Prior research suggests that the media plays an important information intermediary role in capital markets. We investigate the role of the media in influencing firms’ engagement in corporate social responsibility activities. Using a large sample of 4396 unique firms from 42 countries over the period 2003–2012, we find strong evidence that firms engage in more CSR activities if located in countries where the media has more freedom. This relation is robust to using various proxies for media freedom, an alternative source (...) of CSR data, and to applying the instrumental variables approach to address endogeneity. In additional analyses, we find that the positive relation between media freedom and CSR engagement is stronger for better governed firms and for larger firms. Since the media have the ability to impact reputational capital, we conclude that media freedom affects firms’ incentives to engage in costly CSR activities. (shrink)

Dominance feminism and afropessimist theory, despite their critical appearances three decades apart, are undergirded by similar rhetorical strategies, political commitments and argumentative moves. This is the case even as afropessimism’s citational trajectory rarely invokes dominance feminism, and often positions itself as a critique of feminism’s imagined conception of gender as white, one that is thought to be most emphatically announced in the work of scholars like MacKinnon who invest in a gender binary, and in women’s oppressed location in this binary. (...) In this article, I insist on reading dominance feminism and afropessimism together. In so doing, I aspire to challenge afropessimism’s prevailing conception of gender, revealing that while it is often critical of feminist conceptions of gender – particularly conceptualisations of gender that are thought to insist on the shared experiences and positions of women – it actually relies on similar argumentative moves, and even rhetorical seductions, as dominance feminism. (shrink)

This article examines the growing body of commemorative feminist work on intersectionality – the myriad journals and books that have marked intersectionality’s twentieth anniversary and celebrated the analytic’s field-defining status and cross-disciplinary circulation. I argue that this commemorative scholarship is marked by its own genre conventions, including the emergence of originalism, an investment in returning to the ‘inaugural’ intersectional texts – namely Crenshaw’s two articles (1989, 1991) – and assessing later feminist work on intersectionality by its fidelity to those texts. (...) The article reveals that intersectional originalism is its own practice of re-reading and re-interpretation that has its own complex temporal and racial politics, and which is animated by a desire to rescue intersectionality from critique in a moment in which identity politics are increasingly suspect. (shrink)

In this comprehensive collection of essays, most of which appear for the first time, eminent scholars from many disciplines—philosophy, economics, sociology, political science, demography, theology, history, and social psychology—examine the causes, nature, and consequences of present-day consumption patterns in the United States and throughout the world.

Marine ecosystems are under increasing pressure from human activity, yet successful management relies on knowledge. The evidence-based policy (EBP) approach has been promoted on the grounds that it provides greater transparency and consistency by relying on ‘high quality’ information. However, EBP also creates epistemic responsibilities. Decision-making where limited or no empirical evidence exists, such as is often the case in marine systems, creates epistemic obligations for new information acquisition. We argue that philosophical approaches can inform the science-policy interface. Using marine (...) biosecurity examples, we specifically examine the epistemic challenges in the acquisition and acceptance of evidence to inform policy, discussing epistemic due care and biases in consideration of evidence. (shrink)

St. Augustine is the bridge that links ancient philosophy and early Christian theology to the thought patterns of the Middle Ages. But the influence of Augustine's philosophy in general and his epistemology in particular extends far beyond medieval philosophy. Such modern philosophers as Descartes and Malebranche carry the stamp of Augustinism upon their philosophies. What is not so well known is that even some of the most original ideas of Berkeley and Kant can be found anticipated in Augustine.

