The idea that the ethical values of professionals in finance have played a role in the global financial crisis is widespread. The crisis-of-ethics debate is important, concerning one of the main policy challenges of our times, but is based on popular lore and anecdotes rather than systematic evidence. We analyze the self-enhancement and self-transcendence values of PIFs vis-à-vis the general population and test for patterns of variation that are consistent with the idea of a crisis of values, meaning patterns of (...) variation that would implicate PIFs’ values in the GFC. Employing pre-crisis data allows for an unbiased assessment. Results reveal only minor differences in values between PIFs and the general population, too small to support the idea of a crisis of ethical values by objective standards. Extensive robustness checks confirm these findings, sometimes actually revealing values differences counter to the crisis of ethical values idea. We conclude that the financial system would not have fared better had we had a different breed of PIFs. Rather, situational forces can induce severe disregard for the welfare of others, also in people with ordinary, decent values. Hence, if anything, the GFC shows that the financial services industry has been providing an environment highly conducive to unethical behavior. The practical implication is that fixes to the financial system can only come from improved regulatory design. (shrink)

We assess the organizational culture in the finance industry in relation to the global financial crisis and consider the potential of cultural change to improve the financial sector. To avoid biases, we build on the person–organization fit literature and develop a novel, indirect method for assessing organizational culture that revolves around relationships between employees’ personal traits and their career success in the industry or organization under study. We analyze personal values concerning the pursuit of private gain versus personal values concerning (...) caring for others and consider whether employees that value self-enhancement more and self-transcendence less enjoy more career success relative to their peers when working in finance than when working in other industries. Results do not reveal any sort of cross-industry differences that would implicate the finance industry’s culture in the financial crisis. Instead, we find the opposite, namely that strong self-enhancement values and weak self-transcendence values go together with less career success in the finance industry compared to other industries. Hence, if anything, the culture in the finance industry does not seem to resonate well with professionals that seek to pursue personal gain at the expense of clients’ welfare. Implication is that cultural change has little potential to improve the financial system. Meanwhile, the method for assessing organizational culture indirectly by analyzing relationships between employees’ traits and their career outcomes has wider applicability, particularly when relying on scores or measures obtained directly from the people concerned is likely to render biased evidence. (shrink)

In a globalizing world, cross-national differences in values and business culture and understanding these differences become increasingly central to a range of organizational issues and ethical questions. However, various concerns have been raised about extant empirical research on cross-national dissimilarities in the cultural values of managers (what we refer to as managerial values) and the development of a unified business culture. This paper seeks to address three such concerns with the literature on convergence versus divergence of cultural values. It develops (...) an empirical approach to the study of changing business cultures that revolves around birth cohorts and intergenerational values shifts and aims to advance empirical knowledge of the dynamics of cross-national differences in the cultural values of managers. We use time-series data covering 68,708 managers and are able to consider a sample of 32 countries that represent more than half of the cultural clusters recognized in the literature. Results reveal diverse shifts in managerial values across birth cohorts with cross-national dissimilarities waning for some basic cultural dimensions (“convergence”), remaining stable for other dimensions (“cultural stability”), and becoming more pronounced for other dimensions still (“divarication”). Moving beyond the standard convergence/divergence taxonomy, we conclude that a full-fledged convergence–stability–divarication perspective provides the best basis for thinking about the subtle ways in which business cultures are changing. (shrink)

We assess the organizational culture in the finance industry in relation to the global financial crisis and consider the potential of cultural change to improve the financial sector. To avoid biases, we build on the person–organization fit literature and develop a novel, indirect method for assessing organizational culture that revolves around relationships between employees’ personal traits and their career success in the industry or organization under study. We analyze personal values concerning the pursuit of private gain versus personal values concerning (...) caring for others and consider whether employees that value self-enhancement more and self-transcendence less enjoy more career success relative to their peers when working in finance than when working in other industries. Results do not reveal any sort of cross-industry differences that would implicate the finance industry’s culture in the financial crisis. Instead, we find the opposite, namely that strong self-enhancement values and weak self-transcendence values go together with less career success in the finance industry compared to other industries. Hence, if anything, the culture in the finance industry does not seem to resonate well with professionals that seek to pursue personal gain at the expense of clients’ welfare. Implication is that cultural change has little potential to improve the financial system. Meanwhile, the method for assessing organizational culture indirectly by analyzing relationships between employees’ traits and their career outcomes has wider applicability, particularly when relying on scores or measures obtained directly from the people concerned is likely to render biased evidence. (shrink)

