À partir d’une approche anthropologique des prises en charge médicales de la tuberculose et du paludisme, ainsi que des conceptions et usages de la prévention dans des milieux urbains d’Afrique de l’Ouest , ce texte interroge la nature du métier de soignant. Après nous être penchés sur les spécificités de ce type d’étude anthropologique en milieu médical, nous nous attachons à décrypter les processus d’occultations des singularités du malade qui caractérisent les messages et discours de prévention. Dans les structures de (...) santé, sont étudiées les négociations des normes de diagnostic et de traitement à l’œuvre ; les attitudes des soignants qui oscillent entre sur- et sous-estimations des risques sanitaires ; et le hiatus entre la demande et les besoins réels de formations continues. Enfin, nous nous penchons sur la rencontre entre les soignants et les malades qui peut se trouver transformée par les spécificités de la maladie et de son traitement. On constate alors que les fondements de la professionnalisation tendent à disparaître au profit d’un mode de régulation du rapport au malade, au collègue et plus largement au savoir médical qui témoigne de l’émergence d’une culture soignante qui est, de fait, une culture organisationnelle. Elle se caractérise à la fois par la délégation des tâches à des non-professionnels, la production et la résolution des conflits mettant en évidence des réseaux clientélistes ainsi que par une routinisation des gestes.Drawing on an anthropological approach of tuberculosis and malaria care in West African cities , and on an analysis of prevention modes, this paper examines the characteristics of medical work. We first examined the conditions of an anthropological field study in health care centres. The concealment of both patients’ singularities and populations’ specificities targeted in the prevention messages were then studied. The negotiation of diagnosis and treatment standards, and the under- and over-estimations of nosocomial risks were also analysed. We also focused on the gap between demands and actual needs for training, and on the relationships between health care providers and patients, which can be modified by the specificities of the disease. We noticed a decay of professionalization, a kind of regulation of relationships between health care workers and patients, and among medical staff, which expresses an emerging medical culture, which is also an organizational culture. Its main features are the delegation of tasks to non-professionals workers, a strategy of conflict management based on clientelism, and the development of routine action. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:SENECA FALLS INHERITANCE: DISENTANGLING WOMEN, LEGISLATION AND VIOLENCE IN MONFREDO'S HISTORICAL CRIME FICTION Rosemary Erickson Johnsen National Coalition ofIndependent Scholars That men were not prevented by courts or clergy from mistreating their wives meant that, to society's institutions, women had no value. A man could be jailed, even hanged, for stealing another man's horse, but not even reproached for beating his wife. (Miriam Grace Monfredo, Through a Gold Eagle) (...) Miriam Grace Monfredo's feminist genre fiction, her "historymystery " series featuring nineteenth-century librarian Glynis Tryon, offers an opportunity to find a way ofreading literary texts that is not only feminist, but also Girardian. Girard's work provides two clear ways to construct feminist readings directly, without the mediation of overtly feminist theory. First ofthese is Girard's respect for the "quasi-theoretical" potential of literary texts, especially some of those which attend to apparently trivial matters. In Deceit, Desire and the Novel, Girard argues that (male) novelists offer insights unavailable elsewhere, including those scientific fields that claim to know more than everyone else. In its valuing of questions about snobbism, for example, Deceit, Desire and the Novel offers a woman-friendly model. The (male) novelist's question about snobbism is "too frivolous" for (men of) science, but Girard argues that "in his probe of snobbism the novelist is asking himself in his own way just what Rosemary Erickson Johnsen59 might be the hidden springs that make the social mechanism tick" (220). While I regret the fact that Girard's examples and language often ignore women, I believe his conviction that attention to matters socially coded as superficial and frivolous can produce great insight is one feminist critics can appreciate. The second Girardian tool feminists can rely upon is the method of reading texts of persecution described in The Scapegoat. Girard suggests how we might read texts ofpersecution written by naive persecutors in ways that identify with the persecuted and gather the information unintentionally supplied by the authors: "I call those persecutors naive who are still convinced that they are right and who are not so mistrustful as to cover up or censor the fundamental characteristics of their persecution. Such characteristics are either clearly apparent in the text and are directly revealing or they remain hidden and reveal indirectly" (8). Monfredo's crime novels, set in the mid-nineteenth century and focusing on such disenfranchised groups of citizens as women, slaves, Native Americans, and free African-Americans, depend for their verisimilitude on her ability to read historical sources and literary predecessors in just such a way. Accuracy requires that Monfredo's works be categorized as feminist historical crime novels, however awkward such a lengthy description may be. Her novels observe the principles not only of both genres—historical fiction and detective fiction—but also the political position offeminism, and they meet these multiple demands with considerable skill. Furthermore, resolution in crime fiction depends upon the law; working within that tradition, Monfredo is called upon to seek solutions within the system, to look for justice as the result ofa proper functioning ofthe legal and social systems. Information gathered, whether by the official representatives ofthe law or by amateurs, is turned over to the authorities. While her novels clearly respect that tradition, they also point out some limits to the judicial system's ability to contain violence. Girard's model ofits functioning, as described in Violence and the Sacred, depends upon an equality that whole segments of the society Monfredo is depicting do not in fact enjoy: "The judicial authority is beholden to no one. It is thus at the disposal ofeveryone" (23). Ifwomen cannot own property, enter into contracts or sit on juries, in what sense is the law at their disposal? Monfredo's exploration ofthis question takes its place alongside Girard's explanation of the legal system's proper functioning; ifhis theory reveals how it works when all are enfranchised, her fiction suggests some ofthe consequences that result from the existence of disenfranchised subjects. 60'Seneca Falls Inheritance' Our Seneca Falls Inheritance In her first book, Seneca Falls Inheritance (1992), Monfredo offers a theory for the reduction of violence against women: provide women with complete legal equality. The... (shrink)

