Sustainable management of natural resources by farmers is under increasing public scrutiny. In Australia, the case of water unsustainably used and stored by agricultural businesses has gained attention with communities in catchments potentially deprived of water and placed at downstream risk. Yet, sustainable water management institutional policy mechanisms remain disjointed around the country. The study reported here applies a strategic response typology to a survey of 404 farmers in four different institutional environments in Australia to explore their responses to institutional (...) pressures. Findings demonstrate a convergence in typologies that relate to farmers organising each other and communities influencing and networking for the benefit of agricultural resource management thereby questioning the traditional continuum of resistance. Furthermore, the mid-range typology ‘avoidance’ emerges as a highly problematic typology for sustainable water management policymakers especially those in weaker institutional environments where there is a need to develop policy instruments that retain farmer water management decision-making power and encourage networks. The paper also extends the strategic response typology to enable understanding of how gender and location affect strategic responses to institutional pressures. Findings provide insight for policy design in times of increasing catastrophic flood and drought conditions exacerbated by poor water management practice. (shrink)

Although sustainable and responsible investment (SRI) has quite recently become a hot research topic, scarcely any systematic research has been paid to the performance of this non-conventional approach to investment during the financial crisis that emerged in mid-2008 when the resilience of the financial markets was sorely tested. Such real-world resilience in practice is the subject of the current research which tests whether environmental, social and governance screens provides ethical investors with adaptive resilience in bull and bear market conditions by (...) focussing on the SRI equity index of one of the most active markets in Europe in terms of ethical investment, the FTSE4Good-Ibex in Spain. Multivariate Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (M-GARCH) analysis indicates that ethical investors in the equity market examined with evidence that greater resilience in severe business cycle shocks could be attributable to SRI by companies. Although limited to a single country study, the results have implications for investors seeking resilience in crisis: when individual values and beliefs towards sustainability tie with personal investment strategy, the end result is adaptive financial resilience, social well-being and environmental defence. (shrink)

Keith Holyoak and Paul Thagard provide a unified, comprehensive account of the diverse operations and applications of analogy, including problem solving, ...

The scope of the issues -- The moral relationship between leaders and followers -- The morality of leaders : motives and deeds -- Puzzles and perils of transformational leadership.

We propose that people typically reason about realistic situations using neither content-free syntactic inference rules nor representations of specific experiences. Rather, people reason using knowledge structures that we term pragmatic reasoning schemas, which are generalized sets of rules defined in relation to classes of goals. Three experiments examined the impact of a “permission schema” on deductive reasoning. Experiment 1 demonstrated that by evoking the permission schema it is possible to facilitate performance in Wason's selection paradigm for subjects who have had (...) no experience with the specific content of the problems. Experiment 2 showed that a selection problem worded in terms of an abstract permission elicited better performance than one worded in terms of a concrete but arbitrary situation, providing evidence for an abstract permission schema that is free of domain-specific content. Experiment 3 provided evidence that evocation of a permission schema affects not only tasks requiring procedural knowledge, but also a linguistic rephrasing task requiring declarative knowledge. In particular, statements in the form if p then q were rephrased into the form p only if q with greater frequency for permission than for arbitrary statements, and rephrasings of permission statements produced a pattern of introduction of modals totally unlike that observed for arbitrary conditional statements. Other pragmatic schemas, such as “causal” and “evidence” schemas can account for both linguistic and reasoning phenomena that alternative hypotheses fail to explain. (shrink)

The nuclear export of mRNA through the nuclear pore complex (NPC) is a process required for the healthy functioning of human cells, making it a critical area of research. However, the geometries of mRNA and the NPC are well below the diffraction limit of light microscopy, thereby presenting significant challenges in evaluating the discrete interactions and dynamics involved in mRNA nuclear export through the native NPC. Recent advances in biotechnology and single‐molecule super‐resolution light microscopy have enabled researchers to gain granular (...) insight into the specific contributions made by discrete nucleoporins in the nuclear basket of the NPC to the export of mRNA. Specifically, by expanding upon the docking step facilitated by the protein TPR in the nuclear basket as well as identifying NUP153 as being the primary nuclear basket protein initiating export through the central channel of the NPC. (shrink)

We examine the use of analogy in human thinking from the perspective of a multiconstraint theory, which postulates three basic types of constraints: similarity, structure and purpose. The operation of these constraints is apparent in both laboratory experiments on analogy and in naturalistic settings, including politics, psychotherapy, and scientific research. We sketch how the multiconstraint theory can be implemented in detailed computational simulations of the analogical human mind.

