What can be learned from a small scale study of managerial work in a highly marginal and under-researched working community? This article uses the ‘goods–virtues–practices–institutions’ framework to examine the managerial work of owner–directors of traditional circuses. Inspired by MacIntyre’s arguments for the necessity of a narrative understanding of the virtues, interviews explored how British and Irish circus directors accounted for their working lives. A purposive sample was used to select subjects who had owned and managed traditional touring circuses for at (...) least 15 years, a period in which the economic and reputational fortunes of traditional circuses have suffered badly. This sample enabled the research to examine the self-understanding of people who had, at least on the face of it, exhibited the virtue of constancy. The research contributes to our understanding of the role of the virtues in organizations by presenting evidence of an intimate relationship between the virtue of constancy and a ‘calling’ work orientation. This enhances our understanding of the virtues that are required if management is exercised as a domain-related practice. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Giving without the expectation of reward is difficult to understand in organizational contexts. In opposition to a logic based on self-interest or a sense of duty, a “logic of gift” has been proposed as a way to understand the phenomenon of free, unconditional giving. However, the rationale behind, and effects of, this logic have been under-explored. This paper responds by first clarifying the three logics of action—the logic of exchange, the logic of duty, and the logic of gift—and then explains (...) how their balanced integration promises to enhance organizational life and outcomes. Having explicated the unique character and contributions of the logic of gift, the paper further suggests practical implications for management. Encouraging the logic of gift fosters more humane relationships within organizations and to enable individuals to be generous in ways that inspire trust and promote creativity. (shrink)

Cultural critics of the “feminization of love” have argued that heterosexual love has been feminized by a stress on emotional expressivity that masks “masculine” love, with its greater emphasis on instrumental behaviors. Using survey data, this article examines the extent to which the feminization-of-love hypothesis can be extended to same-sex friendships. Data analyses revealed that women's friendships were more expressive than men's only when a narrow, positive definition of expressivity was employed; men's friendships were found to be more aggressive, but (...) no more instrumental, than those of women. These and other findings support the conclusion that women's friendships are more similar to the cultural images of heroic friendship and sisterhood than to the narrower image of feminized love. (shrink)

Good nutrition plays an important role in the optimal growth, development, health and well-being of individuals in all stages of life. Healthy eating can reduce the risk of chronic diseases, such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes and some types of cancer. However, the capitalist mindset that shapes the food environment has led to the commoditization of food. Food is not just a marketable commodity like any other commodity. Food is different from other commodities on the market in that it is (...) explicitly and intrinsically linked to our human existence. While possessing another commodity allows for social benefits, food ensures survival. Millions of people in United States of America are either malnourished or food insecure. The purpose of this paper is to present a critique of the current food system using four meanings of the common good--as a framework, rhetorical device, ethical concept and practical tool for social justice. The first section of this paper provides a general overview of the notion of the common good. The second section outlines how each of the four meanings of the common good helps us understand public practices, social policies and market values that shape the distal causal factors of nutritious food inaccessibility. We then outline policy and empowerment initiatives for nutritious food access. (shrink)

Despite tendencies to compete for a prime place in moral theory, neither virtue ethics nor the four principles approach should claim to be superior to, or logically prior to, the other. Together they provide a more adequate account of the moral life than either can offer on its own. The virtues of principlism are clarity, simplicity and (to some extent) universality. These are well illustrated by Ranaan Gillon’s masterly analysis of the cases he has provided. But the vices of this (...) approach are the converse of its virtues: neglect of emotional and personal factors, oversimplification of the issues, and excessive claims to universality. Virtue ethics offers a complementary approach, providing insights into moral character, offering a blend of reason and emotion, and paying attention to the context of decisions. The cases provided can be more adequately understood if we combine the approaches. Both should foster the virtues of humility and magnanimity. (shrink)

How do feminists in the United Kingdom view spirituality and religion? What are their religious and spiritual attitudes, beliefs, and practices? What role do spirituality and religion play in feminists’ lives? This article presents findings from an interview-based study of 30 feminists in England, Scotland, and Wales. It identifies three characteristics of feminists’ approaches to religion and spirituality: They are de-churched, are relational, and emphasize practice. These features warrant a new approach to feminists’ relationships with religion and spirituality. Rather than, (...) as others have done, equating feminism with secularism, secularization, or alternative spiritualities, the article reveals the complex ways feminists forge religio-spiritual lives. The interview data demonstrate that it is unwise to see “spirituality” and “religion” as analytically distinct. Instead, drawing on the growing field of scholarship on “lived religion,” the article proposes conceptualizing feminist spirituality as lived religion. (shrink)

