We investigate what distinguishes social entrepreneurial ecosystems (SEEs) from entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) through appreciation of the importance of context—the multiplex of intertwined social, spatial, temporal, historical, cultural, and political influences. Community is incorporated as a key variable and hitherto overlooked dimension of the structure and influence of SEEs. We draw on extant literature and examples of a variety of SEEs to support our propositions and demonstrate why considerations of both context and community are critical to advance understanding of SEEs. We (...) contribute to the study of SEEs by presenting a new conceptual framework and theorizing SEE as an evolving composite of interdependent actors who interact and collaborate across multiple levels to collectively generate positive externalities and drive sustainable solutions to social problems. (shrink)

Accession Number: ATLA0001788486; Hosting Book Page Citation: p 168-178.; Language(s): English; Issued by ATLA: 20130825; Publication Type: Essay.

The phenomenon of contract cheating presents, potentially, a serious threat to the quality and standards of Higher Education around the world. There have been suggestions, cited below, to tackle the problem using legal means, but we find that current laws are not fit for this purpose. In this article we present a proposal for a specific new law to target contract cheating, which could be enacted in most jurisdictions.We test our proposed new law against a number of issues that would (...) need to be considered before any legal approach could be successful; would changing the legal status of contract cheating make it less likely to happen? Could this be achieved in a specific way? If so, who should actually be prosecuted and what offence are they committing? Would it actually address the causes of contract cheating? We suggest some answers to these questions, but then also identify a number of unintended potential consequences. We therefore additionally consider whether a legal approach is possible or even desirable.We conclude that a legal approach to contract cheating is possible, and, on balance, appropriate. Using UK law as an example, we offer a specific suggestion to lawmakers, around the world, for how this might be achieved, and conclude that the most successful approach would be to focus largely on a law targeting the providers of contract cheating, in particular commercial services. (shrink)

Constructing Marxist Ethics offers a series of compelling essays that reassess the role of ethics and moral values in Marxist theory and philosophy.

Bovine tuberculosis is a controversial animal health policy issue in England, which impacts farmers, the public, cattle and badgers. Badgers act as a wildlife reservoir of disease. Policy options for badger control include do nothing, badger culling, and badger vaccination. This paper argues for mandatory Animal Welfare Impact Assessment for all policy that significantly affects sentient animals. AWIA includes species description, and AWIA analysis stages. In this paper, AWIA is applied to impacts of bovine TB policy options on cattle and (...) badgers. Over 4 years, 85,000 badgers will be culled to prevent the slaughter of ~17,750 cattle over 9 years. Hence, about five badgers are culled for every cow which avoids slaughter. The AWIA analyses the impact of badger vaccination on cows and badgers based on a set of stated assumptions. The AWIA estimates badger vaccination to reduce the number of cows slaughtered by 11,600, i.e. a 12.5% reduction. Additional to the harm of killing, culling has greater welfare impacts on badgers compared to non-culling options. Actors in animal health and welfare policy were interviewed about the concept of AWIA. Policy actors supported the idea of AWIA to provide objective data to feed into policy making. The paper concludes with the proposal that AWIA is a necessary stage of just policy making where sentient animals are impacted by government policy. (shrink)

We examine the bioethical issues that arise from long-duration space missions, asking what there is that is distinctive about such issues. We pay particular attention to the possibility that such space missions, certainly if they lead to self-sustaining space settlements, may require human enhancement, and examine the significance of reproduction in space for bioethics. We conclude that while space bioethics raises important issues to do with human survival and reproduction in very hazardous environments, it raises no issues that are distinct (...) from those in terrestrial bioethics. Rather, space bioethics raises extreme versions of bioethical issues that are already found in the military, when working in extreme environments (such as Antarctica), or when living in circumstances (such as in prison) where one’s autonomy is severely curtailed. (shrink)

In this article we examine the changing relationship to risk as revealed by the covid-19 pandemic and the ways this has, and may in future, alter sacramental practice, considering the radical effects this could have on traditional Christian practice. We consider the cultural trends that may lie behind this developing approach to risk, examining this in the context of an emergent transhuman identity that is technologically moderated and seeks to overcome risks of human mortality.