Geoffrey Rose's ‘prevention paradox’ occurs when a population-based preventative health measure that brings large benefits to the community – such as compulsory seatbelts, a ‘fat tax’, or mass immunisation – offers little to each participating individual. Although the prevention paradox is not obviously a paradox in the sense in which philosophers understand the term, it does raise important normative questions. In particular, should we implement population-based preventative health measures when the typical individual is not expected to gain from (...) them? After canvassing other attempts to address the paradox, I argue that what is significant about the prevention paradox is that it involves intra-personal trade-offs; the costs and benefits of the choice to implement or not implement a preventative health measure fall on the same individuals. The intra-personal nature of these trade-offs has two implications. First, the solutions to the paradox proposed by other authors are deficient. Second, the policy choice to not implement some preventative health measures can be normatively justified. (shrink)

Persons who are dangerous and legally responsible, but who have not yet committed any currently recognised criminal offence, fall within the gap left between the domains of criminal justice and civil commitment. Many jurisdictions operate legal regimes that permit the detention of such persons in order to prevent the occurrence of anticipated criminal harms. These regimes often either fail to respect the principle of proportionality or contradictorily treat a dangerous offender as both legally responsible and not responsible at the (...) same time. In response to these problems, a number of preventive detention models have been proposed. Retributivist models seek to prevent the occurrence of anticipated criminal harms by requiring blame on the dangerous person’s part in order to warrant detention. However, these models are ill-equipped to deal with the problem of coextensiveness; i.e., they struggle to comprehensively reconcile proportionality in punitive sentencing with the period over which dangerous persons remain dangerous and during which one might therefore want them to be incapacitated. In order to achieve comprehensive incapacitation of dangerous persons for the duration of their dangerousness, retributivist models are forced to abandon their fidelity to proportionality in punitive sentencing, thereby losing themselves in the process. Accordingly, if the practice of preventive detention can be justified at all, such justification will not be of a retributivist character. (shrink)

