Corporate social responsibility (CSR) continues to gain attention atop the corporate agenda and is by now an important component of the dialogue between companies and their stakeholders. Nevertheless, there is still little guidance as to how companies can implement CSR activity in order to maximize returns to CSR investment. Theorists have identified many company-favoring outcomes of CSR; yet there is a dearth of research on the psychological mechanisms that drive stakeholder responses to CSR activity. Borrowing from the literatures on meansend (...) chains and relationship marketing, we propose a conceptual model that explains how CSR provides individual stakeholders with numerous benefits (functional, psychosocial, and values) and how the type and extent to which a stakeholder derives these benefits from CSR initiatives influences the quality of the relationship between the stakeholder and the company. The paper discusses the implications of these insights and highlights a number of areas for future research. (shrink)

A defining characteristic of modern science is its ability to make immensely successful predictions of natural phenomena without invoking a putative god or a supernatural being. Here, we argue that this intellectual discipline would not acquire such an ability without the mathematical zero. We insist that zero and its basic operations were likely conceived in India based on a philosophy of nothing, and classify nothing into four categories—balance, absence, emptiness and nonexistence. We argue that zero is a tangible representation of (...) nonexistence and constitutes all nonzero numbers, which together represent existence. It appears that zero’s journey out of India somewhat separated its mathematical and philosophical aspects, with the former being more valued by some cultures and the latter by others. The European culture, in which modern science grew, largely ignores a philosophy of nothing due to a deep-rooted Greek philosophical base, although this science relies on the notion of nonexistence through zero. Consequently, zero is a mere number of convenience without its foundational philosophy in science, and techniques to circumvent zero are developed. We insist that, while such techniques contribute to the progress of science and mathematics within the current framework, a tendency to avoid zero and its philosophy leads to approximations and may hinder a deeper understanding. Finally, we argue that nonexistence may notionally constitute existence, and hence may be the fundamental. This implies that, if a supernatural being exists, it is not the fundamental. The independence of modern science from a supernatural being is consistent with this. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility positively impacts relationships between firms and customers. Previous research construes this as an outcome of customers’ warm glow that results from supporting firms’ benevolence. The current research demonstrates that beyond warm glow, CSR positively impacts firms’ sales through mitigating their customers’ perceptions of purchase risk. We demonstrate this effect across three conditions in which customers’ perceived risk of purchase is heightened, using both secondary data and two lab experiments. Under conditions of greater purchase risk, CSR positively impacts (...) both sales and customer purchase intentions to a greater extent than in conditions of lower purchase risk. In addition to measuring purchase risk as the mediating process behind these effects, we demonstrate that the effect of CSR on sales is stronger for those CSR activities that signal a stakeholder orientation. (shrink)

This paper studies the relationship between personal stock donation by top executives and board of directors (insiders) of publicly traded corporations and their personal tax, shareholders' returns, and social responsibility. The study finds evidence that the timing of stock donations is driven by personal tax gain. The study further shows, comparing stock gift corporations relative to their non-stock gift cohorts, that personal stock gifts are associated with lower short-term and long-term stock returns to shareholders. This implies that stock donation driven (...) by insiders' personal gain adversely affects shareholder wealth. However, the likelihood and intensity of insiders to make personal stock donation is reduced when firms have strong corporate social responsibility (CSR). Agency theory explains insiders' opportunistic behavior, stakeholder theory is also supported by evidence that stock donation is negatively related to CSR, and stewardship theory offers a different view to explain the rationale behind insiders' stock donation and shareholders' reactions to stock gifts. (shrink)

This paper examines the effects of employees’ sense that they work for a purpose-driven company on their workplace sustainability behaviors. Conceptualizing corporate purpose as an overarching, relevant, shared ethical vision of why a company exists and where it needs to go, we argue that it is particularly suited for driving employee sustainability behaviors, which are more ethically complex than the types of employee ethical behaviors typically examined by prior research. Through four studies, two involving the actual employees of construction companies, (...) we demonstrate that purpose drives the sustainability behaviors of employees by causing them to take psychological ownership of sustainability. In addition, we show that the sustainability-enhancing effect of purpose is stronger when employees perceive that they have higher autonomy in enacting their sustainability actions and for those employees for whom being moral is more central to their sense of self. (shrink)

