Interest in the microfoundations of corporate social responsibility has grown over the past decade. In this study, we draw on social learning theory to examine the effects of prosocial leaders on followers’ motivation to engage in CSR practices, and consequently on their CSR performance. Further drawing from social learning theory, we propose that followers’ trait compliance and leader-member exchange moderate the above relationships by affecting the conceptual mechanisms of social rewards and role-modeling motives. We tested our hypotheses with data from (...) a sample of 138 employees who were responsible for implementing an organization-initiated CSR practice. Our results showed that among followers who were high in trait compliance, leaders’ prosocial motivation was positively associated with followers' CSR motivation. In addition, followers’ CSR motivation was positively related to their objective CSR performance when they had a high-quality relationship with their leaders. Our findings advance our understanding of the conditions under which leaders will be more versus less influential on followers’ motivation and engagement in CSR activities. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our results. (shrink)

We report the identification of a recurrent, 520-kb 16p12.1 microdeletion associated with childhood developmental delay. The microdeletion was detected in 20 of 11,873 cases compared with 2 of 8,540 controls and replicated in a second series of 22 of 9,254 cases compared with 6 of 6,299 controls. Most deletions were inherited, with carrier parents likely to manifest neuropsychiatric phenotypes compared to non-carrier parents. Probands were more likely to carry an additional large copy-number variant when compared to matched controls. The clinical (...) features of individuals with two mutations were distinct from and/or more severe than those of individuals carrying only the co-occurring mutation. Our data support a two-hit model in which the 16p12.1 microdeletion both predisposes to neuropsychiatric phenotypes as a single event and exacerbates neurodevelopmental phenotypes in association with other large deletions or duplications. Analysis of other microdeletions with variable expressivity indicates that this two-hit model might be more generally applicable to neuropsychiatric disease. © 2010 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

Mass-marketing frauds are on the increase. Given the amount of monies lost and the psychological impact of MMFs there is an urgent need to develop new and effective methods to prevent more of these crimes. This paper reports the early planning of automated methods our interdisciplinary team are developing to prevent and detect MMF. Importantly, the paper presents the ethical and social constraints involved in such a model and suggests concerns others might also consider when developing automated systems.

A significant feature of current intellectual life in Europe is the proliferation of high level colloquia, different from the routine meetings of professional or erudite organizations in that they represent authentic team reflection and common intellectual growth through dialogue among the participants. These Roman conversations sponsored by the Istituto di Studi Filosofici, University of Rome, began in 1945, and their topics have continually increased in relevance for the philosophical community at large as international participation grew and concern for vital problems (...) of contemporary man became the basis for discussions. The contributions in this volume center around problems brought to the fore by the influential work of H. G. Gadamer in Wahrheit und Methode, although this author, a frequent contributor to other volumes in this series, does not appear in this particular one. The papers are all variations on the theme of temporal distance as the ground of constructive comprehension. Paul Ricœur and A. De Waelhens have the least circumstantial contributions in this excellent array of authors, many of whom have been doing concurrent work in hermeneutics long before this method and its philosophical repercussions had any notoriety. Within the vast field of semantic research, which has been crisscrossed in every direction by all schools of thought in modernity, these authors are developing the hypothesis of a transcendentalism without a subject. These studies can be pointed to as palpable proof that the generative transformational tendencies and the symbolic tendencies in linguistics can be integrated. In this sense it is significant that ideas from the Anthropologie Structurale of C. Levi-Strauss come up often in the text.—A. M. (shrink)

Hard incompatibilism is a view about free will and moral responsibility that has been developed and defended by Derk Pereboom for almost three decades (Pereboom 1995, 2001, 2014). Succinctly put, hard incompatibilists argue that we do not have free will because, whether determinism is true or false, we are subject to the freedom-undermining effects of causal luck (i.e. causal factors beyond our control). In recent years, Gregg Caruso has become a vocal advocate of hard incompatibilism, and he rests his “public (...) health-quarantine model” and its non-retributive approach to criminal behavior squarely on the foundation of Pereboom’s free-will metaphysics (e.g. Caruso 2012, 2014, 2021, 2022; Pereboom and Caruso 2018, 2022; Dennett and Caruso 2021). More recently, biologist and science popularizer Robert Sapolsky has raised the public profile hard incompatibilism by claiming to endorse this position in his best-selling book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (2023). -/- In this book, I offer a refutation of hard incompatibilism and all instances of constructive incompatibilism. In short, I argue that two central central explanatory tenets of hard incompatibilism are in tension with one another, making it impossible for someone to argue for one without undermining their defense of the other in the process. I then point out that the arguments against hard incompatibilism also undermine Neil Levy's luck-pincer impossibilism (2011). Along the way, I explain why Robert Sapolsky is not a hard incompatibilist and is actually committed to the falsity of hard incompatibilism. In closing, I propose a way for skeptics like Caruso and Sapolsky to maintain their skepticism without any type of constructive incompatibilism as the foundation. -/- [Building from the arguments in "The Problem of Free Will: An Abductive Approach", "Free Will, Self-Creation, and The Paradox of Moral Luck," and "(In)compatibilism"] -/- . (shrink)