We created paired moral dilemmas with minimal contrasts in wording, a research strategy that has been advocated as a way to empirically establish principles operative in a domain‐specific moral psychology. However, the candidate “principles” we tested were not derived from work in moral philosophy, but rather from work in the areas of consumer choice and risk perception. Participants were paradoxically less likely to choose an action that sacrifices one life to save others when they were asked to provide more reasons (...) for doing so (Experiment 1), and their willingness to sacrifice lives depended not only on how many lives would be saved, but on the number of lives at risk (Experiment 2). The latter effect was also found in a within‐subjects design (Experiment 3). These findings suggest caution in the use of artificial dilemmas as a key testbed for revealing principled bases for moral judgment. (shrink)

May's careful examination of empirical evidence makes a compelling case against the primacy of emotion in driving moral judgments. At the same time, emotion certainly is involved in moral judgments. We argue that emotion interacts with beliefs, values, and moral principles through a process of coherence-based reasoning (operating at least partially below the level of conscious awareness) in generating moral judgments and decisions.

Published to coincide with an exhibition at Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool, Women on the Waterfront combines essays, first-person accounts, and stunning photographic images to tell the story of the twentieth-century women who worked, and continue to work, in and around the city’s waterfront—or who abandoned urban life to earn a living at sea. At the heart of the project are Michelle Sank’s remarkable and vibrant portraits of the women she has photographed, alongside their own words—alternately chillingly real in their (...) gritty depictions of life on the waterfront and remarkably confident, vulnerable, and even otherworldly. Enhancing these already extraordinary stories is Joanne Lacey’s rich essay, “Journey to the Water’s Edge,” which examines the story behind this fascinating archive and its origins in Lacey’s own family history. (shrink)

The field of causal learning and reasoning (largely overlooked in the target article) provides an illuminating case study of how the modern Bayesian framework has deepened theoretical understanding, resolved long-standing controversies, and guided development of new and more principled algorithmic models. This progress was guided in large part by the systematic formulation and empirical comparison of multiple alternative Bayesian models.

In this paper I argue that a greater understanding of the part of ethics in leadership will improve leadership studies. Debates over thedefinition of leadership are really debates over what researchers think constitutes good leadership. The ultimate question is not “What is leadership?” but “What is good leadership?” The word good is refers to both ethics and competence. Research into leadership ethics would explore the ethical issues of current leadership research, serve as a critical study of the field, analyze and (...) expand normative theories of leadership, and develop new theories, research questions and ways of thinking about leadership. (shrink)

We contribute to the literature on ethics in the professions by theorizing how global mobility precipitates professional insecurity and constrained moral agency. We present our findings of a study of accountants migrating to Canada. Using postcolonial theory and relational/poststructuralist theories of identity and ethics, we contrast the experiences of marginalized and privileged migrant accountants to show how those with “diverse” social identities are not recognized by professionals in Canada and must seek recognition from Canadian colleagues, employers, and clients to reconstitute (...) their professional identities and moral agency. We discuss the implications of the exclusion and marginalization of professionals for migrants, the profession, and society more generally. (shrink)

This study examines how authentic leadership influences team performance via the mediating mechanism of team reflexivity. Adopting a self-regulatory perspective, we propose that authentic leadership will predict the specific team regulatory process of reflexivity, which in turn will be associated with two outcomes of team performance, effectiveness and productivity. Using survey data from 53 teams in three organizations in the United Kingdom and Greece and controlling for collective trust, we found support for our stated hypotheses with the results indicating a (...) significant fully mediated relationship. As predicted the self-regulatory behaviors inherent in the process of authentic leadership served to collectively shape team behavior, manifesting in the process of team reflexivity, which, in turn, positively predicted team performance. We conclude with a discussion of how this study extends theoretical understanding of authentic leadership in relation to teamwork and delineate several practical implications for leaders and organizations. (shrink)

The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning is the first comprehensive and authoritative handbook covering all the core topics of the field of thinking and ...

