Business and society research has increasingly moved from the margins to the mainstream. Although this progression has benefited from advances in empirical research, the field continues to suffer from considerable methodological challenges that hamper its development. In this introductory article to the special issue, we review how far our field has come in advancing methods and methodologies in business and society research. We also highlight the methods and methodologies covered by the contributors to this special issue and how they help (...) address key shortcomings in our field. Finally, we suggest some promising research methodologies that can address important business and society research challenges going forward. (shrink)

This paper draws from critical data studies and related fields to investigate police officer-involved homicide data for Los Angeles County. We frame police officer-involved homicide data as a rhetorical tool that can reify certain assumptions about the world and extend regimes of power. We highlight the possibility that this type of sensitive civic data can be investigated and employed within local communities through creative practice. Community involvement with data can create a countervailing force to powerful dominant narratives and supplement activist (...) projects that hold local officials accountable for their actions. Our analysis examines four Los Angeles County police officer-involved homicide data sets. First, we provide accounts of the semantics, granularity, scale and transparency of this local data. Then, we describe a “counter data action,” an event that invited members of the community to identify the limits and challenges present in police officer-involved homicide data and to propose new methods for deriving meaning from these indicators and statistics. (shrink)

In this article, we examine how the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child can be useful in pediatric bioethics. Adopted in 1989, the CRC reflects norms that have been deliberated upon for a long period of time and endorsed by most nations. The United States is now the only country that has not ratified the CRC.1 International human rights law shares many key moral concepts with clinical pediatric bioethics, and the CRC provides a considered language common to many (...) jurisdictions that can assist bioethicists in their daily practice and help health-care organizations in their policy development and international interactions. There may, however, be practical challenges with using the CRC in the practice of.. (shrink)

This paper addresses a variant of the job shop scheduling problem with total tardiness minimization where task durations and due dates are uncertain. This uncertainty is modelled with intervals. Different ranking methods for intervals are considered and embedded into a genetic algorithm. A new robustness measure is proposed to compare the different ranking methods and assess their capacity to predict ‘expected delays’ of jobs. Experimental results show that dealing with uncertainty during the optimization process yields more robust solutions. A sensitivity (...) analysis also shows that the robustness of the solutions given by the solving method increases when the uncertainty grows. (shrink)

BackgroundReflexive pitch perturbation experiments are commonly used to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying vocal motor control. In these experiments, the fundamental frequency–the acoustic correlate of pitch–of a speech signal is shifted unexpectedly and played back to the speaker via headphones in near real-time. In response to the shift, speakers increase or decrease their fundamental frequency in the direction opposing the shift so that their perceived pitch is closer to what they intended. The goal of the current work is to develop (...) a quantitative model of responses to reflexive perturbations that can be interpreted in terms of the physiological mechanisms underlying the response and that captures both group-mean data and individual subject responses.MethodsA model framework was established that allowed the specification of several models based on Proportional-Integral-Derivative and State-Space/Directions Into Velocities of Articulators (DIVA) model classes. The performance of 19 models was compared in fitting experimental data from two published studies. The models were evaluated in terms of their ability to capture both population-level responses and individual differences in sensorimotor control processes.ResultsA three-parameter DIVA model performed best when fitting group-mean data from both studies; this model is equivalent to a single-rate state-space model and a first-order low pass filter model. The same model also provided stable estimates of parameters across samples from individual subject data and performed among the best models to differentiate between subjects. The three parameters correspond to gains in the auditory feedback controller’s response to a perceived error, the delay of this response, and the gain of the somatosensory feedback controller’s “resistance” to this correction. Excellent fits were also obtained from a four-parameter model with an additional auditory velocity error term; this model was better able to capture multi-component reflexive responses seen in some individual subjects.ConclusionOur results demonstrate the stereotyped nature of an individual’s responses to pitch perturbations. Further, we identified a model that captures population responses to pitch perturbations and characterizes individual differences in a stable manner with parameters that relate to underlying motor control capabilities. Future work will evaluate the model in characterizing responses from individuals with communication disorders. (shrink)