Responding to serious environmental problems, requires urgent and fundamental shifts in our day-to-day lifestyles. This paper employs a qualitative, cross-cultural approach to explore people’s subjective self-reflections on their experiences of pro-environmental behavioral spillover in three countries; Brazil, China, and Denmark. Behavioral spillover is an appealing yet elusive phenomenon, but offers a potential way of encouraging wider, voluntary lifestyle shifts beyond the scope of single behavior change interventions. Behavioral spillover theory proposes that engaging in one pro-environmental action can catalyze the performance (...) of others. To date, evidence for the phenomenon has been mixed, and the causal processes governing relationships between behaviors appear complex, inconsistent and only partly understood. This paper addresses a gap in the literature by investigating accounts of behavioral spillover in three diverse cultural settings using qualitative semi-structured interviews. The analysis shows that while around half of participants overall who were questioned recalled spillover effects, the other half had not consciously experienced spillover. There were few significant differences across cultures, though some forms of spillover effects were reported more in some cultures than others. More environmentally-engaged participants across all three countries were significantly more likely to experience spillover than those who were less engaged. Accounts of within-domain spillovers were most commonly reported, mainly comprising waste, resource conservation and consumption-related actions. Accounts of between-domain spillover were very rare. Recollection of contextual and interpersonal spillover effects also emerged from the interviews. Our findings suggest that more conscious behavioral spillover pathways may be limited to those with pre-existing environmental values. Behavioral spillover may comprise multiple pathways incorporating conscious and unconscious processes. We conclude that targeting behavioral catalysts that generate more socially diffuse spillover effects could offer more potential than conventional spillover involving a single individual. (shrink)

In the physical sciences a realist ontology rests on our ability to demonstrate the actual and real nature of material entities. Realist metaphysics of social entities, most influentially Bhaskar's critical realism, attempt to provide a related philosophical foundation for the social sciences. This paper examines the central issue of what is real about society it concludes that social relations and the organisations they constitute do exist and discusses the conditions of their demonstration. Realist interpretations of Bourdieu's theories are given particular (...) attention in an argument that accepts the necessity of social realism but remains cautious about the development of methodologies able to provide effective demonstration. (shrink)

First published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Background:Nurses must balance their perceived duty to care against their perceived risk of harm to determine their willingness to report during disaster events, potentially creating an ethical dilemma and impacting patient care.Research aim:The purpose of this study was to investigate nurses’ perceived duty to care and whether there were differences in willingness to respond during disaster events based on perceived levels of duty to care.Research design:A cross-sectional survey research design was used in this study.Participants and research context:Using a convenience sample (...) with a snowball technique, data were collected from 289 nurses throughout the United States in 2017. Participants were recruited through host university websites, Facebook, and an American Nurses Association discussion board.Ethical considerations:Institutional review board approval was obtained from the University of Texas at Tyler and the University of Arkansas.Findings:Analysis of willingness to report to work based on levels of perceived duty to care resulted in the emergence of two groups: “lower level of perceived duty to care group” and “higher level of perceived duty to care group.” The most discriminating characteristics differentiating the groups included fear of abandonment by co-workers, reporting because it is morally the right thing to, and because of imperatives within the Nursing Code of Ethics.Discussion:The number of nurses in the lower level of perceived duty to care group causes concern. It is important for nursing management to develop strategies to advance nurses’ safety, minimize nurses’ risk, and promote nurses’ knowledge to confidently work during disaster situations.Conclusion:Level of perceived duty to care affects nurses’ willingness to report to work during disasters. Primary indicators of low perceived duty to care are amenable to actionable strategies, potentially increasing nurses’ perceived duty to provide care and willingness to report to work during disasters. (shrink)

Resistances to sexual and gender rights are shifting and need new theorisations. This article develops the analytical concept of heteroactivism by exploring its relation to abortion debates in Ireland. Heteroactivism as an analytical category examines resistances to sexual and gender rights that seek to reiterate the place of the heteronormative family (both in terms of gender norms and heterosexuality) through activisms that can stand against new legislative orders. The article investigates three texts to explore how the ‘Vote No’ campaign in (...) Ireland discussed ‘loving both’, but in the main thrust of the poster campaign instead focused on the foetus as an ‘unborn child’. Using textual and visual analysis, we show the creation of Ireland through seeking to ‘love both’ and create a distinction from the dangers, and foreign contagion, of England. The article concludes by arguing that ongoing work is needed to explore heteroactivism and its diverse manifestations, including in abortion debates. (shrink)