This innovative volume, by Michael Shapiro, is not about Adam Smith in the sense in which 'about' is usually understood, for it is neither a comprehensive explication of his views nor a careful tracing of the sources of them. Instead it is a confrontation. This is a book about modernity whose vehicle is a reading of Adam Smith—it is an enactment of the convention that despite the contribution Smith made to creating and legitimating the conceptual space for modern, commercial, (...) liberal, and democratic society, his views are inadequate for those who want an effective, politicized understanding of the present. Shapiro's ultimate goal in this examination is to 'exemplify a way of doing political theory—one that challenges some traditional ways of constructing and celebrating the 'political theory cannon.'. (shrink)

We describe a novel Internet-based method for building consensus and clarifying con icts in large stakeholder groups facing complex issues, and we use the method to survey and map the scienti c and organizational perspectives of the arti cial life community during the Seventh International Conference on Arti cial Life (summer 2000). The issues addressed in this survey included arti cial life’s main successes, main failures, main open scienti c questions, and main strategies for the future, as well as the (...) bene ts and pitfalls of creating a professional society for arti cial life. By illuminating the arti cial life community’s collective perspective on these issues, this survey illustrates the value of such methods of harnessing the collective intelligence of large stakeholder groups. (shrink)

Heyes’ book is an important contribution that rightly integrates cognitive development and cultural evolution. However, understanding the cultural evolution of cognitive gadgets requires a deeper appreciation of complexity, feedback, and self-organization than her book exhibits.

Over the last decade, the news media have reported on corporate scandals involving high-profile organizations such as Arthur Anderson, AOL Time Warner,Enron, Halliburton, Kmart, and Xerox. In 2001, the Conference Board of Canada noted that supplier relationships represent some of the most common ethical problems in the private sector, and estimated that 95% of corporations in the United States and 86% of corporations in Canada have implemented ethical codes of conduct and are espousing their commitment to building relationship with ethical (...) suppliers. While a significant amount of research on corporate ethics has been published (for examples see Akaah and Riordan 1989; Cullen et al. 2003; Román and Ruiz 2005; Schminke et al. 2005; and Weaver et al. 1999a, 1999b), what still remains unknown is how and when a supplier’s ethical code of conduct matters to the buyer making decisions regarding their choice of suppliers. (shrink)

People’s beliefs are influenced by interactions within their communities. The propagation of this influence through conversational social networks should impact the degree to which community members synchronize their beliefs. To investigate, we recruited a sample of 140 participants and constructed fourteen 10-member communities. Participants first rated the accuracy of a set of statements and were then provided with relevant evidence about them. Then, participants discussed the statements in a series of conversational interactions, following pre-determined network structures. Finally, they rated the (...) accuracy of the statements again. The results show that belief synchronization, measuring the increase in belief similarity among individuals within a community from pre-test to post-test, is influenced by the community’s conversational network structure. This synchronization is circumscribed by a degree of separation effect and is equivalent in the clustered and non-clustered networks. We also find that conversational content predicts belief change from pre-test to post-test. (shrink)

A benchmark volume at the intersection of philosophy and religion.

Any human enterprise that consumes billions of dollars, especially when those dollars are those of citizen tax payers, should be subject to at least occasional scrutiny and stock-taking. This Special Issue of Perspectives in Biology and Medicine is an attempt to do just that: to ask whether the massive investment of money, equipment and human scientific talent that has been poured into studying the human genome under the assumption that this enormous scientific endeavor will advance human health has been worth (...) it thus far, and whether it is likely to bear fruit in the futureThe expression that best encapsulates the goal of using genomic information to alter trajectories of... (shrink)

Many distinct, controvertial issues are to be found within the labyrinthine\ntwists and turns of the problem of evil. For philosophers of the\nseventeenth and early eighteenth centures, evil presented a challenge\nto the consistency and rationality of the world-picture disclosed\nby the new way of ideas. In dealing with this challenge, however,\nphilosophers were also concerned with their positions in the theological\ndebates about original sin, free will, and justification that were\nthe legacy of the Protestant Reformation to European intellectual\nlife. Emerging from a conference on the (...) problem of evil in the early\nmodern period held at the University of Toronto in 1999, the papers\nin this collection represent some of the best original work being\ndone today on the theodicies of such early modern philosophers as\nLeibniz, Suarez, Spinoza, Malebranche, and Pierre Bayle. (shrink)

