This paper explores the nature of the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and competitiveness. We start with the commonly held view that firm competitiveness is defined by the market. That is, the question of what are the critical competitiveness factors is answered by looking at how companies and financial analysts describe and evaluate a firm. To analyze this, we review the current state of the art on the relationship between CSR and competitiveness. Second, CSR criteria used by financial analysts (...) is identified and compared with company valuation methods. Third, the results of a multi-stakeholder dialogue on CSR and competitiveness of the European financial sector are presented. As a conclusion, we argue that CSR and competitiveness relate through a learning and innovation cycle, where corporate values, policies and practices are permanently defined and re-defined. Thus, we propose that learning takes place as CSR is embedded in business processes, and that once it has been integrated, in turn, it generates innovative practices, and finally, competitiveness. At the end of the paper, we propose that CSR in practice consists of managing inherent paradoxes generated by the tension between CSR and business policies. (shrink)

Virginia Woolf famously wrote 'as a woman I have no country', suggesting that women had little stake in defending countries where they are considered second-class citizens, and should instead be forces for peace. Yet women have been perpetrators as well as victims of violence in nationalist conflicts. This unique book generates insights into the role of gender in nationalist violence by examining feature films from a range of conflict zones. In The Battle of Algiers, female bombers destroy civilians while men (...) dress in women's clothes to prevent the French army from capturing and torturing them. Prisoner of the Mountains shows a Chechen girl falling in love with her Russian captive as his mother tries to rescue him. Providing historical and political context to these and other films, Matthew Evangelista identifies the key role that economic decline plays in threatening masculine identity and provoking the misogynistic violence that often accompanies nationalist wars. (shrink)

Este artículo analiza la recepción del Romanticismo en la obra de Joan Maragall. A través de sus escritos, de los críticos que la han estudiado y de los epistolarios; se estudia la trayectoria que le predispuso a esa recepción; las similitudes con el krausismo, a la vez que su independencia de él y las lecturas directas de autores considerados románticos. Más concretamente se muestra cómo Maragall desarrolló una teoría estética inspirándose en autores del Círculo de Jena. Estainfluencia explica la naturaleza (...) de su espiritualidad y su pensamiento religioso; así como el ascendiente que tuvo entre poetas españoles cercanos y más jóvenes. (shrink)

The far west in Hesiod's world is confused, and probably reflects a dim knowledge drawn from the Phoenicians in Sicily, where the Greeks bought Tartessian silver. Beneath myths and traditions we may discern a few historical facts: the dynasty of the Tartessian kings, the Phoenician wars with King Geron of Tartessos , followed by the ‘Phoenician Thalassocracy’ and a Tartessian attempt to establish direct commercial relations with Sardinia.

Festzelte are the beer halls (actually tents) of German Oktoberfest style celebrations—generally called Volksfest. Being transient buildings, the tents can be massive and intimidating. 5,000 or more visitors may find a place to drink, eat, sing, dance and celebrate wildly. Chants proclaim the “Gemütlichkeit” [coziness/snugness] despite an atmosphere supercharged with wild behaviors and heavy drunkenness. Norm breaking, liminal behavior is not only tolerated but even expected and intended (up to a certain point).Victor Turner’s concept of cultural performance helps explain the (...) revelry in a beer tent. The tents with their specific rural and folkloristic decorations, spatial structure, and furnishings facilitate the joyous actions. Their staging, as well as the celebratory actions themselves, provide a sacred play-space for anti-structure and communitas, flow and performative reflexivity. The active celebratory participation creates a place where alterity reigns and enables a sense of belonging. (shrink)

Fiodor Dostoievski rasga el alma humana hasta dejarla herida por el sufrimiento, la culpa y el aislamiento. Y, sin embargo, la derrota no gana la batalla. La escritora sureña estadounidense Carson McCullers escribe sobre la soledad y la miseria del sur de los Estados Unidos con una mirada atenta a los paisajes desolados de la Rusia de Fiodor Dostoievski, no sólo físicos sino esencialmente metafísicos. Esta autora que ya leyó al maestro ruso a los 13 años explora las entrañas humanas (...) desde un terreno rural, desolador, inhóspito y desafortunado, con diferencias raciales, sobreexposición de alcohol y con un concepto de bien moral interno que aparece como una pulsión constante e inagotable. En esta aproximación queremos destacar cómo el misterio del mal, pero también el acto de la voluntad y la incomunicación, son aspectos que unen a ambos autores, especialmente en dos de sus obras maestras, Crimen y Castigo y El corazón es un cazador solitario, respectivamente. (shrink)

This article describes how methodologies of EU-funded research within the life sciences and biomedicine have recently become more gender sensitive. This transformation is the result of the Gender Impact Assessments of the EU Fifth Framework Programme, commissioned in 2000-1. The authors assessed the research programme for life sciences, which includes a large health-related component. The new guidelines for research emphasize the need for clear terminology for concepts of sex and gender and for a distinction to be made between the two, (...) for both life sciences and health research. Attention to possible sex differences, even in preclinical research, as well as to effects of gender, will lead to more adequate research data that serve the health of both men and women. The transformation to research becoming more gender-sensitive is further discussed in the context of feminist theory on the body. Being fully aware of the fact that what is happening in bodies is mediated by particular technologies, the authors make an appeal to invest in concepts that take the living and changing body into account. (shrink)