In a globalizing world, cross-national differences in values and business culture and understanding these differences become increasingly central to a range of organizational issues and ethical questions. However, various concerns have been raised about extant empirical research on cross-national dissimilarities in the cultural values of managers and the development of a unified business culture. This paper seeks to address three such concerns with the literature on convergence versus divergence of cultural values. It develops an empirical approach to the study of (...) changing business cultures that revolves around birth cohorts and intergenerational values shifts and aims to advance empirical knowledge of the dynamics of cross-national differences in the cultural values of managers. We use time-series data covering 68,708 managers and are able to consider a sample of 32 countries that represent more than half of the cultural clusters recognized in the literature. Results reveal diverse shifts in managerial values across birth cohorts with cross-national dissimilarities waning for some basic cultural dimensions, remaining stable for other dimensions, and becoming more pronounced for other dimensions still. Moving beyond the standard convergence/divergence taxonomy, we conclude that a full-fledged convergence–stability–divarication perspective provides the best basis for thinking about the subtle ways in which business cultures are changing. (shrink)

Traditionally, this puzzle has been solved in various ways. Aristotle, for example, distinguished between “accidental” and “essential” changes. Accidental changes are ones that don't result in a change in an objects' identity after the change, such as when a house is painted, or one's hair turns gray, etc. Aristotle thought of these as changes in the accidental properties of a thing. Essential changes, by contrast, are those which don't preserve the identity of the object when it changes, such as when (...) a house burns to the ground and becomes ashes, or when someone dies. Armed with these distinctions, Aristotle would then say that, in the case of accidental changes, (1) and (2) are both false—a changing thing can really change one of its “accidental properties” and yet literally remain one and the same thing before and after the change. (shrink)

In this challenging study, André Gallois proposes and defends a thesis about the character of our knowledge of our own intentional states. Taking up issues at the centre of attention in contemporary analytic philosophy of mind and epistemology, he examines accounts of self-knowledge by such philosophers as Donald Davidson, Tyler Burge and Crispin Wright, and advances his own view that, without relying on observation, we are able justifiably to attribute to ourselves propositional attitudes, such as belief, that we consciously (...) hold. His study will be of wide interest to philosophers concerned with questions about self-knowledge. (shrink)

This article begins with Werner Herzog's programmatic statements on new images and deep truth and connects it to ideas of Nietzschean aesthetics, mainly the Apollonian image and the Dionysian horror. My main argument is that Herzog contributes to the literary and aesthetic tradition of new mythology within the medium of film by developing a distinct visual language that tries to express non-rational truth claims. In a first step I explore how Nietzschean aesthetics influenced the debates about the mythic image and (...) total cinema in classic film theory and visual studies. More importantly I show how the desire to create new mythic images not only influenced Herzog's discourse on film, but his actual aesthetic practice. In my analysis of his 1971 documentary Land of Silence and Darkness I show how the dynamic between Apollonian veil and Dionysian Urbild is effective in the construction of what Herzog calls “deep truth”. This article attempts to shift t... (shrink)

The one world, one science argument (so named by Rescher) is advanced by Carl Sagan and others to support the thesis that we will be able to learn to converse with intelligent extraterrestrials if and when we encounter them. The prima facie obstacle to extraterrestrial communication is that the aliens’ culture and geography are bound to be so different from ours that we would find it extremely difficult, if not practically impossible, to find a common topic on which we can (...) both converse. Sagan's rebuttal is that we will share mathematics and the laws of physics, these being the same for all intelligent beings regardless of local cultural and geographical variations. I show that this argument fails even if its contentious assumptions about science and the world are granted—that is to say, it fails on uncontentious grounds. 1 OWOS 2 OWOS and Social Constructivism 3 OWOS and Conceptual Relativism 4 OWOS and the Selection Problem 5 The Fundamental Laws Solution 6 The Mathematics Solution 7 The Radio Solution 8 The Common Conditions Solution 9 The Intractability of the Selection Problem 10 The Superfluity of OWOS CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

In _The Immaterial_,_ _French social philosopher André Gorz argues, in his finely-tuned and polemical style, that the economic boom that accelerated in the 1990s and crashed so spectacularly in 2008 was based largely on an immaterial consumption of symbols and ideas, as capitalism tried to overcome the crisis of the formally industrial regime by throwing itself into a new, so-called knowledge economy. In this, the last full-length theoretical work Gorz completed before his death, he argues instead for the creation (...) of a true knowledge economy. This economy would be based on zero-cost exchange and pooled resources, and knowledge would be treated as humanity’s common property. Currently, in order to exploit knowledge and turn it into capital, the capitalist enterprise privatizes specialized knowledge and claims ownership through private licenses and copyright. But as Gorz shows, the traditional foundations of such capitalist economics have begun to crumble because of the immaterial nature of this new form of product, which makes it almost impossible to measure in monetary terms. The knowledge economy, Gorz declares, _is_ the crisis of capitalism. Thought-provoking and divisive, _The Immaterial _is the perfect book for our time, as we begin to reimagine the structures of our economic system in order to rebuild and move forward. “It is to Gorz... that readers should turn for a compelling combination of sharp analysis, well-wrought polemic, and suggestions for the future.”—_Red Pepper_ “A great figure of the intellectual Left.”—Nicolas Sarkozy “Gorz’s intelligence strikes you at the very first glance: it is one of the nimblest, acutest intelligences I know.”—Jean-Paul Sartre. (shrink)

