Businesses increasingly assume political roles, despite issues of legitimacy. The presented two case studies illustrate how businesses harness their political influence in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices through collaboration and dialog with stakeholders and civil society actors. These cases are set around issues arising in global supply chains in sourcing activities where the core problem is associated with businesses managing extended responsibilities under conflicting institutional conditions. The article seeks to provide empirical examples of Political CSR and illustrates the role of (...) deliberative democracy in contemporary business behavior. It adopts a Western business perspective, more specifically from an end-producer and retailer’s standpoint. Findings suggest that civil society is influential in driving these businesses to act responsibly. Joint collaboration is understood as key to strive toward holistic solutions. Political CSR theory remains an ideal, but offers fruitful grounds for speculating on what the political role of business is or could be and how this translates into pragmatic implications for businesses. (shrink)

We give Scott sentences for certain computable groups, and we use index set calculations as a way of checking that our Scott sentences are as simple as possible. We consider finitely generated groups and torsion-free abelian groups of finite rank. For both kinds of groups, the computable ones all have computable \ Scott sentences. Sometimes we can do better. In fact, the computable finitely generated groups that we have studied all have Scott sentences that are “computable d-\” sentence and a (...) computable \ sentence). In [9], this was shown for the finitely generated free groups. Here we show it for all finitely generated abelian groups, and for the infinite dihedral group. Among the computable torsion-free abelian groups of finite rank, we focus on those of rank 1. These are exactly the additive subgroups of \. We show that for some of these groups, the computable \ Scott sentence is best possible, while for others, there is a computable d-\ Scott sentence. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDer Text schlägt vor, die Entwicklung kollaborativer audiovisueller Wissenspraktiken in der Anthropologie als situiertes und diffraktives Wissen zu verstehen (Haraway, Barad, Smith). Im Durchgang durch einige historische Stationen der Geschichte kollaborativer und partizipativer Projekte wird vorgeschlagen, dass kollaboratives Filmemachen nicht nur eine Dezentrierung einseitiger Autor:innenschaft und einseitiger Repräsentationsmodi ist, sondern auch eine medienspezifische Wissensform, die an soziale Kontexte gebunden und in diese eingebettet ist. Vor dem Hintergrund des Kolonialfilms werden Stationen der Abgrenzung und Versuche der Dekolonisierung des Films beschrieben. Aktuelle (...) Filmexperimente mit marginalisierten Gruppen haben ihren Ursprung in den „shared anthropologies“ (Rouch) und haben diesen Ansatz durch konsequentere Formen des power sharing in Indigenen Kollaborationen und im Fourth Cinema weiterentwickelt. Film kann so auch Amateur:innenwissenspraktiken in kollaborativen Forschungsprojekten abbilden. (shrink)

There are considerable gaps in our knowledge of how children develop abstract language. In this paper, we tested the Affective Embodiment Account, which proposes that emotional information is more essential for abstract than concrete conceptual development. We tested the recognition memory of 7- and 8-year-old children, as well as a group of adults, for abstract and concrete words which differed categorically in valence. Word valence significantly interacted with concreteness in hit rates of both children and adults, such that effects of (...) valence were only found in memory for abstract words. The pattern of valence effects differed for children and adults: children remembered negative words more accurately than neutral and positive words, whereas adults remembered negative and positive words more accurately than neutral words. In addition, signal detection analysis revealed that children were better able to discriminate negative than positive words, regardless of concreteness. The findings suggest that the memory accuracy of 7- and 8-year-old children is influenced by emotional information, particularly for abstract words. The results are in agreement with the Affective Embodiment Account and with multimodal accounts of children’s lexical development. (shrink)

This article reflects on some ethical dilemmas presented by an ethnographic study of prostitution that I conducted in the 1990s. The study drew one research subject into a long and very close relationship with me, and though she was an active and fully consenting participant in the research, she was also objectified within both the field relationship and the textual products it generated. This kind of contradiction has been recognized and discussed as a more general problem for ethnography by feminist (...) and critical ethnographers. In this article it is considered specifically in relation to informed consent as an ethical issue. If an ethnographer secures the free and informed consent of a research subject, does this necessarily make the intimacy of their subsequent relationship ethical? Is it possible for anyone to genuinely consent to being objectified through the research process? (shrink)