Imagine you fly home from vacation with your one-and-a-half-year-old son who is traveling for free as a “lap child.” In the airport parking lot, you put him into his forward-facing car seat, where he sits much more contentedly than he did in the rear-facing one that was mandatory until his first birthday. After he falls asleep on the way home, you transfer him to his crib without waking him, lowering the side rail so you can lift him in more easily. (...) -/- Many parts of this idyllic parenting picture are deemed unacceptably risky according to recent child safety proposals. While these proposals all aim to improve child safety, their possible impact is unclear because there has been little discussion of the absolute risk and risk reduction involved in each. And while precise figures are lacking, rough estimates indicate that the magnitudes are quite small. I will argue that this risk and benefit data raises important questions about the proposals, including whether parents might reasonably believe that the small absolute risk reduction offered by the proposed changes does not justify the attendant burdens. This possibility—termed the “prevention paradox” in other contexts—highlights ethical and theoretical challenges in this area of public health. (shrink)

Based on my study of the Rhodes Must Fall movement, I develop a rejectionist perspective by identifying the understanding and mobilization of epistemic disobedience as the core premise of such a perspective. Embedded in this contextual perspective, epistemic disobedience refers to the decolonization of the self and a fight against colonial legacies. I argue that, rather than viewing a rejectionist perspective as a threat, it should be integrated into the moral learning of contemporary institutions and businesses. This approach is (...) important in ensuring colonial legacies and biases do not create further racism or unequal situations for marginalized groups. The implication for critical management studies is that scholars from this camp should be more sensitive to issues of black consciousness and implement an authentic pragmatic ideal to promote black culture and historiographies in universities and curricula. It also highlights a need for the field of business ethics to apply more sensitive theory of marginalized stakeholders in order to prevent any escalation of violence by multinational corporations in the name of shareholder value creation and profit-maximization. (shrink)

In their recent paper‘Undue inducement: a case study in CAPRISA 008’, Mngadi et al conclude that a participant in an HIV prevention study who deliberately concealed her pregnancy was not ‘unduly induced’ to participate by the offer of an experimental product. This paper argues that while the authors’ conclusion is sound, the framing of this case study is consistent with the preoccupation in research ethics with the concept of undue inducement, coupled with a highly risk-averse attitude to pregnancy. We (...) suggest that the critical research ethics question raised by Mngadi et al ’s case study is not ‘undue inducement’, but the exclusion of pregnant women from research studies where the risks are acceptable to the potential participant, and benefits likely. We also suggest that current regulatory paradigms regarding pregnancy are both overly paternalistic and value the fetus over the mother. In order to ensure timely provision of new HIV prevention agents, we argue that there is a need for expeditious testing of proven effective agents in pregnancy, with due consideration given to situations where preliminary efficacy data exist but fall short of licensure standards. This requires a paradigm shift from researchers, funders, regulators and ethical review bodies towards practices that critically examine the legitimacy of the exclusion of pregnant women on a study-by-study basis. (shrink)

