This paper aims to rethink the problem of NATO burden sharing along ethical lines. It argues that the ethics of burden sharing reveals the tensions between utility of contribution and fairness of distribution. Inspired by Jarrod Hayes and Patrick James’s theory-as-thought method and using the traditions of normative ethics, this interpretive research looks at how the issues of sharing and contributing were discursively framed by its practitioners during NATO’s first decade. Focusing on one of the largest founding members, (...) Canada, the paper finds incoherence between the predominantly consequentialist discourse of government authorities with respect to Canada’s contributions and those authorities’ discourse on allied sharing in NATO, shaped by obligations and communitarian ethics. Consequently, this presence of different ethical logics points to a split discourse on NATO burden sharing in Canada. The paper sheds light on the normative roots of the burden-sharing problem and demonstrates the relevance of theoretical pluralism and eclectic methodology for foreign-policy analysis. (shrink)

This article examines how organizational experience influences social enterprise responses to impact assessment practices. Limited attention has been paid to why organizations resist or challenge impact assessment practices or how prior experience with impact assessment may shape organizational responses. The study draws on interviews with practitioners involved in social enterprise–impact investor dyads in Australia and the United Kingdom. The findings reveal that social enterprises enact either combative or collaborative responses in their relationships with impact investors based on past experiences with (...) impact assessment. The study shows how more experienced social enterprises reach a state of impact lock-in—where they become committed to particular approaches to understanding, measuring, and reporting impact. The article contributes to the literature on impact assessment and impact investment by showing how organizational experience shapes divergent reactions to the demands imposed by impact investors, creating complementary forces of institutionalization and contestation of impact assessment practice. (shrink)

Business Ethics: A European Review, EarlyView.

The need for ethical leadership in navigating today’s complex, global and competitive organisations has been established. While research has confirmed the importance of ethical leaders in promoting positive organisational and employee outcomes, scant research has examined the antecedents of ethical leadership. Furthermore, there has been a call for further examination of leadership models, particularly indigenous leadership models. Responding to these issues, this study suggests Māori leaders’ values add insights into enhancing ethical leadership. Three studies confirm the role of Māori values (...) and ethical leadership. Study one, based on kaupapa Māori research methods, is an exploratory 22-interview study of Māori leaders and identifies five values, as common to successful indigenous leaders. In study two, 249 employees rate their leaders on these five dimensions in relation to their ethical leadership and exchange relationships. Structural equation modelling shows strong support for the distinct nature of the five values and their positive influence on ethical leadership perceptions and quality exchange relationships. Study three, on 122 employees, reinforces the findings of study two—and demonstrates that LMX predicts job outcomes both indirectly and directly, with humility and collectivism also directly predicting outcomes. Our findings suggest that indigenous leaders’ values enhance perceptions and outcomes of ethical leadership for employees. (shrink)

Jarrod Whitaker examines the ritualized poetic construction of male identity in the Rigveda, India's oldest Sanskrit text, arguing that an important aspect of early Vedic life involves the sustained promotion and embodiment of what it means to be a true man.

As engineers gain experience and become experts in their domain, the structure and content of their knowledge changes. Two studies are presented that examine differences in knowledge representation among freshman and senior engineering students. The first study examines recall of mechanical devices and chunking of components, and the second examines whether seniors represent devices in a more abstract functional manner than do freshmen. The most prominent differences between these 2 groups involve their representation of the functioning of groups of electromechanical (...) components and how these groups of components interact to produce device behavior. Seniors are better able to construct coherent representations of devices by focusing on the function of sets of components in the device. The findings from these studies highlight some ways in which the structure and content of mental representations of design knowledge differ during the early stages of expertise acquisition. (shrink)

Functional MRI of fully awake and unrestrained dog ’volunteers' has been proven an effective tool to understand the neural circuitry and functioning of the canine brain. Although every dog owner would vouch that dogs are perceptive, cognitive, intuitive and capable of positive emotions/empathy, as indeed substantiated by ethological studies for some time, neurological investigations now corroborate this. These studies show that there exists a striking similarity between dogs and humans in the functioning of the caudate nucleus, and dogs experience positive (...) emotions, empathic-like responses and demonstrate human bonding which, some scientists claim, may be at least comparable with human children. There exists an area analogous to the ’voice area' in the canine brain, enabling dogs to comprehend and respond to emotional cues/valence in human voices, and evidence of a region in the temporal cortex of dogs involved in the processing of faces, as also observed in humans and monkeys. We therefore contend that using dogs in invasive and/or harmful research, and toxicity testing, cannot be ethically justifiable. (shrink)

