Fleck’s social theory of science refers to many ethnological examples in order to explain how collective thinking and acting constructs certain systems of belief and knowing. According to Fleck, scientific concepts and practices are comparable with magic terms and ceremonies. This essay aims to identify the ethnological sources that Fleck’s epistemology is using. By confronting them with other relativistic theories that were circulating in Lemberg during the interwar period, the originality of Fleck’s own position can be contextualized and explained as (...) well. (shrink)

On the 25th anniversary of Berry’s historic papers on the geometric phase, I discuss here our neutron interferometry experiment in which this phase is clearly separated from the dynamical phase. The connection of this experiment to the observation of the sign reversal of the wave function of a fermion during a 2π precession in a magnetic field by three groups independently in 1975 is discussed.

Why do marketing managers in the transitional economies of Eastern Europe and China often engage in competitively irrational behavior, choosing pricing strategies that damage competitors’ profits, rather than choosing pricing strategies that improve their firm’s profits? We propose one possible reason, the moral vacuum created by the collapse of communist ideology. We hypothesize and find that managers who experienced formal communist moral ideological indoctrination are less likely to be competitively irrational than the post-communist managers who did not. Implications are discussed.

This is a discussion and transcription of a “lose Blatt” of Immanuel Kant’s that was recently located in the Dibner Library of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. It briefly comments on (1) religious delusion [Andachtswahn], (2) Kant’s pedagogical aims, (3) virtue and the general will, and (4) perceptual relativism of magnitude. The sheet may have belonged to a group stemming from Kant’s copy of his Observations on the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), and its provenance can be traced to Rudolf (...) Reicke, the Königsberg librarian and Kant scholar of the late 19th century. (shrink)

Ethics in public administration has been a subject of growing interest for both researchers and practitioners interested in the future of governance. This study examined the relationship between ethics and performance in local governance. We tested the effects over time of an ethics program on employees' perceptions (awareness of the code of ethics, ethical leadership, inclusion of employees in ethical decision making [EDM], ethical climate [EC], organizational commitment, and quality of work life [QWL]) and behavior (organizational citizenship behavior) in one (...) Israeli regional council. We conducted a longitudinal study of 108 employees, using data from a two-phase survey (before implementation of the ethics program and a year after) and objective assessments of employees' behavior through managers' evaluations. The main findings show that the ethics program was very effective, resulting in greater awareness of the code of ethics, increased inclusion of employees in EDM, and an improved EC. Furthermore, ethical leadership was positively related to employees' awareness of the code of ethics, increased inclusion of employees in EDM, an improvement in the EC, greater organizational commitment, and higher QWL. Implications and suggestions for future studies are discussed. (shrink)

This paper presents a succinct review of the movement for moral genesis in business that arose in the 1970s. The moral genesis movement is characterized by: the rejection of the premise that business and ethics are antagonistic; the rise of the Issues Management approach, which stresses the social responsibility of the corporation: disdain of government regulation as a means of business moralization, and a search for control measures aimed at improving organization moral behavior. This movement now begins to give rise (...) to a new organizational model, the Self-Moralizing Corporation, which transcends existing paradigms of corporate rectitude. The tenets of the Self-Moralizing Corporation are that: the moral behavior of members is a requisite to the attainment of organization goals; individual moral behavior is an asset which must be managed and developed by the corporation; individual moral development is a collectively and individually shared responsibility; and, the maintenance of moral values is more important than the preservation of organization structure. (shrink)

The matter of salary levels and professional advancement is much discussed and debated today in business and academe. This paper examines the matter of salary determinants for law professors in colleges of management in the U.S. with an emphasis on examining how gender might affect professorial salary and rank. By focusing on one discipline in today''s academe and in a college having great student demand (management) coupled with a professed commitment to women''s rights and by holding constant variables relevant to (...) salary and rank, this study, addresses the matter of whether gender is a factor in determination of academic rank and salary. This study used correlation and path analysis in arriving at our conclusions. Our sample size meets statistically acceptable parameters. Our results corroborate earlier research which finds significant pay differences between women and men, but they show that at least for the sample of legal studies professors in this study, these pay differences are attributable to the number of years spent in academe. If women have only recently enjoyed opportunities for careers in this discipline, they do not have as much seniority, on average as men. Consequently, if universities pay salaries at least partly according to seniority, women''s salaries are likely to be lower than men''s salaries, as our study indicates. At the same time, however, even after controlling for seniority and other factors that might affect rank, there are still significantly fewer women in the higher ranks. These results point to the operation of a glass ceiling which restricts promotional opportunities for women in other fields. (shrink)

A reader's enjoyment of Odes 3.6 and Epodes 7 and 16 is deepened by an awareness of the interplay between two relationships in Horace's poetry: the relationship of the speaker within the poem to an internal audience; and the interpretive relationship between the reader and the unstable persona of the implied author, Horace. The Archilochean authorial persona of Horace's Epodes and the Alcaic authorial persona of Horace's Odes work together to create a pseudo-autobiography of his life as a movement through (...) genres and through Roman historical time. This pseudo-autobiography functions in the reader's mind as a tool for interpretation. (shrink)