Suicide is a public health problem which will require an integrated cross-sector approach to help reduce prevalence rates. One strategy is to include the legal system in a more integrated way with suicide prevention efforts. Caine explored a public health approach to suicide prevention, depicting risk factors across the socio-ecological model. The purpose of this paper is to examine laws that impact suicide prevention at the individual, relational, community, and societal levels. These levels are fluid, and some (...) interventions will fall between two, such as a community-level approach to training that enhances provider-patient relationships. At the individual level, we will review laws to improve screening requirements across systems. At the relational level, we note interventions with couples having conflict, such as protection orders and access to attorney consultations, which have been known to be injury prevention mechanisms. At the community level, we discuss legislation that recommends suicide prevention efforts for key individuals working as frontline providers in the medical and educational systems. At the societal level, we explore public awareness campaigns that target stigma reduction for those suffering from mental health burden and enhance linkage to care. The article closes with the discussion that laws are good, but their implementation is essential. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.2 (2000) 189-202 [Access article in PDF] Spinoza in Denmark and the Fall of Struensee, 1770-1772 John Christian Laursen * Baruch (Benedict) de Spinoza was the arch-heretic of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He was denounced in half a dozen languages from the time he began to publish until at least the 1780s, when Lessing's allegiance to Spinoza became the heart (...) of a literary scandal. 1 In time-honored fashion, some of these denunciations led to the burning of books and the imprisonment or banning of authors. The most spectacular case, however, led to the trial of a prime minister, the cutting off of his right hand and of his head, and the drawing and quartering of his body in full public ceremony. The year was 1772, the prime minister was Johann Friedrich Struensee, and the country was Denmark.Late eighteenth-century Denmark was not known for barbarities of the type represented by Struensee's execution. Previously disgraced prime ministers had merely been imprisoned, and other political enemies of the ruling powers had [End Page 189] merely been exiled. 2 Why such harshness with Struensee? What was at stake in the fall of Struensee?The answers to these questions are complex, but an important element of those answers lies in Struensee's public image, which made it seem both necessary and justifiable to treat him with such harshness. In turn, public opinion about Struensee was closely tied to the reputation of Spinoza. This essay will show that charges of Spinozism were part of the campaign that poisoned public opinion against Struensee. This was an unusually clear case of a theological and philosophical debate having direct political effects.Before getting to the role of Spinozism and anti-Spinozism in eighteenth-century Denmark, let us fill in important points of the story. The charge against Struensee was lèse majesté, for plotting the death of the King and for usurping power in violation of the constitution. Behind these charges was a further element which encouraged outrage: sleeping with Queen Caroline Matilda. That much was true, as both the Queen, a sister of George III of England, and Struensee admitted, each in order to save the other. The King knew about it all along but did not care. He did not care because he had become a libertine, going out to whorehouses most nights with rowdy friends, and he figured that what was good for the gander was good for the goose. He was also schizophrenic and easily manipulable by those around him, so that Struensee and the Queen encountered no disapproval from him until he fell under other people's influence. After Struensee and the Queen were taken into custody, the King was forced to divorce the Queen and she was sent to live in a Hannoverian castle in Celle because her brother did not want the embarrassment of having her back in England. She died there a few years later. 3It is an irony that we owe our knowledge of the state of public opinion in Denmark in this period to Struensee. Until shortly before the fatal events mentioned above, the Danish press had been subject to censorship that might have prevented the expression of many of the subsequent attacks on Struensee. But in September 1770 Struensee persuaded the king to declare freedom of the press in all his realms (consisting of the kingdoms of Denmark and Norway, the Duchies of Slesvig and Holsten [Schleswig and Holstein in German], Greenland, Iceland, the Faroes, and colonies in India, Africa, and the Caribbean). 4 It is not widely [End Page 190] known that Denmark was the first country to declare unlimited freedom of the press as official public policy. For much of the century England and the Netherlands had effective freedom of the press, but it had never been declared official policy. The next to do so was rebellious Virginia, in the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776), followed by other colonies and then the Bill of Rights of the new... (shrink)

Over the past century, the rise and fall of economic policy orders has been shaped by a paradox, as intellectual and institutional stability have repeatedly caused market instability and crisis. To highlight such dynamics, this volume offers a theory of economic ideas in political time. The author counters paradigmatic and institutionalist views of ideas as enabling self-reinforcing path dependencies, offering an alternative social psychological argument that ideas which initially reduce uncertainty can subsequently fuel misplaced certainty and crises. Historically, the (...) book then traces the development and decline of the progressive, Keynesian, and neoliberal orders, arguing that each order's principled foundations were gradually displaced by macroeconomic models that obscured new causes of the Great Depression, Great Stagflation, and Global Financial Crisis. Finally, in policy terms, Widmaier stresses the costs of intellectual autonomy, as efforts to 'prevent the last crisis' have repeatedly obscured new causes of crises. (shrink)