The task of rhetorical role labeling is to assign labels (such as Fact, Argument, Final Judgement, etc.) to sentences of a court case document. Rhetorical role labeling is an important problem in the field of Legal Analytics, since it can aid in various downstream tasks as well as enhances the readability of lengthy case documents. The task is challenging as case documents are highly various in structure and the rhetorical labels are often subjective. Previous works for automatic rhetorical role identification (...) (i) mainly used Conditional Random Fields over manually handcrafted features, and (ii) focused on certain law domains only (e.g., Immigration cases, Rent law), and a particular jurisdiction/country (e.g., US, Canada, India). In this work, we improve upon the prior works on rhetorical role identification by proposing novel Deep Learning models for automatically identifying rhetorical roles, which substantially outperform the prior methods. Additionally, we show the effectiveness of the proposed models over documents from five different law domains, and from two different jurisdictions—the Supreme Court of India and the Supreme Court of the UK. Through extensive experiments over different variations of the Deep Learning models, including Transformer models based on BERT and LegalBERT, we show the robustness of the methods for the task. We also perform an extensive inter-annotator study and analyse the agreement of the predictions of the proposed model with the annotations by domain experts. We find that some rhetorical labels are inherently hard/subjective and both law experts and neural models frequently get confused in predicting them correctly. (shrink)

This article describes how the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the higher education institutes in developing nations like India to relook at pedagogical approaches. Due to government imposing nationwide lockdown, higher educational institutes were quickly adopting to imbibe online learning medium. This research takes a qualitative thematic analytical approach to explore the facilitators and challenges to online learning from the perspectives of both learners and educators in higher education institutes. We have specifically explored the ethical and social concerns related to online (...) learning and the possible solution for the same. (shrink)

Articles on comparative philosophy; includes articles on Indic philosophy.

H5N1 avian influenza has reportedly claimed the lives of 186 persons worldwide, 77 of whom resided in Indonesia. On February 7, 2007, the government of Indonesia announced that it would withhold strains of H5N1 avian influenza virus from the World Health Organization. On the same day, Indonesia signed a memorandum of agreement with Baxter Healthcare, a United States-based company, to purchase samples and presumably ensure access to subsequent vaccines at a discount.

Banaji’s essays offer a powerful plea for a renewal of Marxism, a passionate argument to emancipate Marxism from the dead weight of vulgar traditions – with their simplifications, forced abstractions, mechanical reductions, generalised a-historical theorising, and familiar teleologies. To reinvigorate Marxism, argues Banaji, it is essential to use theory creatively, and recognise the need for complexity in thinking about categories. We cannot generalise about modes of production simply by referring to the forms of labour exploitation in the abstract: associate serfdom (...) or coerced labour with feudalism, and free wage-labour with capitalism. Without historical research into the specific ways in which each economy works – its history and logic of operation – we cannot in the abstract characterise a mode of production: we only end up producing a formal evolutionary sequence of modes. Agreeing with the general thrust of the critique mounted in the book, this essay suggests that Banaji’s own arguments often reproduce the binaries and linearities he opposes, and remain framed within certain forms of reductionism. (shrink)

As its title indicates, Philosophy as Saṃvāda and Svarāj: Dialogical Meditations on Daya Krishna and Ramchandra Gandhi, edited by Shail Mayaram, centers on two figures who can both easily be counted among the most stimulating thinkers of the recent past associated with the profession of teaching philosophy in Indian universities. That the formal association of Ramchandra Gandhi with the university teaching system was terminated in the later part of his career is both unfortunate and a not too happy commentary on (...) the character of academic establishments.The book focuses on what the editor has termed “philosophy as saṃvāda and svarāj,” which seems to have been conceived as providing the thematic unity to the volume... (shrink)

Bringing together leading observers of the 2018 teachers’ strikes in the United States, this forum surveys the origins, character, and trajectory of the rebellion as a whole. We examine the relations between union bureaucracies and the rank and file, the wider political context of the United States, the geography of the strike, immediate and longer-term grievances in the public-education sector, spontaneity and organisation, local cultural contexts and labour histories, strategies and tactics, social reproduction and gender, race and racism, and the (...) potentialities and obstacles facing the movement in the near future. (shrink)