Given the significant transformations underway in academia, it is pertinent to ask whether the traditional notion of entering the profession in response to a calling is still relevant. This article draws together hitherto unconnected strands of German and Anglo-Saxon literature on callings, then analyzes biographical narratives of 40 social scientists in Germany and the United States. The comparative analysis of the timing, sources, and nature of the respondents’ decision to become academics finds that almost all exhibit a calling orientation. However, (...) their responses no longer correspond to the classical, passive notion; instead, callings in academia have become agentic. In the context of a wider societal trend to self-realization, academia has been transformed to an activity that people pursue because they want to rather than because destiny or an external force pushes them to make such a commitment. The recognition of the social nature of callings is underscored by the significance of professional mentors and family. The unexpected predominance of similarities in the cross-national comparison of calling orientation suggests that the internationalization of academic standards and procedures and the high level of competition for few positions in both contexts may outweigh the effects of culture and tradition. (shrink)

In this essay I critique two influential accounts of rational autonomy in common schooling that conceive liberalism as an ideal form of life, and I offer an alternative approach to democratic education that views liberal theory as concerned with coexistence among rival ways of living. This view places moral agency, not rational autonomy, at the heart of schooling in liberal societies—a moral agency grounded in initiation into dynamic traditions that enable self-definition and are accompanied by exposure to life-paths other than (...) one’s own. This alternative challenges the tendency in large diverse democracies (such as those of the US and the UK) to prefer common to particularistic schools, thereby placing many types of faith and secular schools on a more equal footing and providing moral justification for education in the national cultures of small liberal republics (such as Denmark, Israel and Lithuania) that maintain special relationships to particular groups while acknowledging the rights of all citizens. I call this approach the pedagogy of difference. (shrink)

Informed consent, decision-making styles and the role of patient-physician relationships are imperative aspects of clinical medicine worldwide. We present the case of a 74-year-old woman afflicted with advanced liver cancer whose attending physician, per request of the family, did not inform her of her true diagnosis. In our analysis, we explore the differences in informed-consent styles between patients who hold an "independent" and "interdependent" construal of the self and then highlight the possible implications maintained by this position in the context (...) of international clinical ethics. Finally, we discuss the need to reassess informed-consent styles suitable to the needs of each patient regardless of whether he or she resides in the United States or in Japan. (shrink)

A complex conjuncture of ideological constructions obscured and rationalized the systematic exploitation of farm women. First, farming and homemaking, to which people cling in an attempt to avert the alienation of wage labor, provide a basis for evaluating one's labor in terms that, ironically, makes them vulnerable to super-exploitation. Second, agrarian ideologies, with their strongly patriarchal bias, did not allow women to understand themselves as public actors. Modernizing elite ideologies, specifically the equation of entrepreneurial individualism and efficiency with “progress” and (...) affluence, and the “cult of domesticity” with its redefinition of men's and women's roles, promised women greater equality within the family; however, these normative codes simultaneously opened the farm and home to greater dependence on capitalist markets. The ideology of entrepreneurial individualism also provided templates through which farm men and women (mis)understood their relative poverty as being the result of private, individual choices. In addition, virtually all media assumed a sector differentiated only by commodity, rendering size, class, or other distinctions invisible. Finally, the ideology of separate spheres, as it developed in the nineteenth century, created a segmented and discriminatory labor market for women. The period focused on, the late 1940s and the 1950s, was crucial in establishing the terms of the post-War order. (shrink)

A study of a watershed planning process in the Cache River Watershed in southern Illinois revealed that class divisions, based on property ownership, underlay key conflicts over land use and decision-making relevant to resource use. A class analysis of the region indicates that the planning process served to endorse and solidify the locally-dominant theory that landownership confers the right to govern. This obscured the class differences between large full-time farmers and small-holders whose livelihood depends on non-farm labor. These two groups (...) generally opposed one another regarding wetland drainage. Their common identity as “property owner” consolidated the power wielded locally by large farmers. It also provided an instrument – the planning document – for state and federal government agencies to enhance their power and to bring resources to the region. The planning process simultaneously ameliorated conflicts between government agencies and the large farmers, while enhancing the agencies’ capacity to reclaim wetlands. In this contradictory manner, the plan promoted the environmental aims of many small-holders, and simultaneously disempowered them as actors in the region’s political economy. (shrink)