Around a hundred years ago there was a tiny Jewish community in Hämeenlinna, a small provincial capital in Finland. The dissolution of the Hämeenlinna Jewish community has become shrouded in mystery. Some amateur historians have even suggested that the last members of the Jewish community were shot by Russian soldiers in 1914. What happened to the last Jews of Hämeenlinna, and what were the reasons behind the historical process that led to the dissolution of the community? This article examines the (...) turns of fate that prompted the leading Jewish families, the Rosenbergs and the Krapiffskys, to leave the town. The involvement of the local governor, the hardline antisemite Rafael Spåre, turned out to be instrumental in the case of the Krapiffsky family, who were the last remaining members of the community. (shrink)

Empirical research is largely supportive of the assertion of instrumental stakeholder theory that a positive relationship exists between “managing for stakeholders” and firm performance. However, despite considerable debate on the subject, the amount of variation across firm investments in stakeholders (stakeholder management performance) has not been adequately investigated. We address this gap using a sample of more than eighteen thousand firm-level observations over ten years. We find evidence to support an inverted U–shaped relationship between variation in stakeholder management performance and (...) Tobin’sq, suggesting that firms that have some imbalance in their stakeholder management, but not too much, perform best. We discuss the implications of our study for instrumental stakeholder theory and managerial practice. (shrink)

“This title, I chose it because I don’t understand Hebrew and because it was very short, because it was opaque and a little unbreakable, like an atomic nucleus. For the first screening of the film at the Empire Theater, George Cravenne asked me: ‘What is the title of the film?’ ‘Shoah.’ ‘What does it mean?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘But how, you must translate it! No one will understand!’ And I said: ‘It’s what I want, that no one understands.’”1The common denominator (...) of any translation is delay: this delay is a matter of time and space, a temporal displacement, a delay that exacerbates the ontological differentiation process between sign and meaning.2 Between the moment.. (shrink)

Drawing on a half century of scholarship, of Polish studies of Copernicus and Cracow University, and of Copernicus's sources, this book offers a comprehensive re-evaluation of Copernicus's achievement, and explains his commitment to the ...

Il ne faut pas sous-estimer la fonction heuristique de la notion de système dans la constitution du savoir moderne. La dénonciation du système comme clôture empêche de penser ce que contenait de théoriquement révolutionnaire la notion de dictionnaire, d'encyclopédie, de système des sciences considérée dans son rapport à l'idée problématique d'un système du présent historique et de ses tâches pratiques. La fin des systèmes laisse la pensée démunie.

nombreux textes inédits André Robinet. 2. LE SECOND MEMBRE DE LA DISJONCTION ARCHITECTONIQUE (D2): LES AUTOMATES SYSTÉMIQUES ( 1686-1716) Le discours leibnizien dans (v>4) emprunte la voie d'une communication qui ...

This dissertation is a study of some recent theories of truth. The theories fall into three groups: The Revision Theories, the context-sensitive theories, and the "Chrysippian theories". ;The "Chrysippian theories" are based on the intuition that pathologicalities arising from the concept of truth can be recognized and acknowledged with the concept of truth itself. Thus, from the pathologicality of the Liar, for example, we can conclude that the Liar is not true. This leads to immediate difficulties since the Liar claims (...) just that--that it is not true--and it would thus seem to be true. The Chrysippian theories are designed to avoid these difficulties while preserving the motivating intuition. Haim Gaifman's Pointer Semantics, and Brian Skyrms' Intensional Fixed-Point Theory of Truth are examples of such theories. They are exposited and criticized. ;The context-sensitive theories dealt with are Tyler Burge's Indexical Theory of Truth and the theory of Jon Barwise and John Etchemendy. These theories claim that an ambiguity due to a contextual parameter is the reason for the difficulties we encounter. Burge offers a theory of Tarskian levels coupled with a pragmatic theory that explains the assignment of levels to occurrences of 'true'. Barwise and Etchemendy make explicit a situational parameter in their account of propositions. They consider the ambiguity with respect to the situation a propositions is about a main source of the paradoxes. ;Finally, the Revision Theories of Truth of Anil Gupta and Nuel Belnap and two variations of this theory are considered. One is due to Aladdin Yaqub, the other, the "fully-varied theory", is due to Gupta and Belnap but remains largely unexplored. Revision theories are put forward as the most promising account of the difficulties. They are based on a definitional reading of all Tarski biconditionals. The circularity implied by such a reading is handled by Gupta's and Belnap's general theory of definitions. ;Yaqub's objections raised against the standard theory are examined, and his proposed solution is shown to be inadequate. The fully-varied Revision Theory is shown to provide a better solution. (shrink)