We hypothesize that as one of the most consequential events in evolution, primary endosymbiosis accelerates lineage divergence, a process we refer to as the endosymbiotic ratchet. Our proposal is supported by recent work on the photosynthetic amoeba, Paulinella, that underwent primary plastid endosymbiosis about 124 Mya. This amoeba model allows us to explore the early impacts of photosynthetic organelle (plastid) origin on the host lineage. The current data point to a central role for effective population size (Ne) in accelerating divergence (...) post‐endosymbiosis due to limits to dispersal and reproductive isolation that reduce Ne, leading to local adaptation. We posit that isolated populations exploit different strategies and behaviors and assort themselves in non‐overlapping niches to minimize competition during the early, rapid evolutionary phase of organelle integration. The endosymbiotic ratchet provides a general framework for interpreting post‐endosymbiosis lineage evolution that is driven by disruptive selection and demographic and population shifts. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/gYXrFM6Zz6Q. (shrink)

Due to the highly visible nature of the disease, smallpox received a lot of attention from the colonial and independent Indian governments. An assessment of the changing official views about the impact of geographical and environmental factors on modes of variola causation and control presents insights into themes that are generally ignored in the existing historiography. Rather than being synchronised efforts, imposed top-down, provincial level officials in charge of running vaccination programmes were able to retain a great degree of autonomy (...) and shape the nature of local immunisation drive. As a result, vaccination work in the country was often disjointed, marked by official disagreements about the usefulness of certain strategies and technological inputs, with these trends being most noticeable in rural areas. Thus, this study seeks to highlight the importance of recognising — and studying — the fractured nature of medical and public health administration in the South Asian sub-continent. (shrink)

Immunology researchers are beginning to explore the possibilities of reproducibility, reuse and secondary analyses of immunology data. Open-access datasets are being applied in the validation of the methods used in the original studies, leveraging studies for meta-analysis, or generating new hypotheses. To promote these goals, the ImmPort data repository was created for the broader research community to explore the wide spectrum of clinical and basic research data and associated findings. The ImmPort ecosystem consists of four components–Private Data, Shared Data, Data (...) Analysis, and Resources—for data archiving, dissemination, analyses, and reuse. To date, more than 300 studies have been made freely available through the ImmPort Shared Data portal , which allows research data to be repurposed to accelerate the translation of new insights into discoveries. (shrink)

Study in the context of Hindu philosophy.

Bhattacharya, K.C. Swaraj in ideas.--Seal, B. The neo-romantic movement in literature.--Tagore, R. The religion of an artist.--Sri Aurobindo. The ideal spirit of poetry.

Sāyaṇa-Mādhava closed his exposition of the Cārvāka philosophy in his Sarva-darśana-saṃgraha, Chap. 1 by quoting 11 and a half verses, the authorship of all of which was attributed to Bṛhaspati, the eponymous founder of materialism in India. One of these verses is presumably taken from the Viṣṇupurāṇa. However, it is not Bṛhaspati but some demons, deluded by a Jain and a Buddhist monk, who say this. Bṛhaspati does not appear at all in this Purāṇa. Variant versions of the same story (...) are found in other Purāṇas but Bṛhaspti is not invariably present in all of them. The origin of the story may be traced back to the Maitrāyaṇīya Upaniṣad. Although Bṛhaspati plays a leading part in that story, the background is quite different. By comparing all the versions found in the Purāṇas and the subject matter of the epigrams attributed to Bṛhaspati the paper proposes to show that the Viṣṇupurāṇa story has nothing to do with the materialists, whether the Pre-Cārvākas or the Cārvākas; the Jains and the Buddhists are the target of attack. Sāyaṇa-mādhava, by placing these satirical epigrams either in their original or in altered forms, and attributing them to Bṛhaspati, has mixed up the views of all sorts of nāstikas, particularly the Jains and the Buddhists, with the Cārvākas and thereby succeeded in deceiving several generations of readers and misleading even the best of scholars. (shrink)

This study attempts to compare ‘the ethical value positioning’ of students of Business and Management studies from India and Germany. A complete enumerative survey was conducted for management students using the Ethical Positioning Questionnaire of Forsyth. There were 134 respondents from India and 57 from Germany. The objective was to confer the differences in ethical positioning of students of two economically and culturally diverse nations. By the end of the research, it was constituted that both German and Indian students demonstrate (...) a high degree of Idealism and Relativism and can be qualified as situationists. Exploratory analysis of the responses resulted in extraction of four factors : Non-Violence, Individualism, Non-Consequential, and Situational value. Within the analysis, Indian students displayed a higher preference for Individualism compared to their German counterparts. This study contributes to the literature in cross-cultural ethical value positioning of young managers. This study also opens a window for future research in the factors such as educational qualification, closed social groupings, and background of the students. (shrink)