Entrepreneurs with social goals face various challenges; insights into how these entrepreneurs experience and appreciate their work remain a black box though. Drawing on identity, conservation of resources, and person–organization fit theories, this study examines how entrepreneurs’ social value creation beliefs relate to their work-related well-being (job satisfaction, work engagement, and lack of work burnout), as well as how this process might be influenced by social concerns with respect to the common good. Using data from the German Public Value Atlas (...) 2015 and 2019 and the Swiss Public Value Atlas 2017, a three-study design analyzes three samples of entrepreneurs in Germany and Switzerland. Study 1 reveals that entrepreneurs report higher job satisfaction when they believe their organization creates social value. Study 2 indicates that these beliefs relate negatively to work burnout; entrepreneurs’ perceptions of having meaningful work mediate this relationship. Study 3 affirms and extends these results by showing that a sense of work meaningfulness mediates the relationship between social value creation beliefs and work engagement and that this mediating role is more prominent among entrepreneurs with strong social concerns. This investigation thus identifies a critical pathway—the extent to which entrepreneurs experience their work activities as important and personally meaningful—that connects social value creation beliefs with enhanced work-related well-being, as well as how this process might vary with a personal orientation that embraces the common good. (shrink)

This study investigates the effect of country-level emancipative forces on corporate gender diversity around the world. Based on Welzel’s theory of emancipation, we develop an emancipatory framework of board gender diversity that explains how action resources, emancipative values and civic entitlements enable, motivate and encourage women to take leadership roles on corporate boards. Using a sample of 6390 firms operating in 30 countries around the world, our results show positive single and combined effects of the framework components on board gender (...) diversity. Our research adds to the existing literature in a twofold manner. First, our integrated framework offers a more encompassing, complete and theoretically richer picture of the key drivers of board gender diversity. Second, by testing the framework empirically, we extend the evidence on national drivers of board gender diversity. (shrink)

All humans laugh. However, there is little agreement about what is appropriate to laugh at. While laughter can unite people by showing how they share values and perspectives, it is also has the power to separate and divide. Humor that "crosses the line" can make people feel excluded and humiliated. This collection of new essays addresses possible ways that moral and ethical lines can be drawn around humor and laughter. What would a Kantian approach to humor look like? Do games (...) create a safe space for profanity and offense? Contributors to this volume work to establish and explain guidelines for thinking about the moral questions that arise when humor and laughter intersect with medicine, gender, race, and politics. Drawing from the work of stand-up comedians, television shows, and ethicists, this volume asserts that we are never just joking. (shrink)

Recent research highlights the positive effects of organizational CSR engagement on employee outcomes, such as job and life satisfaction, performance, and trust. We argue that the current debate fails to recognize the potential risks associated with CSR. In this study, we focus on the risk of work addiction. We hypothesize that CSR has per se a positive effect on employees and can be classified as a resource. However, we also suggest the existence of an array of unintended negative effects of (...) CSR. Since CSR positively influences an employee’s organizational identification, as well as his or her perception of engaging in meaningful work, which in turn motivates them to work harder while neglecting other spheres of their lives such as private relationships or health, CSR indirectly increases work addiction. Accordingly, organizational identification and work meaningfulness both act as buffering variables in the relationship, thus suppressing the negative effect of CSR on work addiction, which weakens the positive role of CSR in the workplace. Drawing on a sample of 565 Swiss employees taken from the 2017 Swiss Public Value Atlas dataset, our results provide support for our rationale. Our results also provide evidence that the positive indirect effects of organizational CSR engagement on work addiction, via organizational identification and work meaningfulness, become even stronger when employees care for the welfare of the wider public. Implications for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

This study introduces a human empowerment framework to better understand why some businesses are more socially oriented than others in their policies and activities. Building on Welzel’s theory of emancipation, we argue that human empowerment—comprised of four components: action resources, emancipative values, social movement activity, and civic entitlements—enables, motivates, and entitles individuals to pursue social goals for their businesses. Using a sample of over 15,000 entrepreneurs from 43 countries, we report strong empirical evidence for two ecological effects of the framework (...) components on prosociality. We find that human empowerment lifts entrepreneurs’ willingness to choose a social orientation for their business, and reinforces the gender effect on prosociality in business activity. We discuss the human empowerment framework’s added value in understanding how modernization processes fully leverage the potential of social business activities for societies. (shrink)

