On the life and philosophy of Kundakunda, 2nd century exponent of Jainism.

Although Indic perspectives toward nature are now well documented, climate engineering discussions seem to still lack the views from Indic or other non‐Western sources. In this article, I will apply some of the Hindu and Jain concepts such as karma, nonviolence (Ahiṃsā ), humility (Vinaya ), and renunciation (Saṃnyāsa ) to analyze the two primary climate geoengineering strategies of solar radiation management (SRM) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR). I suggest that Indic philosophical and religious traditions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, (...) and Jainism offer ethical concepts to call for humility in all acts of climate engineering leading to a favoring of CDR over SRM and a favoring of lifestyle changes (particularly vegetarianism) over both. I demonstrate these concepts by introducing the five great elements from the Hindu philosophy, two Hindu legends from Hindu mythology, the Indic ethical ideas of karma, renunciation, and humility, and the moral authority of Gandhi. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop a conceptual framework of the intra-firm transfer of best practices in moral reasoning by integrating three streams of literature: internal knowledge transfer in strategic management, moral reasoning and epistemology in philosophy and business ethics, and leader–member exchange in human resource management. We propose that characteristics of moral reasoning (nature of moral knowledge, tacitness of moral reasoning and causal ambiguity), source characteristics (moral development of leaders), target characteristics (integrity capacity and moral development of subordinates), leader–member exchange (...) and internal ethical climate influence the transfer of best practices in moral reasoning. (shrink)

This Is A Concise Narrative Of The Beginnings, History, Schisms, Social Organization And Cosmology Of The Living Jain Tradition. The Study Is Covered In 7 Chapters - Atheistic Jainism? - Textual Sources And Ethnographic Literature - The Grand Transition In Jainism: Digambar And Shvetambar As Continuity And Change - The Shvetambar `Church` - The Digambar Case Reconsidered: Contemporary Period - The Digambar Jains Of North India: Society And Religion In Baraut, Uttar Pradesh - The Kanji Swami Panth: Contestation, Cosmology (...) And Confrontation. Condition Good. (shrink)

A firm’s enterprise strategy denotes what a firm stands for. Despite its importance, there has been little research on this topic. Furthermore, the theoretical bases underlying the existing approaches to enterprise strategy suffer from several limitations. In view of these shortcomings, this paper invokes Amartya Sen’s Capabilities Approach (SCA) and its notion of “justice as freedom” as a normative foundation of enterprise strategy. Toward this end, it integrates different streams in the stakeholder theory/business ethics and economics literature. It focuses on (...) the stakeholder capability of “having a voice,” and the managerial capability of “using the knowledge to provide stakeholders a voice and freedom.”. (shrink)

This paper addresses the conflicting environmental interests of a firm and the community, an important stakeholder. The short-term profit maximization objective of a firm may stand in contrast with what the community wants – a "safe and clean environment". This paper argues that the information regarding the environmental impact of a firm's products, processes, and waste may be asymmetrically distributed between the firm and the community. The resultant information asymmetry may influence the probability of a firm acting opportunistically, and ultimately, (...) a firm's ethical behavior. The paper identifies information asymmetry between a firm and community, as well as that within the community. The perceived information asymmetry across various community segments may perhaps be a determinant of environmental discrimination. The paper further contends that information asymmetry may diminish in the long run. Finally it examines the implications of information asymmetry for firms and government policy. (shrink)

This article casts in high relief the paradigmatic rigidity in strategy research by highlighting the underlying philosophical assumptions (ontological, epistemological, methodological), their advantages, and their limitations. The article discusses four philosophical paradigms that underpin strategy research. While positivism and constructivism are the dominant paradigms, critical realism and pragmatism as relevant philosophical perspectives are also discussed. Using entrepreneurial opportunity as an exemplar, the article explains how philosophical assumptions inform the researchers’ worldview and guide research within a paradigm. The article contends that (...) paradigmatic dogmatism is undesirable in any discipline, more so in a relatively young discipline such as strategic management. Rather than adhering to and nestling inside a single metatheoretical paradigm, the article calls for a more reflexive philosophical approach in strategy research to gain fresh perspectives. (shrink)

Purpose This research aims to study the coping experience of visually impaired bankers in India after they have received reasonable accommodation from their employers, that is, the work process or environment has been suitably modified to ensure a barrier-free environment for them. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 12 VI bankers working with public sector banks in India. A phenomenological approach was adopted during data analysis. Findings Despite the provision of reasonable accommodations, VI employees often find it difficult (...) to fulfill their job responsibilities. This is on account of extensive paperwork required for completion of their jobs and the partially accessible information systems available to them. As a result, these VI employees are found resorting to workarounds to carry out their jobs, with the nature of workarounds adopted varying with the type and extent of visual impairment. Furthermore, it is observed that VI employees require social support not only from their superiors and peers but also from their subordinates and customers to carry out their tasks. Research limitations/implications Data collection was done through snowball sampling which could have resulted in sampling bias. Due to confidentiality issues, observation of workarounds in practice by VI employees could not be carried out as part of the study. Originality/value The study contributes to the literature on integration of persons with disabilities by examining their coping experience after provision of reasonable accommodations. It emphasizes the role of workarounds, an under-studied area in PwD integration, as well as support of other stakeholders in the experience. (shrink)