With the great increase in litigation, insurance costs, and consumer prices, both managers and businesses should take a proactive position in avoiding liability. Legal liability may attach when a duty has been breached; many actions falling into this category are also considered unethical. Since much of business liability is caused by a breach of a duty by a business to either an individual, another business, or to society, this article asserts that the practice of liability prevention is a practical (...) business application of ethics. In today's highly litigious environment, it is appropriate for the concept of general liability prevention to be included in corporate codes of ethics. (shrink)

Following the widespread occurrence of birth defects from the use of thalidomide to treat nausea during pregnancy in the 1960s and 1970s, the Food and Drug Administration became particularly vigilant about the use of therapeutic agents during pregnancy and in women of childbearing potential. The FDA developed a list that categorizes an agent according to the known risks to a fetus. The drug thalidomide falls into Category X: agents that have demonstrated clear risk of fetal abnormalities and whose risks outweigh (...) the benefits of use during pregnancy.Another Category X drug is isotretinoin, commonly known by its trade name Accutane. Isotretinoin is an oral medication prescribed for severe recalcitrant, nodular acne in patients who are unresponsive to conventional therapy. Isotretinoin has been available since 1982, and it remains the only effective treatment for this condition. (shrink)

The interdisciplinary aspect of collective deliberation, involved in participatory technology assessment (PTA) and responsible research and innovation (RRI), raises issues in relation to the cohabitation of disciplines. In ethics, the choice of which path to take is rarely clear or simple. Without falling into relativism, descriptions of the same actions may vary. Faced with the hard and apparently inevitable reality of misunderstandings, loyalties, interests and requirements, which are mutually incompatible, ethics offers one way of delimiting a conflict in order to (...) maintain relationships. This chapter considers the difficulties involved in judgment, the fact of pluralism, the ethical pluralism of values, ethical theories and their place in practical reasoning between monism and relativism, and finally the potential and the limitations of deliberative democracy. Reaching an ethical judgment on a question, or simply reaching judgment on a question, is a difficult task for any individual. (shrink)

A related concern, discussed in technical literature well before 11 September 2001, is that nuclear weapons may sooner or later fall into the hands of terrorist groups.

Like any other part of the world, Africa is not immune to the intermingling of cultures and civilizations, heritages and horizons, the endogenous and the exogenous, knowledge and imagery. The effects of new communication and information technologies, which still remain the privilege of a minority of political and intellectual elites, cannot conceal the far more profound transformations and reconfigurations that characterize its societies and cultures.

Composition as Identity is, roughly, the thesis that the parts of a whole, taken collectively, are in some sense identical with the whole. Einar Duenger Bohn argues for Universalism from CAI. Universalism says that composition is totally unrestricted: wherever two or more objects occur, an instance of composition occurs, however unnatural or gerrymandered. Bohn’s argument relies on inferences with generic quantifiers, but he does not provide a clear account of generic quantification. My argument is that on the most plausible approach (...) to thinking about such inferences, the argument fails. (shrink)