Distinctions have been proposed between systems of reasoning for centuries. This article distills properties shared by many of these distinctions and characterizes the resulting systems in light of recent findings and theoretical developments. One system is associative because its computations reflect similarity structure and relations of temporal contiguity. The other is "rule based" because it operates on symbolic structures that have logical content and variables and because its computations have the properties that are normally assigned to rules. The systems serve (...) complementary functions and can simultaneously generate different solutions to a reasoning problem. The rule-based system can suppress the associative system but not completely inhibit it. The article reviews evidence in favor of the distinction and its characterization. (shrink)

This essay argues that the new natural law theory (NNLT) propounds five errors that place it on a collision course with the traditional Thomistic understanding central to the moral magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. These root errors are argued to be (1) the denial of the primacy of speculative over practical truth, (2) the negation of unified normative natural teleology expressed in the NNLT doctrine of the putative “incommensurability” of basic goods prior to choice, (3) failure to affirm the (...) transcendence of the common good, (4) negation of the essentially theonomic character of the natural law, and (5) the intentionalist construction of human action. The teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas is held to be a superior light for understanding Catholic moral life. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 13.1 (Spring 2013): 105–131. (shrink)

In this article, the author describes some of his own experiences of becoming an organizational systems theorist. The article also presents overviews of various systems theories that influenced the learning process from subject exploration to mastery. These include system dynamics, management systems, General Systems Theory, self-organizing systems, and autognomics. Additionally, discussions of system failures, philosophical pragmatism, and knowledge management all relate to their influence on systems theories. The article culminates with an examination of the possible causes of system failures and (...) proposes various new ideas for intervening in several large-scale issues, such as sustainability. Finally, there is a review of a new type of organizational performance measurement system known as the adaptive scorecard. (shrink)

With armed conflict in the Persian Gulf now upon us, Harvard archaeologist Steven LeBlanc takes a long-term view of the nature and roots of war, presenting a controversial thesis: The notion of the "noble savage" living in peace with one another and in harmony with nature is a fantasy. In Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage , LeBlanc contends that warfare and violent conflict have existed throughout human history, and that humans have never lived in ecological (...) balance with nature. The start of the second major U.S. military action in the Persian Gulf, combined with regular headlines about spiraling environmental destruction, would tempt anyone to conclude that humankind is fast approaching a catastrophic end. But as LeBlanc brilliantly argues, the archaeological record shows that the warfare and ecological destruction we find today fit into patterns of human behavior that have gone on for millions of years. Constant Battles surveys human history in terms of social organization-from hunter gatherers, to tribal agriculturalists, to more complex societies. LeBlanc takes the reader on his own digs around the world -- from New Guinea to the Southwestern U.S. to Turkey -- to show how he has come to discover warfare everywhere at every time. His own fieldwork combined with his archaeological, ethnographic, and historical research, presents a riveting account of how, throughout human history, people always have outgrown the carrying capacity of their environment, which has led to war. Ultimately, though, LeBlanc's point of view is reassuring and optimistic. As he explains the roots of warfare in human history, he also demonstrates that warfare today has far less impact than it did in the past. He also argues that, as awareness of these patterns and the advantages of modern technology increase, so does our ability to avoid war in the future. (shrink)

First principles and the challenge of Parmenidean monism -- St. Thomas on analogia entis in the Scriptum super sententiis and in De veritate -- Consideration of objections to the view that the analogia entis is the analogy of proper proportionality -- The analogy of being and the transcendence and analogical intelligibility of the act of faith.

A science is an intellectual activity defined by its mechanisms that prevent its scientists from always reaching the conclusions that they set out to reach. Such mechanisms are needed because, if scientists are given full control over what hypotheses they select, what data they discard, and what results they publish, they can communicate any conclusion that they desire. Synthesis, by setting a grand challenge, forces scientists across uncharted territory where they encounter and solve unscripted problems. When theory is inadequate, the (...) synthesis fails, and fails in a way that cannot be ignored. Therefore, synthesis drives discovery and paradigm change in ways that simple hypothesis testing cannot. Here, we describe the discoveries that emerged when synthetic biologists were challenged to create an alternative genetic system that has different molecular structures than DNA and RNA. In pursuit of this particular “grand challenge,” synthesis forced the recognition that the community did not know as much about the double helix as it had constructively assumed. In general, a field of science having access to synthesis as a research strategy can create knowledge even if its practitioners do not fit the ideal of a dispassionate, advocacy-free scientist. (shrink)