A orientação da fenomenologia para uma hermenêutica da facticidade do Dasein permitiu a Heidegger sublinhar a importância primordial do afecto na dinâmica ontológica do cuidado. Mais que uma instância de passividade, no sentido husserliano, a Befindlichkeit vem a ser a forma desperta e activa de ser-no-mundo “sentindo-se”, isto é, enquanto compreensão afectiva tácita ou experiência do existir na quotidianidade e na história. Constitui, por isso, o solo abissal pré-reflexivo do que será a Ontologia Fundamental, o qual só na História do (...) Ser terminará de explicitar-se. Mas é também, ao nível da análise meta-ontológica da existência fáctica, que o estatuto da afectividade se revela plenamente, no quadro de uma possível terapia das perturbações do viver e conviver do Dasein de cada um, contornando a mera dinâmica pulsional pensada por Freud. O nosso percurso procurará atender a estes diferentes pontos, tendo como fio condutor o fenómeno exemplar do temor, nas suas diferentes variantes. (shrink)

The Handbook of Economics and Ethics is a unique collection of 75 original entries on the intersections between economics and ethics.

An efficient assessment of reading and linguistic abilities in school children requires reliable and valid measures. Moreover, measures which include specific test forms for different academic grade levels, that are vertically equated, allow the direct comparison of results across multiple time points and avoid floor and ceiling effects. Two studies were conducted to achieve these goals. The purpose of the first study was to develop tests of reading and listening comprehension in European Portuguese, with vertically scaled test forms for students (...) in the fifth and sixth grades, using Rasch model analyses. The purpose of the second study was to collect evidence for the validity of these tests based on the relationships of test scores with other variables. The samples included 454 and 179 students for the first and second study, respectively. The data from both studies provided evidence for good psychometric characteristics for the test forms: unidimensionality and local independence, as well as adequate reliability and evidence of validity. The developed test forms are an important contribution in the Portuguese educational context as they allow for the assessment of students’ performance in these skills across multiple time points and can be used both in research and practice. (shrink)

The mitigation of pandemics like that caused by the current COVID-19 virus is largely dependent on voluntary public adherence to government rules and regulations. Recent research has identified various individual covariates that account for some of the variance in compliance with COVID-19 behavioral guidelines. However, despite considerable research, our understanding of how and why these factors are related to adherence behavior is limited. Additionally, it is less clear whether disease-transmitting behaviors during a pandemic can be understood in terms of more (...) general behavioral tendencies. The current research has examined the utility of a behavioral-failure lens in predicting adherence to COVID-19 guidelines and in illuminating mechanisms underlying the previously established relationship between Conscientiousness and adherence. In the two studies reported here, individual variations in the predisposition to behavioral failures predicted adherence to COVID-19 measures, and mediated the relationships between Conscientiousness and adherence. The Failure Proneness questionnaire predicted compliance with COVID-19 guidelines, while the Cognitive Failure Questionnaire did not. The results of hierarchical regressions showed that COVID-19 behavior was predicted only through the intentional factors. Hence, our data lend support to the notion that noncompliance with official COVID-19 prevention guidelines is driven mainly by intentional factors related to violation of norms and rules. The theoretical and practical implications of this finding are discussed. (shrink)

Infants, children and adolescents with life-limiting and life-threatening disease need long-term care that may change according to disease’s natural history. With the primary goal of quality of life, the psychologist of pediatric palliative care network deals with a large variety of issues. Little consideration has been given to the variety of intervention areas of psychology in PPC that concern the whole life span of the patient and family. The PPC network is composed by a multidisciplinary team of palliative care specialists (...) that intervenes at home, in the hospital and in every place where the patient is living. The network coordinates different public health services to respond to clinical, psychosocial and spiritual needs. In these scenarios, the psychological need is not a single event but a moment inserted in the complexity of the child’s needs. This retrospective monocentric project consists of an analysis of characteristics of psychological interventions in our PPC service. The time frame taken into consideration is 2019–2020, analyzing the clinical records of 186 patients of Pediatric Palliative Care and Pain Service of Veneto Region. The areas that emerged in the analysis show how the intervention of the psychologist in PPC does not concern only end-of-life, but a series of topics that are significant for the family to guarantee psycho-social wellbeing oriented toward the best quality of life. In conclusion, these different topics highlight the complexity of the child and family experience. This variety must be taken into consideration, the psychologist must increase holistic support with a dedicated skills curriculum. (shrink)