It had to happen. After two full decades of intense energy, business ethicists and business practitioners may actually have succeeded in suppressing the feeblest joke of the profession: “Business Ethics. Isn’t that an oxymoron?” Har har har.In the early days of business ethics, the oxymoron had actual embodiments. “Business” was represented by hard-nosed, thicks-kinnedmanagers with no inclination to adopt academia’s language and critiques. “Ethics” was embodied by ivory-towered theoreticians with an undisguised contempt for profit makers. What a joke to think (...) of these two groups as conceptually productive partners. (shrink)

It had to happen. After two full decades of intense energy, business ethicists and business practitioners may actually have succeeded in suppressing the feeblest joke of the profession: “Business Ethics. Isn’t that an oxymoron?” Har har har.In the early days of business ethics, the oxymoron had actual embodiments. “Business” was represented by hard-nosed, thicks-kinnedmanagers with no inclination to adopt academia’s language and critiques. “Ethics” was embodied by ivory-towered theoreticians with an undisguised contempt for profit makers. What a joke to think (...) of these two groups as conceptually productive partners. (shrink)

That we have recently transitioned into a post-truth political era is a common refrain. But the influence of false, inaccurate, and misleading claims on politics in western liberal democracies isn't novel. In their book, Merchants of Doubt, Oreskes and Conway expose the "Tobacco Strategy": the methods various actors have deployed, increasingly since the mid-twentieth century, to obscure the truth about scientific issues from the public, induce widespread ignorance and unwarranted doubt, and stall public responses to issues that can have significant (...) consequences for people's lives. One aspect of the Tobacco Strategy involves the propagation of falsehoods by actors dissenting from an expert consensus (Oreskes... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 44, no. 3. © 2018 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 699 Jennifer C. Nash The Political Life of Black Motherhood In 1976, Adrienne Rich wrote, “We know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood.”1 In the four decades since the publication of Rich’s now-canonical Of Woman Born, Andrea O’Reilly has argued for the advent of “maternal theory” (...) as an academic discipline, the maternal memoir has become a highly popular (and profitable) literary genre, and there has been sustained attention to maternal activism with scholarly analyses of such organizations as Mothers Against Drunk Driving and Mothers of the Movement.2 If Mamie Till Bradley boldly “let the world see” her son’s mutilated body in a 1955 public plea to make visible black suffering and antiblack violence, Valerie Castile’s statement after a jury found a police officer not guilty in the death of her son continued in the tradition of 1. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 11. 2. See Andrea O’Reilly, ed., Maternal Theory: A Reader (New York: Demeter Press, 2007); Ann Hulbert, “The Real Myth of Motherhood,” Slate, March 8, 2005; Jennifer C. Nash and Samantha Pinto, “Strange Intimacies: Reading Black Mothering Memoirs,” Public Culture (forthcoming); Danielle Poe, Maternal Activism: Mothers Confronting Injustice (Albany: SUNY Press, 2016); and Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930–1965 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). 700 Jennifer C. Nash Books Discussed in This Essay Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines. Edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016. Laboring Positions: Black Women, Mothering and the Academy. Edited by Sekile Nzinga-Johnson. Bradford, ON: Demeter Press, 2013. How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump. By Laura Briggs. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017. Birthing Justice: Black Women, Pregnancy, and Childbirth. Edited by Julia Oparah and Alicia Bonaparte. New York: Routledge, 2016. making black (male) pain visible through grief-stricken black motherhood. Castile said, My son loved this state. He had one tattoo on his body and it was of the twin cities, the state of Minnesota with “TC” on it. My son loved this city, and this city killed my son and the murderer gets away.... We’re not evolving as a civilization, we’re devolving, we have taken steps forward, people have died for us to have these rights and now we’re devolving, we’re going back to 1969.3 Her emotional plea reveals the political currency of black maternal suffering, one of the few spaces in which black pain is readily culturally visible. Indeed, there has been intensified scholarly and popular interest in representing black motherhood as both a site constituted by grief and expected loss and as a political position made visible (only) because of its proximity to death. It is certainly the case that a cultural inattention to motherhood has been replaced by an intense investment in representing at least some aspects of “the nature and meaning of motherhood” and 3. “Philando Castile’s Mother Reacts to Verdict,” Washington Post video on YouTube, posted on June 16, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJsD4cCpUA. Jennifer C. Nash 701 in representing certain mothers—particularly black mothers—as symbols of trauma and injury, of pain that can be mobilized for “legitimate” political ends and social change. If, as O’Reilly suggests, maternal theory is now a distinct field, it has been fundamentally shaped by the intellectual and political labor of black feminists—Dorothy Roberts, bell hooks, Alice Walker, Patricia Hill Collins, Hortense Spillers, and Audre Lorde—who have captured the myriad ways that black maternity is cast as pathological, excessive, and marked by aberrant performances of gender and heterosexuality that threaten both the nuclear family and the heterosexual state. Drawing on a varied archive from the Moynihan Report to cultural panics about “kids having kids,” from ongoing representations of black women’s “failure” to breastfeed as a public health crisis to the racialized underpinnings of birth control, black feminist theory... (shrink)