L'idée centrale est simple : l'éducation est la voie incontournable pour réaliser le type d'homme équilibré qu'une société se donne comme idéal. Ce fil directeur que Iba fall tient fermement tout au long de ce plaidoyer pour un monde davantage ancré dans les valeurs humanistes, explore différents aspects d'une crise à la fois d'identité et de civilisation. Il y a crise, selon le jeune professeur de philosophie, parce qu'il y a rencontre, choc et parfois contradiction entre deux modèles d'éducation. (...) Celui qui est porté par la mondialisation a des tendances dissolvantes pour celui engendré jadis par l'éducation traditionnelle africaine. D'où le sens du titre : " Crise de la socialisation au Sénégal ". S'agit-il d'un procès de la mondialisation? En un certain sens, oui cela en est un. Toutefois l'argumentaire donne à voir une lecture moins négative de ce changement d'échelle qui tend à affecter toute chose. Ce dont il est question, c'est la mise à l'épreuve des valeurs traditionnelles de l'éducation dans le contexte d'une mondialisation en cours. Très exactement, ce qui est en cause, c'est la volonté d'exportation ou de transfert des tendances chosifiantes de la globalisation économique et matérielle dans un domaine dont le propre est d'être immatériel et de se nourrir de valeurs qui se donnent l'homme comme fin et non comme moyen. Abdoulaye Elimane Kane. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Empty Words: Buddhist Philosophy and Cross-Cultural InterpretationEdward R. FallsEmpty Words: Buddhist Philosophy and Cross-Cultural Interpretation. By Jay L. Garfield. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 306 + xi pp.Jay L. Garfield's Empty Words is a collection of (mostly) previously published essays bearing on the interpretation of Buddhist thought. Emphasizing the Indo-Tibetan tradition while indebted to Euro-American philosophy, Empty Words belongs in a class with books such (...) as Tom Tillemans's Scripture, Logic and Language: Essays on Dharmakīrti and His Tibetan Successors (1999) and Matthew Kapstein's Reason's Traces: Identity and Interpretation in Indian and Tibetan Buddhist Thought (2001). Below is a précis of Empty Words, followed by remarks on some points that especially caught this reviewer's interest.The essays in Empty Words are gathered into three sections according to subject matter: (1) Madhyamaka, (2) Yogācāra, and (3) Ethics and Hermeneutics. There are five essays in section 1, clustered around three themes: Nāgārjuna's theory of causality (ch. 2, 4), parallels between Madhyamaka and the European skeptical tradition (ch. 1), and paradox in Madhyamaka (ch. 3, 5).Section 2 begins with an essay interpreting Vasubandhu on the three natures and three naturelessnesses, arguing that "Vasubandhu subordinates the naturelessnesses [End Page 196] to the natures pedagogically and describes them as characteristics of, but not (with the exception of the third) identical to the three natures" (p. 121). As for the other three essays in section 2, chapter 7 consists of a translation of and commentary on Vasubandhu's Trisvabhāvanirdes´a, chapter 8 presents an interesting experiment in cross-cultural interpretation in which the history of European idealism is viewed through a Buddhist idealist lens, and chapter 9 (one of the two previously unpublished essays in Empty Words—ch. 14 is the other) attempts to bring together Garfield's views on the limits of expressibility in Madhyamaka and his interpretation of the three natures in Yogācāra.Section 3 includes three essays concerning issues in ethics or political philosophy and two essays discussing the hermeneutical issues involved when Euro-American and Tibetan philosophers attempt to understand each other's traditions. The topics of the former essays are as follows. Is the Dalai Lama's advocacy of human rights (which are grounded in liberal moral theory) compatible with Buddhist ethics, which emphasizes a compassion-based morality (ch. 10)? Are Buddhist values and democracy incompatible (ch. 11)? How does Samdhong Rinpoche's approach to nonviolence relate to Gandhi's (ch. 12)? In the final two essays of the book, Garfield advocates a strategy of cross-cultural interpretation which would avoid the pitfall of orientalism, drawing heavily on Gadamerian-Heideggerian hermeneutics.The remarks that follow bear exclusively on points from essays in section 1 on Madhyamaka. In chapter 4, Garfield critiques the claim, attributed to Dharmakīrti (by rGyal tshab in his commentary on the pramānasiddhi chapter of Pramānavarttika) that belief in rebirth is necessary for the cultivation of bodhicitta. Garfield argues that if this claim is correct, then the "I" in the bodhisattva vow is doing real metaphysical work, functioning as the basis for a real causal relation, contra Nāgārjuna's analysis of causality (which is supposed to involve the rejection of real causal powers). Otherwise, a simpler account of bodhicitta would suffice, in which striving for personal enlightenment could be replaced by striving for someone's attaining enlightenment some time in the future. On this account, practitioners would resolve to contribute to the accumulation of causes of someone's eventually attaining enlightenment, where this accumulation of causes turns out to be something like "universal moral improvement."But what if practitioners just do not know how to bring about universal moral improvement? Garfield acknowledges that buddhas sometimes act counter to the "moral" good, and this suggests an important cognitive difference between buddhas and ordinary beings: ordinary beings can only (fallibly) infer what the best thing to do is, whereas buddhas simply know. Hence, the importance, from a practitioner's standpoint, of the Buddha's teaching, which is a path of personal attainment (and who knows whether it is incidentally a... (shrink)