In ‘Theorizing resistance: Foucault, cross-cultural psychiatry and the user/survivor movement,’ Swerdfager develops a rich argument about the relationship between user/survivor voices, cross-cultural psychiatry, and the emerging discipline of global mental health. The paper questions the future directions of cross-cultural psychiatry in the era of GMH, and discusses the implications for user/survivor voices. This commentary engages with Swerdfager, focusing on the historical development of cross-cultural psychiatry and the discipline’s evolving relationship with GMH, concluding with a brief discussion of recent developments with (...) potential to open up new spaces for user/survivor voices as mental health... (shrink)

America now is home to approximately three million Hindus and Jains. Their contribution to the economic and intellectual growth of the country is unquestionable. Dharma in America aims to explore the role of Hindu and Jain Americans in diverse fields such as: education and civic engagements medicine and healthcare music. Providing a concise history of Hindus and Jains in the Americas over the last two centuries, Dharma in America also gives some insights into the ongoing issues and challenges these (...) important ethnic and religious groups face in the America today. (shrink)

This essay is conceived as a contribution to the academic debate on the ethical status of mystical traditions with regard to Jain asceticism in particular and—through comparison of Jain with Advaita Vedanta asceticism—to ideologies of radical quietism more generally. For both Jain and Advaita Vedantic ascetic traditions, the material world, and particularly the body, are the primary obstacles to spiritual development. We deal with the social, physical, and environmental implications of such a worldview, rather than with the (...) practice or the phenomenology or the doctrine of mysticism, which we grant to be an accurate reflection of a particular kind of cosmic experience. We address ethical issues, not metaphysical ones. In our discussion of Jain asceticism, we demonstrate that the basic problem (and promise) of quietism, in almost any cultural form, is the shocking realization it can occasion that the Real has absolutely nothing to do with the social or with any sort of ethical action. We argue that Jain asceticism cannot function as an adequate resource for contemporary ethics. Our normative concerns lie exclusively with the adequacy of Jain quietism in supporting a stable global community and a sustainable natural environment. One can be mystical without being ethical, and ethical without being a mystic. We conclude that the truths of quietism are both very profound and profoundly nonethical. (shrink)

Nationwide, almost 11% of women abuse drugs during their pregnancy. In some communities, these numbers are as high as 25–30%. Drug abuse is not limited to the poor or to African Americans, but is seen among affluent and white Americans as well. It is widespread, irrespective of race or social class. Annually, nearly 375,000 infants are exposed to drugs in America. Because of the terrible suffering caused by these births, and the conflicts caregivers experience in the treatment of these infants, (...) Trollope's quote is very apropos. Although caregivers have good motives in trying to rescue these babies and helping place them in a nurturing environment, despair about this objective is always close to the surface. (shrink)

Contributed articles presented at a seminar.

As Acharya Vidyanand writes in the Foreword of Samayasara, it is the ultimate conscious reality. The enlightened soul has infinite glory. It has the innate ability to demolish the power of karmas, both auspicious as well as inauspicious, which constitute the cycle of births and deaths, and are an obstacle in the path of liberation of the soul. Samayasara is an essential reading for anyone who wishes to lead a purposeful and contented life. It provides irrefutable and lasting solutions to (...) all our problems, concerning worldly ways as well as spiritual curiosities and misgivings. (shrink)

"This book... is the English translation of the Hindi book Tattvārthasūtra with Upādhyāya (now Ailācārya) Srutasāgarji, as the principal commentator and edited by Dr Sudeep Jain in Hindi"--P. 3.

The appropriate understanding and fast processing of lengthy legal documents are computationally challenging problems. Designing efficient automatic summarization techniques can potentially be the key to deal with such issues. Extractive summarization is one of the most popular approaches for forming summaries out of such lengthy documents, via the process of summary-relevant sentence selection. An efficient application of this approach involves appropriate scoring of sentences, which helps in the identification of more informative and essential sentences from the document. In this work, (...) a novel sentence scoring approach DCESumm is proposed which consists of supervised sentence-level summary relevance prediction, as well as unsupervised clustering-based document-level score enhancement. Experimental results on two legal document summarization datasets, BillSum and Forum of Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE), reveal that the proposed approach can achieve significant improvements over the current state-of-the-art approaches. More specifically it achieves ROUGE metric F1-score improvements of (1−6)% and (6−12)% for the BillSum and FIRE test sets respectively. Such impressive summarization results suggest the usefulness of the proposed approach in finding the gist of a lengthy legal document, thereby providing crucial assistance to legal practitioners. (shrink)