While documentary ethics has been largely normative to date, there is growing interest in alternative forms of ethical thinking. The work of Emmanuel Levinas in particular is providing a way of thinking through both the ethics of documentary viewing and production. This article begins by drawing attention to the link between documentary ethics and aesthetics and then uses Levinas's work to consider the ethical relations established in observational documentary production. Of the different documentary modes, the observational has been the source (...) of particular ethical difficulties, yet viewed from a Levinisian perspective it is possible to identify ways in which observation preserves the alterity of the documentary subject. (shrink)

It is argued that promissory obligation arising from the contract of employment offers a simpler and less contentious explanation and justification of the doctor-nurse relationship at work, than does May's proposal of second-order reasons. The second-order reason position is rejected as the norm for that relationship, and in the exceptional case, where it is admitted, shared employee status is identified as primary validator of a doctor as locus of rational authority. Finally, a brief case is made for a more precise (...) vocabulary to describe the doctor-nurse relationship, as a contribution to more collegial relations. (shrink)

Background:Homeless persons in the United States have disproportionately high rates of illness, injury, and mortality and tend to believe that the quality of their end-of-life care will be poor. No studies were found as to whether nurses or nursing students require moral courage to help homeless persons or members of any other demographic complete advance directives.Research hypothesis:We hypothesized that baccalaureate nursing students require moral courage to help homeless persons complete advance directives. Moral courage was defined as a trait of a (...) person or an action that overcomes fears or other challenges to achieve something of great moral worth.Research design:The hypothesis was investigated through a qualitative descriptive study. Aside from the pre-selection of a single variable to study (i.e. moral courage), our investigation was a naturalistic inquiry with narrative hues insofar as it attended to specific words and phrases in the data that were associated with that variable.Participants and research context:A total of 15 baccalaureate nursing students at a public university in the United States responded to questionnaires that sought to elicit fears and other challenges that they both expected to experience and actually experienced while helping homeless persons complete advance directives at a local, non-profit service agency.Ethical considerations:The study was approved by the Internal Review Board of the authors’ university, and each participant signed an informed consent form, which stated that the study involved no reasonably foreseeable risks and that participation was voluntary.Findings:Before meeting with homeless persons, participants reported that they expected to experience two fears and a challenge: fear of behaving in ways that a homeless person would deem inappropriate, fear of discussing a homeless person’s dying and death, and the challenge of adequately conveying the advance directive’s meaning and accurately recording a homeless person’s end-of-life wishes. In contrast, after their meetings with homeless persons, relatively few participants reported having encountered those obstacles. So, while participants required moral courage to assist homeless persons with advance directives, they required greater moral courage as they anticipated their meetings than during those meetings.Discussion:Our study breaks new ground at the intersection of nursing, moral courage, and advance directives. It might also have important implications for how to improve the training that US nursing students receive before they provide this service.Conclusion:Our results cannot be generalized, but portions of our approach are likely to be transferable to similar social contexts. For example, because homeless persons are misunderstood and marginalized throughout the United States, our design for training nursing students to provide this service is also likely to be useful across the United States. Internationally, however, it is not yet known whether our participants’ fears and the challenge they faced are also experienced by those who assist homeless persons or members of other vulnerable populations in documenting healthcare wishes. (shrink)

