This article adopts an issues management approach to corporate social responsibility implementation. Issues evaluation, which is an integral component of issues management, can be conducted by using the concept of three expectational gaps. However, the concept of expectational gaps suffers from an ambiguity that limits its application to issues evaluation. The legitimacy gap concept is used in this article to clarify the ambiguity surrounding expectational gaps. The study thus develops a four-gap framework for conducting a quantitative issues evaluation. This framework (...) is applied to six social and six environmental issues in the context of the forest products industry in the Northwest United States by means of a survey of 278 society and 94 industry respondents. Results empirically demonstrate the existence of expectational gaps and also provide insights into the nature of misalignment between societal and business perceptions along these social and environmental issues. Appropriate managerial responses are suggested to narrow or bridge different types of gaps. (shrink)

Thus far, the academic focus has been limited to understand how hybrid organizations balance goal plurality. However, the question how hybrids engage (or fail to engage) local communities in this process and the potential challenges involved has remained unaddressed. Relying on an inductive multiple case study of six Canadian community forest enterprises (CFEs), we describe dilemmas that arise between community engagement and CFEs’ other goals that form their social mission, as well as a distinct set of compromise tactics to address (...) them. We further identify a tension that arises from two distinct dimensions inherent to community engagement that are inherently interwoven yet contradicting. We add to research on paradox by showing that tensions not merely arise between outcome-focused goals that stem from organizational hybridity, but demonstrate that individual goal prescriptions in itself entail elements that cause tension, and warrant paradoxical management to ensure hybrids’ success in fulfilling their overall mission. (shrink)

Defining and implementing Corporate Responsibility can be a challenge for many businesses. The identification of patterns in the processes of adoption and implementation of Corporate Responsibility practices can help managers to administer these processes more ably. In this research note, the authors identify four factors influencing the adoption and implementation of Corporate Responsibility practices: internal drivers; organizational structures; attributes of practice; and formal processes. Results indicate that there is also a continuous improvement component, meaning that the adoption and implementation of (...) Corporate Responsibility practices are cyclical, rather than linear, processes. (shrink)

This qualitative study indentifies how corporate responsibility (CR) practices are diffused to companies, as well as the factors that influence this diffusion process. Forest companies, industry associations, non-governmental organizations, and academics in Brazil, Canada, and the United States participated in this interview-based study. Data emerging from a grounded theory approach revealed three factors influencing the diffusion of CR practices to companies: (1) external contextual characteristics, (2) connectors, and (3) experts and expert organizations. These three factors influence each other, meaning that (...) the diffusion process of CR practices is somewhat cyclic. These interactions are usually manifested by companies and expert organizations influencing each other’s actions, being influenced by the external environment, and contributing to the CR trends that are observed in the external environment. (shrink)

Robert Kirk uses the notion of "raw feeling" to bridge the intelligibility gap between our knowledge of ourselves as physical organisms and our knowledge of ..

Robert Merrihew Adams has been a leader in renewing philosophical respect for the idea that moral obligation may be founded on the commands of God. This collection of Adams' essays, two of which are previously unpublished, draws from his extensive writings on philosophical theology that discuss metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical issues surrounding the concept of God--whether God exists or not, what God is or would be like, and how we ought to relate ourselves to such a being. Adams studies (...) the relation between religion and ethics, delving into an analysis of moral arguments for theistic belief. In several essays, he applies contemporary studies in the metaphysics of individuality, possibility and necessity, and counterfactual conditionals to issues surrounding the existence of God and problems of evil. (shrink)

In the debate between positivism and non-positivism the argument from relativism plays a pivotal role. The argument from relativism, as put forward, for instance, by Hans Kelsen, says, first, that a necessary connection between law and morality presupposes the existence of absolute, objective, or necessary moral elements, and, second, that no such absolute, objective, or necessary moral elements exist. My reply to this is that absolute, objective, or necessary moral elements do exist, for human rights exist, and human rights exist (...) because they are justifiable. (shrink)

In this article, I take up two arguments in favor of the discursive model of legal argumentation: the claim to correctness argument and the dual nature thesis. The argument of correctness implies the dual nature thesis, and the dual nature thesis implies a nonpositivistic concept of law. The nonpositivistic concept of law comprises five ideas. One of them is the special case thesis. The special case thesis says that positivistic elements, that is, statutes, precedents, and prevailing doctrines, are necessary for (...) law in order to achieve legal certainty. Without this, law would not be as perfect as it could possibly be. But it says, at the same time, that this alone would not be enough to fulfill the claim to correctness. The claim to correctness refers not only to the real dimension of law, defined by statutes, precedents, and prevailing doctrines, but also to its ideal dimension, defined, first and foremost, by justice. The special case thesis is my oldest thesis. It has remained an essential element of my system over the years. Its connection with four other theses—the Radbruch formula, the human rights thesis, the idea of deliberative democracy, and principles theory—does not change this at all. On the contrary, this connection has lent greater strength to the special case thesis. (shrink)

According to the author there is no doubt that one has to distinguish between the justification and the application of norms. Problems are seen only to arise if one asks what exactly the distinction is and which consequences have to be drawn from it. Recently, Klaus Günther, in particular, has searched for this distinction and connected it with far‐reaching conclusions concerning the theory of norms, arguments, and morals. His theses are the object of the author's considerations.