This paper is situated within the framework of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and addresses how women in organizational spaces with strongly values-driven practices can contribute to a more sustainable development in the implementation of a Circular Bioeconomy. Companies aligned with this model have a special responsibility to orient their practices towards comprehensive and fair sustainability if they want to align themselves with the policy frameworks of ecological transition. The article asks whether there is a harmonization of the environmental and social (...) dimensions of practices in companies aligned with the circular bioeconomy and how the participation of women in management positions (in this case, white women, college-educated and non-disabled women) can promote transformative organizational change. Based on the theories of CSR practices, critical feminist perspectives, and social practices theory, a comparative ethnographic approach is used, applying a multi-method (participant observation, interviews, and documents) and multi-site analysis with four companies. The study extends the empirical evidence aimed at favoring the adoption of integrated sustainable practices in organizations. Future research could investigate broader intersectional dynamics to provide more detail on the heterogeneity of the experiences and practices of women or feminist actors and their influence on organizations. (shrink)

What is postmodern music and how does it differ from earlier styles, including modernist music? What roles have electronic technologies and sound production played in defining postmodern music? Has postmodern music blurred the lines between high and popular music? Addressing these and other questions, this ground-breaking collection gathers together for the first time essays on postmodernism and music written primarily by musicologists, covering a wide range of musical styles including concert music, jazz, film music, and popular music. Topics include: the (...) importance of technology and marketing in postmodern music; the appropriation and reworking of Western music by non-Western bands; postmodern characteristics in the music of Górecki, Rochberg, Zorn, and Bolcom, as well as Björk and Wu Tang Clan; issues of music and race in such films as The Bridges of Madison County, Batman, Bullworth, and He Got Game; and comparisons of postmodern architecture to postmodern music. Also includes nine musical examples. (shrink)

El artículo se propone examinar las condiciones por las que los derechos humanos no son respetados en su totalidad para todos los seres humanos. En concreto, estudia la relación entre ser sujeto de justicia y la posesión del estatus de ciudadanía y, por otro lado, la relación entre privación de derechos y ausencia de ciudadanía. En este sentido, se exploran algunos de los discursos que han permitido la cesura entre el hombre como sujeto político y el hombre como sustrato biológico. (...) Se propone tomar la profunda intimidad entre el acceso a los derechos y el ser sujeto reconocido por el Estado como el vector explicativo de la vulneración de los derechos humanos. (shrink)

: Drawing on Adriana Cavarero's account of natality, Guenther argues that Martin Heidegger overlooks the distinct ontological and ethical significance of birth as a limit that orients one toward an other who resists appropriation, even while handing down a heritage of possibilities that one can—and must—make one's own. Guenther calls this structure of natality Being-from-others, modifying Heidegger's language of inheritance to suggest an ethical understanding of existence as the gift of the other.

What is the meaning of critique for critical phenomenology? Building on Gayle Salamon’s engagement with this question in the inaugural issue of Puncta: A Journal for Critical Phenomenology (2018), I will propose a six-fold account of critique as: 1) the art of asking questions, moved by crisis; 2) a transcendental inquiry into the conditions of possibility for meaningful experience; 3) a quasi-transcendental, historically-grounded study of particular lifeworlds; 4) a (situated and interested) analysis of power; 5) the problematization of basic concepts (...) and methods; and 6) a praxis of freedom that seeks not only to interpret the meaning of lived experience, but also to change the conditions under which horizons of possibility for meaning, action, and relationship are wrongfully limited or foreclosed. While the first two dimensions of critique are alive and well in classical phenomenology, the others help to articulate what is distinctive about critical phenomenology. (shrink)

Prolonged solitary confinement has become a widespread and standard practice in U.S. prisons—even though it consistently drives healthy prisoners insane, makes the mentally ill sicker, and, according to the testimony of prisoners, threatens to reduce life to a living death. In this profoundly important and original book, Lisa Guenther examines the death-in-life experience of solitary confinement in America from the early nineteenth century to today’s supermax prisons. Documenting how solitary confinement undermines prisoners’ sense of identity and their ability to (...) understand the world, Guenther demonstrates the real effects of forcibly isolating a person for weeks, months, or years. -/- Drawing on the testimony of prisoners and the work of philosophers and social activists from Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Frantz Fanon and Angela Davis, the author defines solitary confinement as a kind of social death. It argues that isolation exposes the relational structure of being by showing what happens when that structure is abused—when prisoners are deprived of the concrete relations with others on which our existence as sense-making creatures depends. Solitary confinement is beyond a form of racial or political violence; it is an assault on being. (shrink)