Conceptual features differ in how mentally tranformable they are. A robin that does not eat is harder to imagine than a robin that does not chirp. We argue that features are immutable to the extent that they are central in a network of dependency relations. The immutability of a feature reflects how much the internal structure of a concept depends on that feature; i.e., how much the feature contributes to the concept's coherence. Complementarily, mutability reflects the aspects in which a (...) concept is flexible. We show that features can be reliably ordered according to their mutability using tasks that require people to conceive of objects missing a feature, and that mutability (conceptual centrality) can be distinguished from category centrality and from diagnosticity and salience. We test a model of mutability based on asymmetric, unlabeled, pairwise dependency relations. With no free parameters, the model provides reasonable fits to data. Qualitative tests of the model show that mutability judgments are unaffected by the type of dependency relation and that dependency structure influences judgments of variability. (shrink)

Finite Transcendence: Existential Exile and the Myth of Home introduces and situates “existential exile” as an experience of the fundamental finitude of human existence and demonstrates how a particular way of responding in faith may enable one to find home in exile. Using the literary and philosophical oeuvre of Albert Camus as a model, this book demonstrates the manner in which mythic literature can both present and engage the condition of exile toward its possible transcendence.

A normative framework for modeling causal and counterfactual reasoning has been proposed by Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines. The framework takes as fundamental that reasoning from observation and intervention differ. Intervention includes actual manipulation as well as counterfactual manipulation of a model via thought. To represent intervention, Pearl employed the do operator that simplifies the structure of a causal model by disconnecting an intervened-on variable from its normal causes. Construing the do operator as a psychological function affords predictions about how people (...) reason when asked counterfactual questions about causal relations that we refer to as undoing, a family of effects that derive from the claim that intervened-on variables become independent of their normal causes. Six studies support the prediction for causal arguments but not consistently for parallel conditional ones. Two of the studies show that effects are treated as diagnostic when their values are observed but nondiagnostic when they are intervened on. These results cannot be explained by theories that do not distinguish interventions from other sorts of events. (shrink)

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of Abbreviations -- Introduction: 'We': The Dangerous Thing -- 1 The Sellarsian Ethical Framework -- 2 Josiah Royce's Philosophy of Loyalty -- 3 Richard Rorty's Quasi-Sellarsian We -- 4 On the Prospects of Redescribing Rorty Roycely -- Bibliography -- Index.

This essay attempts concisely to articulate the necessary role played within moral theology in general—and within the moral theology of grace in particular—by the metaphysics and natural philosophy of human agency. It argues for the priority of the speculative with respect to the practical inasmuch as speculative knowledge precedes desire, and desire precedes intention; for the centrality of unified normative teleology; for the primacy of being over relation; and for the primacy of sound doctrine regarding the divine causal providence for (...) the moral theology of grace and freedom. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 31-44, January 2022.

Comment on Dean Pettit, who replies in same issue.

Plato's Euthyphro is a dialogue about the virtue of piety. It is also one of the aporetic dialogues, ending in apparent failure to discover what piety is. It is common to understand the dialogue as teaching lessons about other things, about definition, for instance, or about the logic of refutation. About piety, however, it is thought to teach us only negatively, showing a few of the many things which piety is not.My thesis, on the contrary, is that there is a (...) positive account of the nature of piety in the dialogue; it is, moreover, an account which cannot be separated from the other lessons which the dialogue teaches. I shall find it necessary to expose the structure of the logical lessons in order to develop my account of the holy. (shrink)

We propose a causal model theory to explain asymmetries in judgments of the intentionality of a foreseen side-effect that is either negative or positive (Knobe, 2003). The theory is implemented as a Bayesian network relating types of mental states, actions, and consequences that integrates previous hypotheses. It appeals to two inferential routes to judgment about the intentionality of someone else's action: bottom-up from action to desire and top-down from character and disposition. Support for the theory comes from three experiments that (...) test the prediction that bottom-up inference should occur only when the actor's primary objective is known. The model fits intentionality judgments reasonably well with no free parameters. (shrink)

Product differentiation has emerged as a central dynamic in contemporary agrofood systems. Departure from the mode of standardization emblematic of agrofood modernization raises questions about future technical trajectories and the ways in which learning will be sustained. This article examines two innovation trajectories: the rapid coupling of biotechnologies and information technologies to yield products differentiated by constituent components—a model based on a cognitive logic of decomposition/ recomposition—and the proliferation of product networks that mobilize distinctive, localized resources to create complete identities—a (...) model based on a cognitive logic of identity. The article analyzes the information structures—institutional mechanisms that support information exchange and learning—in each of these opposed development paradigms. We find that knowledge creation under each of the logics occurs through mechanisms not recognized within the respective paradigms. On this basis, we derive institutional hybridity as a fundamental resource in systems of innovation. (shrink)