Buddhism in a Dark Age: Cambodian Monks under Pol Pot, by Ian Harris, is a natural follow-up to Harris’s 2005 work, Cambodian Buddhism: History and Practice, also published by the University of Hawai‘i Press. The present work, like the earlier one, is primarily focused on the social and political history of Cambodian Buddhism and expands on the final two chapters of that earlier work in that it deals with Buddhism in Democratic Kampuchea from 1975 to 1979 and the aftermath of (...) Khmer Rouge control. Both works are heavily dependent on French-and English-language secondary sources and periodicals, with Khmer-language sources used infrequently. Buddhism in a Dark Age is, however, a very different book than Cambodian... (shrink)

The present study extends the meaningful work and ethics literature by comparing three ethics-related antecedents. The second contribution of this paper is that in using a multi-dimensional MFW construct we offer a more fine-tuned understanding of the impact of ethical antecedents on different dimensions of MFW, such as expressing full potential and integrity with self. Using an international data set from 879 employees and structural equation modelling, we confirmed an updated seven-dimension Comprehensive Meaningful Work Scale. The structural model found that (...) fairness, responsible leadership and worthy work are all significant and positively related to the majority of meaningfulness dimensions. However, different antecedents are related to different dimensions of MFW, showing that a complex and multi-level combination of ethics-related practices are required to cultivate MFW. All relationships were in the expected positive direction except responsible leadership, which was negatively related to the MFW dimension of integrity with self. Across the seven dimensions of MFW, only the dimension ‘Service to Others’ was uniformly not predicted by any antecedent. However, all three antecedents significantly related to important dimensions of MFW not usually measured in the ethics literature, such as ‘Unity with Others’ and ‘Expressing Full Potential’. In addition, we conducted dominance analysis to test the relative importance of the three antecedent across the MFW dimensions, and found that worthy work is the most dominant antecedent, although all three antecedents are the most dominant for at least one MFW dimension—further highlighting the importance of exploring MFW as a multi-dimensional construct. We discuss the implications for MFW theory and practice. (shrink)

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2018.

Even after several decades of human drug development, there remains an absence of published, substantial, comprehensive data to validate the use of animals in preclinical drug testing, and to point to their pr...

This paper examines the meaning and significance of the numerical phrase tríḥ saptá and its compounded form triṣaptá in the R̥gveda and Atharvaveda in order to understand its use in the opening hymn of the Śaunakīya Saṃhitā. It argues that by invoking Vācaspati and the “Thrice Seven” the hymn’s composer makes a complex poetic and mythological statement about the cosmological importance of his ritual tradition, its founding fathers, and the powerful nature of ritual speech and knowledge, a message that the (...) redactors of the Śaunakīya Saṃhitā wished to foreground by opening their text with this hymn. (shrink)

When everyone can be a publisher, what distinguishes the journalist? This article considers contemporary challenges to institutional roles in a digital media environment and then turns to three broad journalistic normative values - authenticity, accountability, and autonomy - that affect the credibility of journalists and the content they provide. A set of questions that can help citizens determine the trustworthiness of information available to them emerges from the discussion.

Hòa Hảo is a tradition that emerged in the early part of the twentieth century in Vietnam with its principle canon, the _Sám Giảng_ (_The Oracles_), authored by its founder, Huỳnh Phú Sổ. Its principle philosophical innovation is foregrounding moral practices within an ethicized relational ontology. The conditioned world is constituted by relations that have both metaphysical and moral correlates, but as relations, are empty of intrinsic being. The development of moral epistemic abilities leads to metaphysical insights, and paired with (...) its karmic benefits, moral practice, _giới_, is taken to be both necessary and sufficient for liberation, albeit with the possible intermediate step of a Pure Land rebirth. (shrink)

Human Quality Treatment (HQT) is a theoretical approach expressing different ways of dealing with employees within an organization and is embedded in humanistic management tenants of dignity, care, and personal development, seeking to produce morally excellent employees. We build on the theoretical exposition and present a measure of HQT-Scale across several studies including cross-culturally to enhance confidence in our results. Our first study generates the 25 items for the HQT-Scale and provides initial support for the items. We then followed up (...) with a large study of managers (n = 363) from Nigeria in study 2, which confirms the theoretical properties of the five dimensions of HQT and highlights a two-factor construct: HQT Ethically Unacceptable and HQT Ethically Acceptable using a 20-item HQT-Scale. Study 3 with a large sample of New Zealand employees (n = 452) again confirms the nature of the construct and provides construct validity tests. Finally, using time-lagged data, study 4 (n = 308) focuses on New Zealand employees and job attitudes and behaviors, and a well-being outcome. That study not only confirms the theoretically implied effects but also shows the HQT Ethically Acceptable factor mediates the detrimental effects of HQT Ethically Unacceptable. Overall, our four studies provide strong support for the HQT-Scale and highlight important understandings of HQT and humanistic management in the workplace. (shrink)

