Review of extant research on the corporate environmental performance (CEP) and corporate financial performance (CFP) link generally demonstrates a positive relationship. However, some arguments and empirical results have demonstrated otherwise. As a result, researchers have called for a contingency approach to this research stream, which moves beyond the basic question “does it pay to be green?” and instead asks “when does it pay to be green?” In answering this call, we provide a meta-analytic review of CEP–CFP literature in which we (...) identify potential moderators to the CEP–CFP relationship including environmental performance type (e.g., reactive vs. proactive performance), firm characteristics (e.g., large vs. small firms), and methodological issues (e.g., self-report measures). By analyzing these contingencies, this study attempts to provide a basis on which to draw conclusions regarding some inconsistencies and debates in the CEP–CFP research. Some of the results of the moderator analysis suggest that small firms benefit from environmental performance as much or more than large firms, US firms seem to benefit more than international counterparts, and environmental performance seems to have the strongest influence on market-measures of financial performance. (shrink)

This study explores the relationship between board environmental committees and corporate environmental performance. We propose that board environmental committees will be positively associated with CEP. Moreover, we argue that the composition of the committee as well as the presence of a sustainability manager will influence this relationship. Our results find support for a positive association between board environmental committees and CEP. Further, the presence of a senior-level environmental manager positively moderates this relationship, but is not effective in isolation. Unexpectedly, no (...) support was found for the influences of stakeholder representation. (shrink)

We describe how Intuitionistic Linear Logic can be used to provide a unified logical account for agents to find and execute plans. This account supports the modelling of agent interaction, including dialogue; allows agents to be robust to unexpected events and failures; and supports significant reuse of agent specifications. The framework has been implemented and several case studies have been considered. Further applications include human–computer interfaces as well as agent interaction in the semantic web.

Love and sex provide a fertile ground for philosophical inquiry, both conceptual analysis of the nature of love and sex and discussion of the many ethical issues that they raise. Moral issues arising from love include the permissibility of romantically loving more than one person at the same time and the moral value of romantic love and friendship. Moral issues arising from sex vary from the most fundamental question—the one addressed by Alan Soble in his paper in this issue—of (...) whether sex can be reconciled with respect for persons, to questions about the permissibility of sex in particular circumstances. Much current work in philosophy of love and sex concerns precisely such issues in applied ethics, for instance the topics addressed by the authors of four more papers in this collection—homosexuality, prostitution, relationships that cross power lines in academia, and the wrongness of rape and other sexual misdeeds. Other ethical issues about sex include the morality of casual sex, adultery and open marriage, sadomasochism, and pornography. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis essay considers the nature of mourning and melancholia in light of Patrizio Guzman’s film, Nostalgia for the Light. It examines the position of three women dealing with the aftermath o...

In thinking of my relationship to Peter McHugh as an intimate collaboration, I take some reactions elicited to a most recent unpublished writing of his on intimacy as an occasion for discussing both intimacy and collaboration as a notion in-itself and as applicable to us in particular, treating that space between the general and particular of intimacy as its zone of fundamental ambiguity. I try to being to view a story of the imaginary of community, its elemental stirrings, that Peter (...) might appreciate. In this, I reorient Arendt’s notion of communicating with the dead to the problem of the intimate collaboration and of how each might be a practice that mirrors the other, intimate collaboration being one way of confirming the vow in communicating with the dead to witness, and reciprocally, such communication being a way of practicing intimate collaboration. This leads me to bring to view a range of unstated resonances of the discussion that have applicability to our shared history. First, is intimate collaboration possible in organizations such as the university and how does it coexist among adversarial exchanges, factitious coteries, alliances, and collegial networks? Second, is communicating with the dead another way of speaking of tradition and dissemination in any context as such and what could the manner and method of orienting to this desire say about the quality of life in commemoration per se? (shrink)

A perspective is developed for approaching affliction as a social fact. Disability and disease are considered as two ways in which we suffer a disjunction which arises from the need to take initiative with respect to the inexorable, whether that means the mark of disability or the unconquerability of disease.The story of affliction always raises and masks in certain respects the problem of suffering as the collective representation of our experience of subjectivity where that experience passes through the separateness of (...) being marked to the singularity of being without hope. (shrink)

We propose that a control system will address the causal dynamics of the neural network that Depue & Collins regard as underlying extraversion. We briefly describe a control system approach and articulate the notion of integration. The integration of goals and regards is achieved by subcortical assessment of reward in the nucleus accumbens and VTA (ventral tegmental area) transmission of this information largely by dopaminergic systems and representation of reward in the MOC (medial orbital cortex). Thus reward information is collected, (...) integrated, and evaluated in the MOC. Such control decisions rely on constraining processes, a functional property of the MOC mediated largely by serotonergic neurons. (shrink)

This text attempts to show why the academic split between ethics and social sciences has been disastrous and argues that advances in vigour and sensitivity are made possible by closing this artificial divide.