There is little empirical evidence showing a direct link between a capacity for statistical learning (SL) and proficiency with natural language. Moreover, discussion of the role of SL in language acquisition has seldom focused on literacy development. Our study addressed these issues by investigating the relationship between SL and reading ability in typically developing children and healthy adults. We tested SL using visually presented stimuli within a triplet learning paradigm and examined reading ability by administering the Wide Range Achievement Test (...) (WRAT-4; Wilkinson & Robertson, 2006). A total of 38 typically developing children (mean age of 9;5 years, range 6;4–12;5) and 37 healthy adults (mean age of 21 years, range 18–34) were assessed. In children, SL was significantly related to reading ability. Importantly, this relationship was independent of grade and also age. The adult data, too, revealed that SL was significantly related to reading ability. A regression analysis of the combined child and adult data revealed that SL accounted for a unique amount of variance in reading ability, after age and attention had been taken into consideration. For the first time, this study provides empirical evidence that a capacity for more effective SL is related to higher reading ability in the general population. (shrink)

A gathering of the available ancient diagnostic commentaries, difficult as they are, should allow for the discovery of many interesting insights into the production of knowledge in ancient Mesopotamia. The work under review is disappointing in this regard. The presentation is cumbersome and confusing. The translations are all too often inaccurate, as are the interpretations. All in all, the work represents a step or two backward from previous editions of the texts. With these defects corrected, however, these ancient commentaries have (...) much to offer the modern reader. (shrink)

Understanding the nature of science has long been a desired outcome of science education, despite ongoing disagreements about the content, structure, and focus of NOS expectations. Addressing the concern that teachers likely focus only on student learning expectations appearing in standards documents, this study examines the current state of NOS in science education standards documents from nine diverse countries to determine the overt NOS learning expectations that appeared, NOS statements provided near those learning expectations, but not identified as learning outcomes, (...) and NOS statements found in ancillary text. Findings indicate that NOS ideas rarely occur as expectations for student learning and are far more commonly found in ancillary material. Moreover, consensus was not apparent in the overt learning outcomes for students. Given the well-documented poor state of NOS instruction and the consistent lack of NOS appearing in published curriculum materials, the NOS standards appearing in nearly all documents analyzed are unlikely to provide sufficient conceptual or pedagogical support for NOS to be accurately interpreted or translated into meaningful experiences for students. (shrink)

While ethics and justice are domains that concern the human, this paper argues that these spheres are organized and given meaning in terms of what lies at the limits of the human subject: children (excluded from political and economic life) and non-human animals. In this respect, the orientation to ethical life takes the form of a disavowal: in the attempt to negotiate human vulnerability, a subjectivity that defines itself in terms of the control of nature displaces its fragility onto children (...) and animals. In the face of environmental catastrophe – and the threats to human security that accompany it – there is a shared sense of the tenuousness of life. An opportunity to comprehend this tenuousness is missed, however, to the extent that both children and animals are romanticized as “innocent”: ethically pure because morally and politically incapable. Because of their exclusion from the sphere of moral action, children and non-human animals have come to represent human vulnerability in general: a vulnerability associated with passivity, and a lack of precisely the control that has produced the problems we now face. This paper argues for a reconsideration of the passivity and vulnerability that lies at the “limits of being human” as the site of ethical and political change. The philosophy of Giorgio Agamben is deployed to think through the caesura between human and non-human animality, and the “passivity” or impotentiality that enables the ethical. Jacques Rancière is also drawn upon to consider the failure to recognize children and animals as political actors. (shrink)

We report a study examining the role of linguistic context in modulating the influences of individual differences in fluid and crystalized intelligence on comprehension of literary metaphors. Three...

In this paper I argue that a greater understanding of the part of ethics in leadership will improve leadership studies. Debates over the definition of leadership are really debates over what researchers think constitutes good leadership. The ultimate question is not "What is leadership?" but "What is good leadership?" The word good is refers to both ethics and competence. Research into leadership ethics would explore the ethical issues of current leadership research, serve as a critical study of the field, analyze (...) and expand normative theories of leadership, and develop new theories, research questions and ways of thinking about leadership. (shrink)

An in-depth examination of the work of this important medieval woman mystic.

As the first monograph on waiting in Christian traditions, this study breaks new ground by revealing how waiting becomes a stabilizing force that helps to solidify Christian identity and community. It analyzes various forms of Christian waiting through the lens of Paul Ricoeur’s ideas about ideology and utopia.