It is true for many disciplines within the humanities that there are numerous excellent works that introduce the beginner to the basic building blocks of the discipline, and also many advanced studies for the accomplished scholar, but few works that help the student get from the beginning stage to the advanced level. That has certainly been true of the discipline of Sanskrit. Once a student has devoted a couple of years to working through one of the excellent introductions to the (...) language by Ashok Aklujkar, Michael Coulson, Madhav Deshpande, Robert Goldman, or Walter Maurer, there have been hardly any intermediate texts to help the student systematically progress to more advanced levels. Now, however, with the publication of Scholastic Sanskrit, an important step has been taken toward filling that lacuna. This book assumes that the student has learned enough about Sanskrit grammar and syntax to be ready to begin plunging into the vast corpus comprising the many genres of Sanskrit literature. It is built on the conviction that even a student at the early stages of exploring Sanskrit literature can benefit from the work of traditional commentators; it is also built on the observation that until now there have not been reliable guides to help the student make intelligent use of Sanskrit commentaries. (shrink)

The concept of social structure is crucial in social analysis, yet sociologists' use of the term is often ambiguous and misleading. Contributing to the ambiguity is a tendency to imply the meaning of "social structure" either by opposing it to agency or by contrasting it to culture, thus reducing "structure" to pure constraint and suggesting that "culture" is not structured. Even more damaging is the tendency to conflate these two contrasts. To add to the confusion, these contrasts are often mapped (...) inappropriately onto other dichotomies prevalent in social theorizing, including material versus ideal, external versus internal, static versus active, and objective versus subjective, to produce a conceptual prism in which structure, agency, and culture are all poorly understood. This article attempts to disentangle these concepts from the aforementioned system of contrasts, to specify the connections between structure and agency, and to make a case for the inclusion of culture in the sociological conception of social structure. (shrink)

Vájra: Zur Schleuderwaffe im Rigveda. By Walter Slaje. Studia Indologica Universitatis Halensis, vol. 21. Halle/Saale: Universitätsverlag Halle-Wittenberg, 2022. Pp. 110, illus. €69.

Dr Hay is Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen. A zoologist by profession, his research has been guided by the hypothesis that religious or spiritual awareness is biologically natural to the human species and has been selected for in the process of organic evolution because it has survival value. Although naturalistic, this hypothesis is not intended to be reductionist with regard to religion. Nevertheless it does imply that all people, including those who have no religious belief, have (...) a spiritual life. His research has included a number of national and in-depth surveys of reports of religious or spiritual experience in the United Kingdom.. (shrink)

This paper argues that the inappropriate framing and implementation of plagiarism detection systems in UK universities can unwittingly construct international students as ‘plagiarists’. It argues that these systems are often implemented with inappropriate assumptions about plagiarism and the way in which new members of a community of practice develop the skills to become full members of that community. Drawing on the literature and some primary data it shows how expectations, norms and practices become translated and negotiated in such a way (...) that legitimate attempts to conform with the expectations of the community of practice often become identified as plagiarism and illegitimate attempts at cheating often become obscured from view. It argues that this inappropriate framing and implementation of plagiarism detection systems may make academic integrity more illusive rather than less. It argues that in its current framing – as systems for ‘detection and discipline’ – plagiarism detection systems may become a new micro-politics of power with devastating consequences for those excluded. (shrink)

ABSTRACTOscar Larsson’s sympathetic critique of constructivist institutionalism calls for a clarification of my understanding of subjectivity, inter-subjectivity, and their mutual interdependence. That interdependence lies at the heart of any genuinely constructivist approach, just as the interdependence of structure and agency lies at the heart of any genuinely institutionalist approach. As such, I reject the charge of subjectivism just as I would that of voluntarism. Building on the social ontology of Berger and Luckmann, we can distinguish between subjectivity and intra-subjectivity and (...) proceed to show how the latter implies a notion of inter-subjectivity. An example of the social construction of a political crisis shows that social facts are made and remade through a fusion of inter- and intra-subjectivities. (shrink)

Like most religions, the Buddhist tradition is rich in stories that are designed to illustrate key principles and values. Stories of the Buddha himself offer a verbal portrait of an ideal human being that followers of the tradition can aspire to emulate; his story offers a picture of a person with a perfectly healthy mind. Stories of other people (and of gods, ghosts and ghouls) portray a wide range of beings from the nearly perfect to the dreadfully imperfect, all presented (...) as models of what one could eventually become oneself through gradual transformations from one’s present mentality. In what follows, I shall first tell a brief story about myself and will then recount the stories of two men who were cousins with similar but importantly different mentalities. And I shall conclude with a few observations about what I see as the significance of the difference between these two cousins. (shrink)

Beyond the Ancient Quarrel brings together contributions from leading scholars to explore the boundaries between literature, philosophy, and literary criticism in the work of J.M. Coetzee.