In this book, Michael J. Shapiro stages a series of pedagogical encounters between political theory, represented as a compositional challenge, and cinematic texts, emphasizing how to achieve an effective research paper/essay by heeding the compositional strategies of films. The text's distinctiveness is its focus on the intermediation between two textual genres. It is aimed at providing both a conceptual introduction to the politics of aesthetics and a guide to writing strategies. In its illustrations of encounters between political theory and (...) cinema, the book's critical edge is its emphasis on how to intervene in cinematic texts with innovative conceptual frames in ways that challenge dominant understandings of life worlds. The Cinematic Political is designed as a teaching resource that introduces students to the relationship between film form and political thinking. With diverse illustrative investigations, the book instructs students on how to watch films with an eye toward writing a research paper in which a film constitutes the textual vehicle for political theorizing. (shrink)

The primary aim of this dissertation is an exegesis of Collingwood's historical science of mind. I take seriously Collingwood's claim that history is for "self-understanding" and treat his philosophy of history as a form of reflective philosophy. In particular, I examine the epistemological basis for Collingwood's claim that mind is an object that changes as it understands itself. ;In Chapter One, I consider the distinction between natural process and historical process as central to an understanding of Collingwood's historical science of (...) mind. I defend Collingwood's attempt to preserve the distinction between historical process and natural process in order to reserve for history its appropriate subject matter---mind. ;In Chapter Two, I consider the epistemological basis for Collingwood's claim that mind changes fundamentally in the historical process. I argue that Collingwood's reading of Anselm's proof of the existence of God is the key to understanding his theory of the priority of "faith" to reason and so to the historical nature of first principles. ;Chapter Three has two parts. In part one, I examine Collingwood's logic of philosophical concepts: the scale of forms. In part two, I argue Collingwood's moral philosophy, found in The New Leviathan and in his lectures on "Goodness, Rightness, Utility" , exemplifies this logic. I conclude that Collingwood's historical study of mind is an attempt to overcome the disjunction between theory and practice caused by the abstract thinking of modern scientific consciousness. ;Chapter Four provides a survey of the scholarship surrounding Collingwood's corpus as a whole. I argue that there have been three waves of Collingwood scholarship. The first is influenced by T. M. Knox's editing of Collingwood's manuscripts and his "radical conversion hypothesis." The second wave of Collingwood scholarship argues for the systematic or thematic unity of Collingwood's philosophy. The third and most recent wave builds on the second. As an example, I discuss Guiseppina D'Oro's suggestion that Collingwood's thought is unified by its overarching concern with critical philosophy. I conclude with the suggestion that Collingwood's thought is unified by an attempt to provide a viable reflective philosophy based on historical consciousness. (shrink)

The idea that immoral behaviour can sometimes be admirable, and that moral behaviour can sometimes be less than admirable, has led several of its supporters to infer that moral considerations are not always overriding, contrary to what has been traditionally maintained. In this paper I shall challenge this inference. My purpose in doing so is to expose and acknowledge something that has been inadequately appreciated, namely, the moral aspect of nonmoral goods and evils. I hope thereby to show that, even (...) if immorality can be admirable, this poses no threat to morality. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss ethical implications of the use of mobile phone apps in the control of the COVID-19 pandemic. Contact tracing is a well-established feature of public health practice during infectious disease outbreaks and epidemics. However, the high proportion of pre-symptomatic transmission in COVID-19 means that standard contact tracing methods are too slow to stop the progression of infection through the population. To address this problem, many countries around the world have deployed or are developing mobile phone apps (...) capable of supporting instantaneous contact tracing. Informed by the on-going mapping of ‘proximity events’ these apps are intended both to inform public health policy and to provide alerts to individuals who have been in contact with a person with the infection. The proposed use of mobile phone data for ‘intelligent physical distancing’ in such contexts raises a number of important ethical questions. In our paper, we outline some ethical considerations that need to be addressed in any deployment of this kind of approach as part of a multidimensional public health response. We also, briefly, explore the implications for its use in future infectious disease outbreaks. (shrink)