Sociologists often ask why particular groups of people have the moral views that they do. I argue that sociology’s empirical research on morality relies, implicitly or explicitly, on unsophisticated and even obsolete ethical theories, and thus is based on inadequate conceptions of the ontology, epistemology, and semantics of morality. In this article I address the two main problems in the sociology of morality: (1) the problem of moral truth, and (2) the problem of value freedom. I identify two ideal–typical approaches. (...) While the Weberian paradigm rejects the concept of moral truth, the Durkheimian paradigm accepts it. By contrast, I argue that sociology should be metaphysically agnostic, yet in practice it should proceed as though there were no moral truths. The Weberians claim that the sociology of morality can and should be value free; the Durkheimians claim that it cannot and it should not. My argument is that, while it is true that factual statements presuppose value judgments, it does not follow that sociologists are moral philosophers in disguise. Finally, I contend that in order for sociology to improve its understanding of morality, better conceptual, epistemological, and methodological foundations are needed. (shrink)

De moderne filosofie lijdt aan muziekvergetelheid. Opvallend is echter dat filosofen, wanneer ze toch aandacht schenken aan muziek, hun aandacht bij voorkeur op één bepaald genre richten, namelijk de opera. Filosofen zoals Søren Kierkegaard en Friedrich Nietzsche lieten hun gedachten over Don Giovanni, Parsifal en Carmen gaan, terwijl omgekeerd de filosofie van Arthur Schopenhauer de opera heeft beïnvloed via Wagner. Diens werk lijkt zich op het snijpunt van het grensverkeer tussen moderne filosofie en moderne muziek te bevinden. Het was zijn (...) ambitie de menselijke existentie en de menselijke geschiedenis in één panoramisch oeuvre te vatten, vanaf het primordiale begin tot en met de dramatische finale die ophanden leek: een catastrofale apotheose die een geheel nieuwe toekomst mogelijk zou maken. Dat is althans de verhaallijn van zijn meesterwerk Der Ring des Nibelungen. Aan het slot van Götterdämmerung lijkt zich een algehele verwoesting te hebben voltrokken: ‘Everything is destroyed and there is an enigmatic kind of hovering over the scene of destruction’ (Badiou 2010, p. 106), een ambivalente stemming van hoop en destructie zette Wagner op muziek. Voor Wagner is dan ook een hoofdrol in deze studie weggelegd: voor zijn muziektheoretische geschriften (waarin hij over een ‘muziek van de toekomst’ filosofeerde), maar meer nog voor de muzikale totaalkunstwerken die hij daadwerkelijk componeerde. (shrink)

Cross-cultural dialogue between the Kyoto School of modern Japanese philosophy and the classical pragmatist tradition in American philosophy can help educators to clarify aims for greater ecological responsiveness in moral education. This dialogue can contribute to meeting an urgent practical need to cultivate ecological imagination, and an equally practical need to make theoretical sense of the way in which ecological perception becomes relevant to moral deliberation. The first section of this chapter explores relational thinking in the Kyoto School and American (...) pragmatism to help develop, in the second section, a concept of ecological imagination. A fine-tuned ecological imagination is a capacity we already count on in our best environmental writers, educators, scientists, and policy analysts. Moral deliberation enlists imagination of a specifically ecological sort when the imaginative structures we use to understand ecosystemic relationships shape our mental simulations and what John Dewey calls our “dramatic rehearsals.” The final section draws from the foregoing to clarify some appropriate aims for contemporary moral education. Enriched through cross-cultural dialogue about the relational networks in which our finite lives are embedded, a finely aware ecological imagination can make the deliberations of the coming generation more trustworthy. (shrink)

Kolb discusses postmodern architectural styles and theories within the context of philosophical ideas about modernism and postmodernism. He focuses on what it means to dwell in a world and within a history and to act from or against a tradition.

Drawing inspiration om Joseph T. O’Connell’s work on socio‐cultural integration, this pa‐ per connects the notion of ‘deep equality’ with two broad lessons that can be taken om O’Connell’s approach that pertain to the study of religious diversity in contemporary life. The rst is the recognition of the amorphous nature of religious identity, and the second is the necessity to search for models of socio‐cultural integration in the face of di erence. These lessons are valuable in providing an alternative discourse (...) of diversity that moves away om problematisation to collaboration. Słowa kluczowe: ; ; ; ; ; ; ;;;. (shrink)

What is trust? How does it function as a primary virtue for persuasive arguments? How does its presumption contribute to the effectiveness of an argument’s persuasiveness? This presentation will explore these questions and the controversy among scholars regarding how trust is generated and under what conditions it is lost. We will also discuss whether inauthentic trustworthiness is a manipulation used for gaining a fallacious advantage in argumentation.