The link between Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and financial performance has continued to generate mixed and inconclusive results. Most studies in this area seem to assume that corporate social and financial performance share the same underpinning logic. Drawing from a qualitative analysis of practitioners' accounts of the challenges of mainstreaming the market for responsible investments, as part of the broader CSR agenda, this article re-examines this taken-for-granted assumption in the extant literature, and reaches the conclusion that CSR, as a complex (...) private governance of externalities, does not easily lend itself to measurability and profitability. In other words, not everything about CSR is measurable and profitable as much as the financial markets would expect. Comparing what is rendered measurable and profitable, on one hand, and what is yet to fully lend itself to measurability and profitability, on the other, is identified as one of the fundamental flaws of this literature. As such, CSR and financial performance will continue to run on competing logics until their different markets are distinctively articulated and/or aligned. (shrink)

Tarski’s conceptual analysis of the notion of logical consequence is one of the pinnacles of the process of defining the metamathematical foundations of mathematics in the tradition of his predecessors Euclid, Frege, Russell and Hilbert, and his contemporaries Carnap, Gödel, Gentzen and Turing. However, he also notes that in defining the concept of consequence “efforts were made to adhere to the common usage of the language of every day life.” This paper addresses the issue of what relationship Tarski’s analysis, and (...) Béziau’s further generalization of it in universal logic, have to reasoning in the everyday lives of ordinary people from the cognitive processes of children through to those of specialists in the empirical and deductive sciences. It surveys a selection of relevant research in a range of disciplines providing theoretical and empirical studies of human reasoning, discusses the value of adopting a universal logic perspective, answers the questions posed in the call for this special issue, and suggests some specific research challenges. (shrink)

Process philosophy was on the periphery of academic thinking for much of the twentieth century. Whereas the focus of intellectual development was for the most part on scientific analysis, process philosophy argued for a more encompassing synthesis as well. Although the drive — the corpus delecti of formal research assessment funding exercises — for separate, discrete and latterly measurable bodies of knowledge arrived at from within increasingly autonomous academic disciplines has undoubtedly led to significant advance in many areas it has, (...) at the same time, rendered opaque the interconnectedness of all things and thereby diminished the perceived value of ideas developed in one field, in terms of their relevance to others. At its heart, this trend has arisen from a reliance upon a metaphysics of stasis; things are constant and can thus be analysed and re-analysed into ever finite and thoroughly separate elements. In contrast, a metaphysics of process suggests that change and interconnectedness are the predominant characteristics of nature. As such, it provides new directions for contemporary thought by enabling the development of ideas via an otherwise unavailable framework of coherence and comprehensiveness. One area in which process thought has proved helpful is organisation studies. This paper examines the role of interpersonal trust in organisations from a Whiteheadian perspective. As such, it aims to show how Whitehead’s thinking can be applied to complex human experiences in such a way as to reveal the nature of the processes that go toward their development. The paper begins with a theoretical explication of trust derived from the contemporary social scientific literature. The development of trust, a key component of human society, is argued to be a subjective and processual phenomenon. In the light of this discussion the paper uses appropriate elements of Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism to provide a description of trust’s development in an individual for another individual, and its consequent impact on their cooperative behaviour. It thereby attempts to uncover the hitherto inaccessible micro-processes that go towards the development and continuation of interpersonal trust in organisational settings. In so doing, the paper seeks to demonstrate the explanatory power of an aspect of Whitehead’s work, his elucidation of human ‘emotional experience’, that is perhaps too often overlooked as a comparatively minor and non-technical use of his categoreal scheme. (shrink)

In this article, we provide a broad overview of the interplay among cognition, belief systems, and institutions, and how they affect economic performance. We argue that a deeper understanding of institutions’ emergence, their working properties, and their effect on economic and political outcomes should begin from an analysis of cognitive processes. We explore the nature of individual and collective learning, stressing that the issue is not whether agents are perfectly or boundedly rational, but rather how human beings actually reason and (...) choose, individually and in collective settings. We then tie the processes of learning to institutional analysis, providing arguments in favor of what can be characterized as “cognitive institutionalism.” Besides, we show that a full treatment of the phenomenon of path dependence should start at the cognitive level, proceed at the institutional level, and culminate at the economic level. (shrink)