Si les voies du droit sont complexes, ses objets divers et ses champs multiples, il est par essence "en commerce" avec d'autres disciplines des sciences sociales et humaines, qui interfèrent dans son élaboration et affectent son contenu comme la portée de sa fonction normative. Au carrefour des régimes politiques, des systèmes juridiques et des sociétés en mutation, il a dû, au fil du temps, diversifier ses instruments pour répondre à des problématiques écartelées entre nationalismes et mondialisation. Ces rencontres et croisements (...) interpellent les juristes de tous horizons autant que les chercheurs de toutes disciplines. Des droits africains au droit français, du droit de l'urbanisme au droit et à la sociologie de l'environnement comme du tourisme, des droit constitutionnel et international aux droits de l'Homme, ce recueil présente des études et des témoignages rassemblés en l'honneur du Professeur Jean-Marie Breton, dont le parcours, un demi-siècle durant, l'a conduit à explorer, dans divers universités et continents, les itinéraires du droit dans sa quête de connaissance des terres des hommes. (shrink)

This research investigates the influence that consumers’ perceptions of retail business ethics have on their responses when retailers either create social discount spaces or do not. Using scenarios to imply these social practices and structural equation modeling to test the hypotheses among a sample of 689 respondents, the authors find that consumers’ perceptions of retail business ethics have positive effects on consumer loyalty, both directly and through consumer trust, as well as positive, strong influences on the retailer’s corporate social responsibility (...) and corporate reputation. Furthermore, consumers’ perceptions of retail business ethics exert a stronger effect on consumer trust in integrated social discount spaces, though social discount practices do not affect the link between such perceptions and loyalty. Compared with when the retailer does not offer discount space, collaborative and integrated social discount spaces have weaker effects on trust and loyalty to the retailer. These findings have several notable theoretical and practical implications. (shrink)

Sustainable luxury is a strategic issue for managers and for society, yet it remains poorly understood. This research seeks to clarify how corporate social responsibility actions directly and indirectly affect consumers’ willingness to pay a premium price for luxury brand products, as well as how a long-term orientation might moderate these relationships. A scenario study presents fictional CSR actions of two brands, representing different luxury products, to 1,049 respondents from two countries. The results of a structural equation modeling approach show (...) that the luxury brands’ CSR actions negatively affect customer WTPP overall and for each brand. The luxury brands’ functional and symbolic value dimensions positively mediate the effects of CSR actions on WTPP, whereas social value does not. The effects of CSR actions and brand symbolic value on WTTP do not differ between countries. The effect of functional value on WTPP differs across countries, such that it is stronger for high-LTO than low-LTO cultures. Inversely, the effect of social on customer WTPP is stronger for low-LTO than high-LTO cultures. These findings have theoretical and practical implications for luxury brand managers. (shrink)

Abstract:Paul Williams critiques Śāntideva's argument, claiming it rests on a category mistake. I suggest that if Williams' critique were sound, then the debate about composition as identity in recent analytic metaphysics would also be nonsensical. My argument is that Williams' objection does not make sense when dealing with absolutely general concepts such as the concepts of identity and parthood.

In Discovering Alabama Forests, ecologist-educator Doug Phillips and photographer Robert Falls celebrate the current health and diversity of Alabama woodlands while sounding a call for their wise management and protection in the future.