Academic writings– writings that take place in academic settings, from undergraduate essays to research monographs – are social practices and methods of knowledge enquiry. In virtue of being social and epistemic, they should be of concern to critical realists because of critical realism's stratified approach to reality. By critiquing approaches to academic writing that can flatten reality, I propose that if academic writings were understood as ontologically stratified social practices, they could afford writers the rational judgement to make textual choices. (...) Specifically, I show there is the possibility to produce discourse that is different from standardized ‘objective' and ‘transparent' academic prose, which, inter alia, also has colonial roots. If academic writings were understood ontologically and epistemologically as practices and methods of enquiry that require writers (i.e. agents) to rationally judge what form their texts should take, this could further academic writing’s educative and emancipatory purpose of advancing knowledge and justice. (shrink)

En What Emotions Really Are y en otros artículos, Griffiths afirma que las clases naturales de los organismos vivos en Biología son cladistas. La afirmación está inmersa en una nueva teoría acerca de las clases naturales. En este trabajo examinaré los argumentos esgrimidos por Griffiths para sostener el estatus privilegiado de las clasificaciones cladistas frente a otras clasificaciones. No se discutirá la teoría de las clases naturales ofrecida, de cuyos méritos no dudo, sino su capacidad para ofrecer una solución en (...) la cuestión particular de qué sistema de clasificación de organismos debería utilizarse en Biología. In What emotions really are and in other papers Griffiths states that in Biology, natural classes ofliving organisms are clades. This assertion is made within the bounds of a new theory of natural classes. In this paper I wiIl consider the arguments employed by Griffiths to support the privileged status of the cladistic classification over other classifications. It is not Griffith's theory of natural classes what will be discussed, but his ability to offer a solution to the particular issue ofwhich classification system of organisms should be used in Biology. (shrink)

Physicians are trained to an expert degree in the scientific knowledge and skills of biomedicine. Despite this training, however, physicians’ professional lives are rife with instances in which they do not know. They must operate adeptly in the face of numerous uncertainties, as the extensiveness of the scientific literature, unknown mechanisms of pharmaceuticals or biological processes, and variations in patients’ etiologies and anatomies render it impossible to know everything. Similarly, physicians study vast swaths of scientific concepts and clinical skills throughout (...) their careers, yet individual physicians cannot commit all that biomedical knowledge to memory. Given the impossibility of absolute knowledge... (shrink)

To these rather restrained opinions, one must add the unremitting efforts of the media but also of academia—these powers and institutions are decidedly united—who aim to ridicule and discredit for ever more literary theory’s encroachment, or attemptedencroachment, of its authority on literature. It may seem paradoxical that such a sparing, abstract, or even, as they say, insignificant activity should elicit such an... eroticization. Why so much passion for such an elusive object? We must look back to the beginningsof theoretical thought (...) in the area of arts and literature, in order to attempt to uncover the reasons for this apparent anomaly. (shrink)

The use of eHealth components in healthcare is often viewed in the context of disruptive change and ethical pitfalls. We focus on interpersonal relationships between physicians, patients, and care providers and show that positive changes (also) occur within this context.

This guest column suggests that we should follow Hannah Arendt in resisting the urge to expound doctrines or systems and, instead, should disclose the processes of our thought as they are “in motion.” While we should not hesitate to express judgments, our aim in intellectual work should be to occasion (and experience) surprise. Like Arendt, we should candidly express “the bliss of thought” as we think and write. On this basis, the political arena can become “a space for self-analysis and (...) (by analogy with psychoanalysis) continuous rebirth.” And it is only on this basis, Kristeva argues, that reconstruction, after a century of unprecedented destruction, be accomplished without our succumbing to nostalgia. Efforts at reconstruction must be undertaken, as Arendt undertook them, “in light of the history of nihilism” and “in the name of sheer survival.” Kristeva joins Arendt in advising against a return to foundationalism while at the same time urging the development of a kind of “re-foundationalism.” Kristeva concludes by showing how, in these attitudes, Arendt's thinking was—despite her notorious dismissal of psychoanalysis—in tune with those of Freud. (shrink)