RESUMENEl valor estético del Sistema del Idealismo Trascendental ha pasado algo desapercibido, si se tiene en cuenta su relevancia y si se compara con la buena fortuna de otras obras del mismo autor. La tendencia general, justificada, ha sido estudiar la cuestión de la belleza y el arte en aquellas obras directamente dedicadas a este tema. Este artículo pone en evidencia el valor estético decisivo que tiene el Sistema y, cómo toda la obra y toda su estructura, fundamenta y desarrolla (...) la definición de belleza que aparece sólo en sus últimas líneas: «lo infinito expresado de modo finito es belleza» (SW 465).PALABRAS CLAVESCHELLING, ESTÉTICA, SISTEMA DEL IDEALISMO TRASCENDENTAL, BELLEZAABSTRACTThe aesthetic value of the System of Transcendental Idealism has been scarcely recognized. It must be considered the relevance of this work, and how easy has been the recognition of beauty in other works of Schelling. The general tendency, absolutely justified, has been to look for beauty and art in those text clearly devoted to this topic. In this article it is shown and analyzed the decisive aesthetic value of the System: how the whole work, its whole structure, base and develops the definition of beauty we find just in the last lines of the text: «The infinite expressed in a finite way is beauty» (SW 465)KEYWORDSSCHELLING, AESTHETICS, SYSTEM OF THE TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM, BEAUTY. (shrink)

Zu den bedeutendsten Leistungen der Friedensschrift Kants für die Entwicklung der Völkerrechtsidee gehört die Zurückweisung der bisherigen Leitvorstellung eines ius ad bellum. Unmißverständlich formuliert er: „Bei dem Begriffe des Völkerrechts, als eines Rechts zum Kriege, läßt sich eigentlich gar nichts denken“ . Eine internationale Rechtsordnung müsse dem Ziele dauerhafter Friedenssicherung dienen, und in einem Bund freier Völker soll dieser zwischenstaatliche Konsens institutionalisiert werden.

Las nociones epistémicas modales se definen como aquellos conceptos epistémicos que, como el de cognoscibilidad o el de indudabilidad, incluyen una nota modal. Segun se defiende en este trabajo, la semántica de mundos posibles y algunas de sus extensiones (especialmente las llevadas a cabo para logica temporal, logica epistemica y logica condicional) son instrumentos adecuados para deshacer el nudo de las intensionalidades superpuestas en estas nociones especialmente esquivas al análisis. Para mostrarlo, se proporcionan una serie de análisis sucesivos de la (...) nocion de cognoscibilidad que a partir de una interpretación naif van salvando una serie de presuposiciones, problemas y paradojas hasta dar con una analisis que se presume satisfactorio.“Modal epistemic notions” are those epistemic concepts which in some way or another has a modal element. These modal epistemic notions, although they could appear intuitively clear, they turn out to be particularly obscure, slippery, when one subjects them to a formal analysis. In this paper we will try to show that possible world semantics (and its extensions for epistemic, temporal and conditional logic) is an appropriate instrument for the explanation ofthese notions. Four successive analysis of the notion of “knowability” are given, ranging from a naive account to an analysis that gets to the bottom ofthe problem. (shrink)

Cover Photograph: Transgenic Hydra provide insights of general relevance into stem cell biology. The image shows a mass culture of transgenic Hydra expressing EGFP in all of their ectodermal epithelial cells. See article by Thomas C. G. Bosch pp. 478–486.

Este artículo analiza la aportación de Aspasio al concepto aristotélico de ergon. Hasta el momento no se ha realizado un estudio de este concepto bajo el prisma de las aportaciones aspasianas, centrándose en el capítulo séptimo del libro primero de la Ética Nicomaquea. Examina el significado que Aristóteles reconoce en la función propia del ser humano, y los matices que añade Aspasio. Para esta investigación se sigue el orden del texto y se centra el análisis en los términos clave: el (...) primer apartado se dedica al bien del hombre; el segundo, a la felicidad. El tercero y cuarto a las diversas cualidades que definen la función propia: es específica y racional; es activa, virtuosa y estable. El quinto y último apartado examina los comentarios sobre el método y los principio. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that pragmatism has something to gain from returning once more to the question of truth, and acknowledging the truth of the existence of Being and its elements. The practical relevance of this insight is shown by my proposition for a practical hermeneutic social scientific method which logically follows from the truth of Being. The method is compatible with the inevitability of subjective judgments in any kind of scientific research, as well as with many pragmatist insights. (...) It is my hope that pragmatists will be willing to follow their own adagium and conceive of this confrontation with difference as an opportunity to re-assess their views. (shrink)

Current work in experimental biology revolves around a handful of animal species. Studying only a few organisms limits science to the answers that those organisms can provide. Nature has given us an overwhelming diversity of animals to study, and recent technological advances have greatly accelerated the ability to generate genetic and genomic tools to develop model organisms for research on host–microbe interactions. With the help of such models the authors therefore hope to construct a more complete picture of the mechanisms (...) that underlie crucial interactions in a given metaorganism (entity consisting of a eukaryotic host with all its associated microbial partners). As reviewed here, new knowledge of the diversity of host–microbe interactions found across the animal kingdom will provide new insights into how animals develop, evolve, and succumb to the disease. (shrink)