William Keith Brooks was an American zoologist at Johns Hopkins University from 1876 until his death in 1908. Over the course of his career, Brooks staunchly defended Darwinism, arguing for the centrality of natural selection in evolutionary theory at a time when alternative theories, such as neo-Lamarckism, grew prominent in American biology. In his book The Law of Heredity, Brooks addressed problems raised by Darwin’s theory of pangenesis. In modifying and developing Darwin’s pangenesis, Brooks proposed a new theory of heredity (...) that sought to avoid the pitfalls of Darwin’s hypothesis. In so doing he strengthened Darwin’s theory of natural selection by undermining arguments for the inheritance of acquired characteristics. In later attacks on neo-Lamarckism, Brooks consistently defended Darwin’s theory of natural selection on logical grounds, continued to challenge the idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and argued that natural selection best explained a wide range of adaptations. Finally, he critiqued Galton’s statistical view of heredity and argued that Galton had resurrected an outmoded typological concept of species, one which Darwin and other naturalists had shown to be incorrect. Brooks’s ideas resemble the “biological species concept” of the twentieth century, as developed by evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr and others. The late-nineteenth century was not a period of total “eclipse” of Darwinism, as biologists and historians have hitherto seen it. Although the “Modern Synthesis” refers to the reconciliation of post-Mendelian genetics with evolution by natural selection, we might adjust our understanding of how the synthesis developed by seeing it as the culmination of a longer discussion that extends back to the late-nineteenth century. (shrink)

The title of this book can be understood in at least two ways. First of all, The Word of God and the Mind of Man is an exploration of the extent to which the human mind can receive and understand divine revelation, insofar as this revelation is understood to include the communication of truth. On a second and more fundamental level, the phrase the word of God recalls its classical context -- the prologue to John's Gospel and the classical Logos (...) doctrine of the early church fathers: all human knowledge is possible because of the unique human participation in the eternal Logos of God, Jesus Christ. - Preface. (shrink)

This book deals with the relationship between feminism and liberalism in theory and practice. The author argues that rather than seeing liberalism as exclusionary of women's specificity, as many contemporary feminists do, we should look at variations in liberalism, and in particular at its democratization in the nineteenth century and how feminists have used liberalism as a resource. Liberalism is analyzed using a post-structuralist theory of hegemony: texts of liberal political philosophy are deconstructed to show how the term "women" is (...) used as an "undecidable" in the Derridean sense to produce the opposition between feminine private and masculine public spheres; these texts are then linked to liberal-democratic social and political practices, including feminism as a social movement. (shrink)

Frustrations attending East/west feminist dialogs in the early days of post-socialism were particularly visible in the Czech Republic. English-language publications explained why Czechs were not going to accept feminism easily, despite the growth of new gender studies centers. This article explores the works of three scholars who participated in these discussions: sociologist Marie Čermáková, philosopher and sociologist Hana Havelková, and sociologist Jiřina Šiklová. It argues that in the early to mid-1990s, Czech gender scholars' explanations of why feminism was inappropriate in (...) the Czech context reproduced state narratives of family and gender relations from the interwar and socialist era. Feminist writings from Western Europe and the US often make explicit the contrast between state agendas and women's lives. Czech narratives of past experiences with the state, however, served as a framework for navigating the early post-socialist era. (shrink)

This article argues that a gender perspective enables us to better understand the emerging basis for collective organization in the world capitalist crisis. Since women and their children are most threatened by inroads on the subsistence economy, and since welfare provisions are the first budgetary cuts made by governments faced with increasing debt burdens, women are forced to engage in collective action to ensure survival. In Latin American countries, this new political arena is even more dynamic than the workplace as (...) a site for engaging in struggle. This situation contrasts with core industrial countries, where the encounter with bureaucratic agencies in redressing human welfare issues tends to fragment individual actions rather than weld together collective consciousness. (shrink)