Law's Ideal Dimension provides a comprehensive account in English of renowned legal theorist Robert Alexy's understanding of jurisprudence, as expanded upon from his publications A Theory of Legal Argumentation (OUP 1989), A Theory of Constitutional Rights (OUP 1985), and The Argument fromInjustice (OUP 1992).The collection is divided into three parts. Part One concerns the nature of law: it explores its real and ideal dimensions and how the ideal dimension of law is sometimes employed but does not play a systematically (...) important role. Part Two discusses constitutional rights, human rights, andproportionality. It defends the construction of constitutional rights as principles against objections raised by the rule construction and elaborates on the nature of constitutional rights as well as the mathematical balancing of those rights. Part Three concerns the relation between argumentation,correctness, and law. The author concludes this volume with a biographical reflection. (shrink)

These are the answers I gave to Brian Bix, Peter Koller, Ralf Posher, Torben Spaak, Timothy Endicott, and Jan Sieckmann at the end of a splendid conference day in 2018. The critique given to me concerned important aspects of three main themes in my work: the claim to correctness, human and constitutional rights, and the ideal dimension of law. In the last decades I have attempted to connect these themes systematically. The result is the idea of democratic constitutionalism as an (...) institutionalization of practical reason. (shrink)

The rational choice assumption that any chosen behavior can be understood as optimizing material self?interest is not borne out by psychological research. Expressive motives, for example, are prominent in the symbols of politics, in social relationships, and in the arts of persuasion. Moreover, instrumentality is a mindset that is learned (perhaps overlearned), and can be situationally manipulated; because it is valued in our society, it provides a privileged vocabulary for justifying behaviors that may have been performed for other reasons, and (...) encourages the illusory belief in the universality of rational choice. (shrink)

Disagreements about the success of any given argument often arise because the suppositions of the critic differ from the suppositions of the author of the argument. In maintaining the plausibility of a metaethical argument for theism against the objections articulated by Stephen J. Sullivan, I will probe our differing suppositions with regard to the relation of theological to naturalistic metaethical theories, the starting point for the metaethical argument for theism, and the relation of the qualities of God's will to our (...) obligation to obey God. (shrink)

Bender, Robert Review of: Women in Cambridge: A Men's university - though of a mixed type, by Rita McWilliams-Tullberg, Gollancz 1975, 255 pp.

Originally published in 1967. An introduction to the literature of nonstandard logic, in particular to those nonstandard logics known as many-valued logics. Part I expounds and discusses implicational calculi, modal logics and many-valued logics and their associated calculi. Part II considers the detailed development of various many-valued calculi, and some of the important metathereoms which have been proved for them. Applications of the calculi to problems in the philosophy are also surveyed. This work combines criticism with exposition to form a (...) comprehensive but concise survey of the field. (shrink)

These three impressive volumes seem likely to be for some time the standard collection of Leibniz’s writings in Italian translation. Replacing two volumes of 1967-68, with the same title and publisher, which were edited by Domenico Omero Bianca, the new translation by Massimo Mugnai and Enrico Pasini offers the Italian reader an outstandingly comprehensive selection of Leibniz’s works in a presentation richly though unobtrusively illuminated by the latest scholarship. My chief aim in this review will be to give scholars working (...) in English an idea of the lines of study suggested by this new product of Italian scholarship, and the resources available in it. (shrink)

Tekst niedostępny online z racji zgody na publikację przekładu tylko w wersji drukowanej.

A model of what an edition of a philosohic text for an introductory level should be. Introduction does an admirable job of putting Berkeley's thought in the intellectual context of its time. --Gary C. Hatfield.

Leibniz's version of the ontological argument, a modal argument for theism on which he worked most intensively in the 1670s, has two stages. The first, an “incomplete” proof, concludes that God can only be a necessary being, and therefore if God's existence is possible, then God exists. The second stage is an a priori argument that the existence of such a necessary God is indeed possible. Leibniz's fullest attempts at a possibility proof turn on his conception of a most perfect (...) being, and the chapter concludes that they are not likely to succeed, in part because of difficulties in connecting the concepts of perfection and necessary existence. (shrink)

This work is ''a systematic ontology.'' Ontology is the study of being as such, and a systematic ontology is an account of the most fundamental ways of being something or other - of what they are and of how they are related to each other. The questions it pursues are not primarily about what causes things, but about what things are or consist in - though causal questions cannot be totally avoided. The title of the work, What Is, and What (...) Is in Itself, marks the most important distinction in ways of being. What is includes everything there is, but not everything there is included in what is in itself. The first five chapters of the book define and examine the ways of being: in chapters 1 and 2, being actual or existing, or even just being something without existing or being actual; in chapter 3, being an intentional object, and perhaps a merely intentional object; in chapter 4, relations between things and their properties; and in chapter 5, being a thing in itself. Chapter 6 discusses whether only conscious beings are things in themselves, and suggests an affirmative answer. Chapter 7 discusses the epistemology of ontology. Chapters 8 and 9 discuss issues about thisness and identity. And chapters 10 and 11 discuss mainly occasionalist and panentheist answers to questions about the causal unity of the universe. (shrink)

My aim in this article is to flesh out a new distinction between moral responsibility, as it is understood in light of Strawson’s “reactive attitudes,” and an institutional form of responsibility—a responsibility that employees bear for their work to their superiors. I show that Strawson’s view of responsibility is separate from organizational responsibility, and hence the responsibility of employees to their managers cannot be understood in terms of indignation or resentment, both of which are key Strawsonian concepts. The latter type (...) of responsibility can be understood in terms of objective attitudes, managerial demands, organizational standards, and related expectations. Based on a Cartesian and a Wittgensteinian notions of asymmetry between first- and third-person uses of psychological concepts, Strawson developed a view of responsibility that dissolves the above asymmetry. In contrast with the latter asymmetry, which focuses on those who ascribe psychological concepts to themselves and to others, Strawson’s view is centered on the recipients of reactive attitudes. According to his view, resentment and indignation differ because they are aimed at different recipients, something that cannot be applied in cases of organizational responsibility. (shrink)