In Remnants of Auschwitz , Giorgio Agamben argues that the hidden structure of subjectivity is shame. In shame, I am consigned to something that cannot be assumed, such that the very thing that makes me a subject also forces me to witness my own desubjectification. Agamben’s ontological account of shame is problematic insofar as it forecloses collective responsibility and collapses the distinction between shame and humiliation. By recontextualizing three of Agamben’s sources – Primo Levi, Robert Antelme and Maurice Blanchot – (...) I develop an alternative account of shame as the structure of intersubjectivity , and of a collective responsibility that is more fundamental than the subject itself. On this basis, I sketch the preliminary outline of a biopolitics of resistance rooted in the ethics of alterity. The intuition driving this approach is that life is never bare ; even in situations of extreme affliction there remains a relation to alterity which provides a starting point for resistance. (shrink)

Shame is notoriously ambivalent. On one hand, it operates as a mechanism of normalization and social exclusion, installing or reinforcing patterns of silence and invisibility; on the other hand, the capacity for shame may be indispensible for ethical life insofar as it attests to the subject’s constitutive relationality and its openness to the provocation of others. Sartre, Levinas and Beauvoir each offer phenomenological analyses of shame in which its basic structure emerges as a feeling of being exposed to others and (...) bound to one’s own identity. For Sartre, shame is an ontological provocation, constitutive of subjectivity as a being-for-Others. For Levinas, ontological shame takes the form of an inability to escape one’s own relation to being; this predicament is altered by the ethical provocation of an Other who puts my freedom in question and commands me to justify myself. For Beauvoir, shame is an effect of oppression, both for the woman whose embodied existence is marked as shameful, and for the beneficiary of colonial domination who feels ashamed of her privilege. For each thinker, shame articulates the temporality of social life in both its promise and its danger. (shrink)

Psychiatrist Stuart Grassian has proposed the term “SHU syndrome” to name the cluster of cognitive, perceptual and affective symptoms that commonly arise for inmates held in the Special Housing Units (SHU) of supermax prisons. In this paper, I analyze the harm of solitary confinement from a phenomenological perspective by drawing on Husserl’s account of the essential relation between consciousness, the experience of an alter ego and the sense of a real, Objective world. While Husserl’s prioritization of transcendental subjectivity over transcendental (...) intersubjectivity underestimates the degree to which first-person consciousness is constitutively intertwined with the embodied consciousness of others, Husserl’s phenomenology nevertheless provides a fruitful starting-point for a philosophical engagement with the psychiatric research on solitary confinement. (shrink)

Steven Rose's book is essentially a plea for considering the variety and complexity of life and against simplistic reductions of human and animal behavioral phenomena to single genetic causes.

Written by two of the leading figures in the field, this is a lucid and systematic introduction to semantics as applied to transformational grammars of the ...

Boards of directors affect corporate strategy and decision-making through monitoring of management and resource provision. Recently, an increasing number of studies have examined the relationships between board characteristics and corporate social responsibility (CSR). These studies have yielded inconsistent findings. This article therefore reports the results of a study applying meta-analytical techniques to a sample of 82 empirical studies to help clarify the relationships between board characteristics and CSR. Although prior research has tended to apply relatively simplistic models investigating the impact (...) of individual board characteristics independently and only directly, we adopt a more complex perspective to shed new light on the board characteristics–CSR nexus. Specifically, we use a meta-analytic path model that accounts for the potential interplay between board characteristics in determining CSR and tests whether the presence of a CSR committee plays a meditating role. Our findings suggest that board size, board independence, and female board representation are partially interrelated with each other and jointly influence CSR directly as well as indirectly via the presence of a CSR committee. In addition, we find that country-level institutional factors act as moderators and that the relationships differ with regard to the specific dimension of CSR (i.e., social, environmental, or aggregate). (shrink)