In this new work, political theorist Michael J. Thompson argues that modern societies are witnessing a decline in one of the core building blocks of modernity: the autonomous self. Far from being an illusion of the Enlightenment, Thompson contends that the individual is a defining feature of the project to build a modern democratic culture and polity. One of the central reasons for its demise in recent decades has been the emergence of what he calls the cybernetic society, a (...) cohesive totalization of the social logics of the institutional spheres of economy, culture and polity. These logics have been progressively defined by the imperatives of economic growth and technical-administrative management of labor and consumption, routinizing patterns of life, practices, and consciousness throughout the culture. Evolving out of the neoliberal transformation of economy and society since the 1980s, the cybernetic society has transformed how that the individual is articulated in contemporary society. Thompson examines the various pathologies of the self and consciousness that result from this form of socialization--such as hyper-reification, alienated moral cognition, false consciousness, and the withered ego--in new ways to demonstrate the extent of deformation of modern selfhood. Only with a more robust, more socially embedded concept of autonomy as critical agency can we begin to reconstruct the principles of democratic individuality and community. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Commonwealth of Hope: Augustine’s Political Thought by Michael LAMBMichael J. S. BrunoLAMB, Michael. A Commonwealth of Hope: Augustine’s Political Thought. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2022. xiii + 431 pp. Cloth, $39.95In his comprehensive study of Augustinian hope, Michael Lamb seeks to provide a corrective to the common characterization, especially promoted in the last century, of Augustine as politically and socially pessimistic. Lamb asserts (...) that Augustine’s work leads us, rather, to a “realistic hope,” as he argues for a more “hopeful, this-worldly” reading of the Doctor of Grace. After tracing the path of contemporary Augustinian interpretation, Lamb begins an interdisciplinary study of Augustine’s understanding of hope, which he argues allows us to understand how Augustine “advocated and modeled engagement in public life,” as “bishop, theologian, and citizen.”In part 1, “The Virtue of Hope,” Lamb systematically discusses Augustine’s understanding of virtue, and the relationship within his theology of the theological virtues. In chapter 1, Lamb utilizes the Enchiridion to explore Augustine’s understanding of the objects and grounds of hope, as “the orientation of will” toward objects that “engage our desire and spark an affective movement for union with what we love.” In chapter 2, Lamb explores hope’s integral connection to love and integrally captures key concepts in Augustine’s thought, particularly the consequences of the Fall in human pride, the presence of the libido dominandi, and the often-discussed debate of uti-frui, noting that Augustine is fundamentally concerned with love being rightly ordered. In chapter 3, he responds to the criticism of Augustine’s hope as “otherworldly,” explaining how Augustine does not dismiss temporal goods but, rather, “chastens disordered desires for them.” Lamb also makes clear that Augustine “challenges the either/or dualism” that locates [End Page 154] eternal goods in a purely transcendent realm. In chapter 4, Lamb analyzes the grounds of faith and its objects, outlining Augustine’s treatment of faith’s relation to both authority and neighbor, who for Augustine must be included as an object of faith. In chapter 5, relying on Augustine’s Confessions, Lamb underscores the condemnation of Pelagianism while demonstrating that similar to love, we might hope in neighbors as “a way to hope in the invisible God.” He also examines the epistemological challenges presented by the vices of presumption and despair, noting how for Augustine “a deficient or disordered faith leads to disordered hope.”Part 2 of Lamb’s work turns to Augustine’s rhetoric and how Augustine’s pedagogical concerns undergird both his sermons and other works, especially the often-cited City of God. In chapter 6, Lamb notes the need within political interpretations of Augustine for a greater grasp of “his rhetorical and pedagogical purposes,” especially his moral teaching offered to a wide and diverse audience both in his preaching and letters. In chapter 7, Lamb turns to City of God, noting its aim as both instruction and encouragement, and confronts the limits of the binary view of optimism and pessimism as “anachronistic and conceptually confining.” Lamb, on the contrary, posits a “more capacious triad of presumption, hope, and despair” as capturing the true “posture” of Augustine’s City of God, especially book 22.In part 3, Lamb focuses on the place of political goods as objects of hope within Augustine’s thought. Chapter 8 focuses on the political implications of Augustine’s eschatology and ecclesiology and, through engagement with numerous interpreters, examines Augustine’s saeculum as “a passing age in which members of both cities—earthly and heavenly—share proximate goods and build a common life together.” In chapter 9, Augustine’s epistolary is examined in order to demonstrate that, while “fulfilling his duties and embodying active citizenship, [Augustine] did not make an idol of politics or see it as the ultimate source of salvation.” In chapter 10, Lamb proposes an alternative account to the “antipolitical, otherworldly exclusivist” Augustine, namely, an Augustine who both is slow to judge the virtue and vice of others and acknowledges “some form of genuine, if incomplete, virtue in those without faith.” In this chapter, Lamb’s nuances of Augustine’s understanding of “true virtue” are well grounded... (shrink)

This wide-ranging book reconstructs this debate and places within their contemporary contexts the rival claims concerning the nature of the cosmos and the ...