Structuralism, in so far as its essence can be pinned down, seems to be the view that the surface aspects of social phenomena are best explained in terms of complex, elusive, below-the-surface "structures," patterns, or model systems. Examples of such underlying structures are the unconscious motivation schemes of individuals, a taken-for-granted economic order, customs of social strata, ingrained moral philosophies, and religious institutions. The De Georges’ pioneer sourcebook [[sic]] presents selections, infused with the structuralist viewpoint, from the writings of Marx, (...) Freud, and the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who are structuralism’s patriarchs; Claude Lévi-Strauss, its present high priest; Roman Jakobson, teacher of structural linguistics at Harvard and M.I.T.; Louis Althusser, who rejects affiliation with structuralism; and four others. Some of these selections include extremely difficult passages, in which the authors seem to be striving to squeeze a deep disclosure out of a surface act or function. Other selections are clearer, somewhat smoother, and more convincing. A well-made index concludes the volume.—W. G. (shrink)

Listening to someone from some distance in a crowded room you may experience the following phenomenon: when looking at them speak, you may both hear and see where the source of the sounds is; but when your eyes are turned elsewhere, you may no longer be able to detect exactly where the voice must be coming from. With your eyes again fixed on the speaker, and the movement of her lips a clear sense of the source of the sound will (...) return. This ‘ventriloquist’ effect reflects the ways in which visual cognition can dominate auditory perception. And this phenomenological observation is one what you can verify or disconfirm in your own case just by the slightest reflection on what it is like for you to listen to someone with or without visual contact with them. (shrink)

In today's complex business world, the question of business ethics is increasingly gaining importance as managers and employees face numerous ethical dilemmas in their jobs. The ethical climate in the Turkish business environment is also at a critical stage, and the business community as a whole is troubled by ethical problems. This study attempts to determine the effect of individual, managerial and organizational factors on the ethical judgments of Turkish managers, and to evaluate the ethical perceptions of these managers. The (...) findings of this study reveal that the ethics score, the measure of ethical judgment, of Turkish managers differs significantly only with respect to gender and that female managers have higher ethics score than male managers. Other individual, managerial and organizational factors considered in this study do not have any significant effect on the ethical judgments of the managers. A comparative analysis between female and male managers in terms of their ranking of the eleven ethical business scenarios, ranking of the sixteen unethical acts, ranking of the factors influencing managers to engage in unethical practices, and ranking of the various parties to whom a company is socially responsible enables the researchers to enlighten the subject of business ethics in Turkey. (shrink)

This article shows that the various regimes of “real socialism” uniformly failed to transcend the horizon of capitalism. They have remained class societies based on wage labour, commodity production, a money economy and welfare systems fed by redistribution. At the same time, they present peculiar features that are different from other versions of “state capitalism.” Traditional elites were annihilated, private property of capital in the hands of individuals or autonomous groups was prohibited, and the advantages accruing to leading positions were (...) not inherited, although equality in income was very modest. The main political invention of “real socialism” was the Party, a unique institution unlike any other, grounded in theory, but an institution of the state, over the executive, which had unprecedented powers of mobilisation and cultural influence. It had to be intellectual in character, as the system was steered through the Plan which was, in the final analysis, a text. The changes of 1989 took place partly mediated by the Party, partly against its rule. The successor regimes are conspicuously political owing to the nature of the adversary. (shrink)

Trust among current and future patients is essential for the success of biobank research. The submission of an informed consent is an act of trust by a patient or a research subject, but a strict application of the rule of informed consent may not be sensitive to the multiplicity of patient interests at stake, and could thus be detrimental to trust. According to a recently proposed law on “genetic integrity” in Sweden, third parties will be prohibited from requesting or seeking (...) genetic information about an individual. Cumbersome restrictions on research may be lifted, thus creating a more favourable climate for medical research. (shrink)

In the past, hypothesis testing in medicine has employed the paradigm of the repeatable experiment. In statistical hypothesis testing, an unbiased sample is drawn from a larger source population, and a calculated statistic is compared to a preassigned critical region, on the assumption that the comparison could be repeated an indefinite number of times. However, repeated experiments often cannot be performed on human beings, due to ethical or economic constraints. We describe a new paradigm for hypothesis testing which uses only (...) rearrangements of data present within the observed data set. The token swap test, based on this new paradigm, is applied to three data sets from cardiovascular pathology, and computational experiments suggest that the token swap test satisfies the Neyman Pearson condition. (shrink)

Written over the last 18 months of his life and inspired by his interest in G. E. Moore's defence of common sense, this much discussed volume collects Wittgenstein's reflections on knowledge and certainty, on what it is to know a proposition for sure.