This paper explores whether MacIntyrean virtue ethics concepts are applicable in non-Western business contexts, specifically in SMEs in Taiwan, a country strongly influenced by the Confucian tradition. It also explores what differences exist between different polities in this respect, and specifically interprets observed differences between the Taiwanese study and previous studies conducted in Europe and Asia. Based on case study research, the findings support the generalizability of the MacIntyrean framework. Drawing on the institutional logics perspective and synthesizing this with MacIntyrean (...) concepts, the paper explains the differences between the studies largely by reference to the Confucian tradition operating at both the micro-level within firms and at the macro-level as a means of harmonizing the potentially competing institutional logics to which firms are subject. The recent weakening of this tradition, however, suggests that increased conflict may characterize the future. (shrink)

The world as we know it is structured by intersecting forms of systemic violence. It might seem obvious that this violence calls for critique. But this essay experiments with another, more radical possibility inspired by Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Black feminist poethics and by abolitionist refusals of critique as an end in itself and a substitute for collective action. To what extent might phenomenology, even in its most critical form, be so deeply invested in the Kantian tradition of transcendental critique (...) that it confirms the logic of the world as we know it? And how, if at all, might a praxis of phenomenology beyond critique imagine and affirm a poethical world in which entanglement, indeterminacy, and simultaneity generate virtual possibilities for being, knowing, and doing beyond and against racial violence? (shrink)

Condensing the key message conveyed by a long document into an informative summary is particularly helpful to lawyers and legal experts. State-of-the-art approaches to legal document summarization rely on Language Models (LMs) and are mostly trained on English documents. More limited research efforts have been devoted to summarizing legal documents in languages other than English. In this work, we investigate the applicability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to summarize Italian legal news documents. We benchmark state-of-the-art abstractive summarization techniques based on (...) Language Models, Large and not, for headline and abstract generation from legal news documents. We run an extensive set of experiments on a proprietary legal dataset, evaluating the resulting summaries according to both quantitative metrics and human evaluation. As expected, latest LLMs outperform classical models such as BART, T5, particularly in terms of grammaticality and informativeness of the summary content. Fine-tuned LLMs also show a significant increase in performance, variable across law areas, compared to their zero-shot setting. Importantly, the level of specialization of the fine-tuned version already reaches a steady state after feeding the model with few hundreds of training data. (shrink)

This essay traces the development and the nature of two ideas that have played an important role in Buddhist thought and Buddhist experience. The one, called mandala , is fairly well known in Western literature, particularly because of its intricate and aesthetically moving patterning. It describes the experiencer's anthropocosmic universe. AI; such it is governed by the two major forms of geometry, plane and projective, with circles, squares, and triangles entering various combinations. Broadly speaking, a mandala presents a static worldview. (...) By contrast, what is called dkyil·'khor , is hardly ever mentioned in Western literature. It is a thoroughly dynamic concept that describes the anthropocosmic whole's self·organization in ever· changing and evolving patterns, ebbing and flowing, but always in some sense being the whole. In other words, a mandala emphasizes structure, a dkyil·'khor emphasizes process. The accompanying illustrations show select phases in the construction of a mandala. (shrink)

In Buddhist experience-qua-experienced based and process-oriented thought the experiencer is an integral aspect by virtue of his being a participant, not a detached observer, in the anthropocosmic unfolding of life's mystery, variously called "reality," "Being," or "wholeness." The unfolding process passes through three phases, called "in-depth appraisals," toward a definite value of phase difference. The whole process is experienced as shifting patterns of energy in constant creative interaction with their environment through frequencies of light and intensities of vibrations . These (...) fuse in the sememic-morphemic Hilm, symbol of the spiritual in man, that underlies all concrete manifestations. (shrink)

The Chorus representation is a sparse, similarity-preserving representation achieved by a feedforward neural network. Hence it is probably better suited for interpolation than for categorization. This commentary raises the question of how to combine categorization with interpolation, whether feedforward networks can be reasonable models for parts of the cerebral cortex, and whether people can perform more than one interpolation at a time.

We briefly review the long-standing ideas about the use of synchronicity in the brain, which rely on Donald Hebb's views on cell assemblies and synaptic plasticity. More recently the distinction among several timescales in the description of neural activity has become a focus of theoretical discussion. Phillips & Singer's target article is criticized mainly because it does not distinguish these timescales properly and hence does not really address the questions so intensely debated today.