Farmers’ markets are a relatively recent phenomenon in Prague, Czechia. The first of them was opened in the autumn of 2009, but the real boom started in the spring/summer of 2010. The survey introduced in this paper is concerned with the study of alternative food networks and farmers’ markets. It offers the results of methodological triangulation based on: (1) the data obtained via the questionnaire survey, (2) market organizers’ reflections on the customer structure, motivation for shopping at farmers’ markets and (...) the question of social exclusivity of farmers’ markets in Prague as revealed in interviews, and (3) the field notes from the participant observation at the markets under study. The results show that farmers’ markets are emerging all around Prague in localities of different social status, so the poorer citizens are not necessarily excluded from the access to markets. The differences between markets, in terms of size, range of goods, and term seem to follow the inner city/hinterlands divide rather than the socio-spatial differentiation of the city. New consumer patterns clearly result from the cultural environment, specific context, and also from the different development path of the post-socialist consumer society. (shrink)

Comparing people to trees is a customary and common practice in Jewish tradition. The current article examines the roots and the development of the image of people as trees in Jewish sources, from biblical times to recent generations, as related to the prohibition against destroying fruit trees. The similarity between humans and trees in the Jewish religion and culture was firstly suggested in biblical literature as a conceptual-symbolic element. However, since the Amoraic period, this similarity was transformed to a resemblance (...) bearing mystical and Halakhic implications. Various sources in rabbinical literature describe trees as humans that may be spoken to or yelled at to produce fruit. Cutting down a tree was perceived by the rabbis of the Talmud not only as an unethical act or vandalism, but also as a hazard: the death of the tree corresponds to the death of the person who resembles it. All societies, cultures and religions have a system of values and practices that are aimed at shaping people, society and the environment according to a certain worldview.Contribution: The discussion in this article on the relationship between religion-culture and nature indicates how the Jewish religion shaped believers’ attitude to the world of flora over the generations by transforming the man-tree comparison into one with binding and even threatening practical religious meaning. (shrink)

This work focuses on corporate social responsibility disclosure practices of multinational corporations. Based on a longitudinal study of CSR reports of companies operating in the automotive industry, the paper offers a detailed study of how disclosure practices are changing and which principles and approaches influence and drive the development of such disclosure. Based on a four-year report-based study, the findings enable us to identify three main trends in the CSR disclosure strategy of automotive firms. First, in line with the mainstream (...) CSR literature, the present study confirms the trend towards the increasing environmental and social accountability. Second, it adds evidence to the emerging debate regarding the harmonization and standardization of reporting and discusses this aspect by mentioning the standards as exerting some normative pressures within the sector. Finally, it provides evidence on specific links emerging between issues and actors. The implications of this evidence contribute to opening up the debate on CSR disclosure to the possibility of combining the institutional lens with a strategic approach that captures the materiality considerations of CSR disclosure. (shrink)

This article uses an account of dwelling to interrogate the concept of curriculum making. Tim Ingold’s use of dwelling to understand culture is productive here because of his implicit and explicit interest in intergenerational learning. His account of dwelling rests on a foundational ontological claim—that mental construction and representation are not the basis upon which we live in the world—which is very challenging for the kinds of curriculum making with which many educators are now familiar. It undermines assumptions of propositional (...) knowledge and of the use of mental schemas to communicate and share. At the level of critique, then, dwelling destabilizes contemporary ideas of curriculum as textual, pre-specified content for transmission or pre-defined objectives or standardized activity. The positive claims of dwelling are equally challenging, for these are that the world is a domain of relational entanglement in which an organism can be no more than a point of growth for an emergent ‘environment’, and meaning only inheres in these relations. The paper articulates how differentiation (of learner, salient meanings, knowledge, skill and place) are possible in such an ontology, and how curriculum making can be understood from this perspective as being the remaking of relationships between these. (shrink)

Fieldwork experiences in the summer of 2003 resulted in confusion regarding the ethical positioning of myself (the interviewer) in relation to the multiple 'actants' that constituted the research subject(s). This paper explores some of these personal issues and conflicts in order to clarify, gain perspective on and critique the nature (and indeed the 'Nature') of my fieldwork. The multiple positioning of participants within networks of agricultural and social ethics is addressed. I borrow Lewis Holloway's idea of relational ethical identity, in (...) order to resituate and rethink the interviews in terms of actor-network theory. This paper argues that ethical identities and ethical 'natures' can be understood as relationally constructed and constituted within networks. The ways in which notions of (un)ethical agricultural relations shaped each interview experience are also explored. Specifically, how did my ideas of (un)ethical farming influence my 'ethical take' on how different farmers operated? I also argue that all encounters are ethically charged and, as such, encounters result in emotional tensions. (shrink)

Early Daoism, as articulated in the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi, indirectly addresses environmental issues by intimating a non-reductive naturalistic ethics calling on humans to be open and responsive to the specificities and interconnections of the world and environment to which they belong. "Dao" is not a substantial immanent or transcendent entity but the lived enactment of the intrinsic worth of the "myriad things" and the natural world occurring through how humans address and are addressed by them. Early Daoism potentially corrects (...) both anthropocentrism and biocentrism in environmental ethics by disclosing the things themselves in the context of the selfcultivation of life. Given increasing environmental devastation and the dominance of views, practices, and institutions reducing nature to a background and/or raw material for human activity, this "ethics of encounter" discloses the life of things as inexhaustibly more than human projects and constructs, extending ethical recognition and responsibility beyond social relations and the social self. (shrink)