This study examines the variations in corporate social orientations across developed and developing countries in the context of a legitimacy threat. Conceptualizing CSO as signals, the author develops and validates a seven-code index of CSO that identifies executive orientations toward multiple stakeholders. Using this index on CEO shareholder letters from the United States, Germany, and India, the author finds that firms signal a multi-stakeholder image toward employees, communities, and environment during good times to enhance their social license to operate, and (...) yet such signals are not carried through during the threat period. This disconnect in signaling in the wake of a legitimacy threat is indicative of decoupling in corporate orientations and exposes the multi-dimensionality of the CSO concept. By adding a cross-national and temporal dimension, this research contributes toward better understanding the complexity behind CSOs and opens new areas for future research. (shrink)

This volume is based on innovative ideas coming from different Indic philosophies and how they can enrich the theory and methods in religious studies.

An ongoing debate in the United States relating to COVID-19 features the purported tension between containing the coronavirus to save lives or opening the economy to sustain livelihoods, with ethical overtones on both sides. Proponents of opening the economy argue that sustaining livelihoods should be prioritized over virus containment, with ethicists asking, “What about the risk to human life?” Defendants of restricting the spread of the virus endorse saving lives through virus containment but contend with the ethical concern “What about (...) people’s livelihoods and individual freedoms?” A commonly held belief is that political ideology drives these differential preferences: liberals are more focused on saving lives, whereas conservatives favor sustaining livelihoods with no additional government intervention in the free-market economy. We examine these lay beliefs among US residents in four studies and find that economic system justification (ESJ), an ideology that defends the prevailing economic system when under threat, is a reliable psychological predictor beyond political ideology. Specifically, compared to those who scored low on ESJ, people who scored high on ESJ judged China as more justified in downplaying the spread of virus to protect its interest in the global free-market economy, supported in-person over online learning, viewed shelter in place as less desirable, and perceived the opening of the Texas economy as more legitimate. We also find that multiple psychological mechanisms might be at work—resistance to market interventions, perceived legitimacy of opening the economy, perceived seriousness of the health crisis, and violation of human rights. (shrink)

Physician-pharmaceutical industry interactions continue to generate heated debate in academic and public domains, both in the United States and abroad. Despite this, recent research suggests that physicians and physicians-in-training remain ignorant of the core issues and are ill-prepared to understand pharmaceutical industry promotion. There is a vast medical literature on this topic, but no single, concise resource. This book aims to fill that gap by providing a resource that explains the essential elements of this subject. The text makes the reader (...) more aware of the key ethical issues and allows the reader to be a more savvy interpreter of industry promotion, have a heightened awareness of the public and medical legal consequences of some physician-pharmaceutical industry interactions, and be better equipped to handle real-life encounters with industry. (shrink)

La obra psicoanalítica de Sigmund Freud no ha perdido vigencia. Ya sea que se le utilice como un método terapéutico; como una vía para pensar al ser humano en su dimensión psíquica, consciente e inconsciente, e interpretar sus acciones; o como una manera de explicar la cultura y los comportamientos colectivos, los textos freudianos siguen constituyendo un referente explicativo de variados fenómenos intrapsíquicos y psicosociales. En este sentido, constituye una institución que debe seguir explotándose.

We appreciated the important commentary provided by Michelle Oberman on our paper, “Discontinuing Life Support in an Infant of a Drug-Addicted Mother: Whose Decision Is It?” . For the most part we agree with Oberman's analysis of the issues, but there are seven points of variance, either of conception, emphasis, or accuracy. We wish to clarify these and welcome the chance her commentary provided to offer aspects of the social situation surrounding the case we presented.

Manju Jain's innovative study of T. S. Eliot's Harvard years traces the genesis of his major literary, religious and intellectual preoccupations in his early work as a student of philosophy, and explores its influence on his poetic and critical practice. His concerns were located within the mainstream of Harvard philosophical debates, especially in relation to the controversy of science versus religion. These questions (and Eliot's work as he grappled with them) point forward to important debates in contemporary philosophy and (...) hermeneutics. Drawing extensively on unpublished sources, Manju Jain offers answers to the questions of why Eliot failed to find satisfaction in an academic career devoted to philosophy, and why he abandoned the speculations of metaphysics for the dogmas of theology. (shrink)

Jainism is essentially a spiritual philosophy having a strong focus on the ultimate purification of the soul (ātmā). A human being usually when fails to understand things, when sorrows attack, etc., then he attributes to memorize the deva (celestial being) to seek help. Man can be guided both correctly and incorrectly by the deva and can establish a new system in a society that can be both in a positive form and a negative form. Thus, this involvement of deva in (...) human life brings change in his culture, behavior, spirituality, etc. There is a lot of misunderstanding about deva. In Jain literature, it is mentioned as the difference between Arhat (Supreme Divine) and deva (celestial being), which will help the man to move in the right direction. In various positive and negative ways, a human is affected by deva, in the past and the present. (shrink)