, and above which it is optimal to rest. This threshold function decreases during the night, with a particularly sharp drop at the end of the night, representing the time and energy costs associated with returning to normal (...) body temperature. The results of the model emphasise the trade-off between energy and predation, not just between foraging options, but also between foraging during the day and entering hypothermia at night. The value of being able to use hypothermia represents not just energy savings, but also reduced predation risk due to changes in the optimal foraging strategy. Conditions which give a high value of hypothermia are short photoperiod, variable food supply, low temperatures, poor and scarce food supplies. (shrink)

(1996). Knowledge elicitation using a multi‐modal approach. World Futures: Vol. 47, Unity and Diversity in Contemporary Systems Tinking: Systematic Pictures at an Exhibition, pp. 93-101.

The ability to reason independently from one's own goals or beliefs has long been recognised as a key characteristic of the development of formal operational thought. In this article we present the results of a study that examined the correlates of this ability in a group of 10-year-old children ( N = 61). Participants were presented with conditional and relational reasoning items, where the content was manipulated such that the conclusion to the arguments were either congruent, neutral, or incongruent with (...) beliefs, and either logically valid or logically invalid. Participants also received a measure of working memory capacity (the counting span task) and a measure of inhibitory control (the stop signal task). Indices of belief bias and logical reasoning on belief-based problems were predicted independently by both measures. In contrast logical reasoning on belief neutral problems was predicted by working memory alone. The findings suggest that executive functions play a key role in the development of children's ability to decontextualise their thinking. (shrink)

We give in this paper a sufficient condition, cast in semantic terms, for Hallden-completeness in normal modal logics, a modal logic being said to be Hallden-complete (or Ήallden-reasonable') just in case for any disjunctive formula provable in the logic, where the disjuncts have no propositional variables in common, one or other of those disjuncts is provable in the logic.

Li Zehou is perhaps best known among Western audiences for his work on aesthetics. This is mainly due to the fact that translations of his writings available in English are mostly limited to his aesthetics.1 The content of A Response to Michael Sandel and Other Matters differs greatly from these previous translations. Published in Chinese in 2014, it is one of Li’s most recent books, and in it he discusses several main points of the systematic philosophical outlook he has developed (...) over recent decades, and places them in relation to Western liberalism. A Response thus aims far beyond responding to Michael Sandel’s views on justice and morality as presented in the... (shrink)

1976 will surely prove to have been a vintage year in Hume studies. The excitement generated by the Edinburgh and McGill conferences has been complemented by the publication of commemorative issues by at least three journals and now by the appearance of this rich and rewarding volume. Its nineteen papers, all but four of them newly written, display the variety and excitement of present-day Hume scholarship. Indeed, the dominating impression is that the rich veins of Hume’s writings on psychology, morals, (...) religion, art, politics and history are only just being opened up, dramatically broadening the quite narrow focus of much earlier scholarship. The preoccupation with the narrowly epistemological concerns of Book I of the Treatise and of the first Enquiry has given way to a catholic interest in the various facets and levels of Hume’s thought and particularly in the way in which a study of its other dimensions can help us understand the more well-thumbed portions of his works. (shrink)