The question of language development and origin is a subject that is vital to our understanding of what it means to be human. This is reflected in the large range of academic disciplines that are dedicated to the subject. Language development has in particular been related to studies in cognitive capacity and the ability for mind reading, often termed a theory of mind. The Social Brain Hypothesis has been the only attempt to correlate a cognitive scale of complexity incorporating a (...) theory of mind and intentionality orders to the archaeological record and hominin phylogeny. However, a method is still lacking that allows a correlation of the orders of intentionality to the archaeological signatures that represent the physical expression of hominin behaviour. This paper is primarily concerned with introducing a new theoretical perspective – termed the identity model – which facilitates such a correlation between a scale of cognitive acuity, hominin behaviour through the archaeological record and subsequently language development within an evolutionary context. (shrink)

According to an influential view, empathy has, and should have, a role in ethics, but it is by no means clear what is meant by 'empathy', and why exactly it is supposed to be morally good. Recently, Peter Goldie has challenged that view. He shows how problematic empathy is, and argues that taking an external perspective is morally superior: we should focus on the other, rather than ourselves. But this argument is misguided in several ways. If we consider conversation, there (...) is no need to see an opposition between a focus on the other and on ourselves. I propose to shift the perspective of the discussion towards the needs of those who are supposed to benefit from empathy, and to study how people communicate their imaginative processes towards their receivers. I end with an exploration of theoretical resources for an account of mutual perspective- shifting. (shrink)

There has been limited research investigating the effects of the recognition form of respect between leaders and their followers within the organisation literature. We investigated whether mutual recognition respect was associated with follower job performance and well-being after controlling for measures of liking and appraisal respect. Based on data we collected from 203 matched leader–follower dyads in the Insurance industry in Malaysia, we found mutual recognition respect predicted both follower job performance and well-being. Significantly, appraisal respect was only found to (...) be positively associated with job performance. Our findings suggest mutual recognition respect is an important form of respect in workplace relationships that can bring benefits to both the individual and the organisation. (shrink)

The philosophical-psychological Lvov-Warsaw School, derived from the philosophical tradition of Franz Brentano, developed his concept of intentionality for many years in an original way. This is particularly evident in Kazimierz Twardowski’s theory of actions and products and Tadeusz Tomaszewski’s theory of action. Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz’s semantic epistemology is also an important yet unfinished achievement (though less related to the issue of intentionality), in the light of which cognitive processes are organically embedded in cultural artefacts and, more specifically, in language. Despite the (...) extraordinary wealth of the Lvov-Warsaw School’s achievements, the theoretical findings of Twardowski and his disciples allow for the extraction of relatively consistent conclusions regarding the specifics of human cognition. Achievements of the Polish school of psychology seem to be important in the long ongoing discussion on the topic of the nature of cognitive processes and the mind. (shrink)

It has been argued that globalization assists the USA to gain a hegemonic position, allowing it to export its culture. Because this exportation leads to the domination by American culture of the local cultures of importing countries, which are the key element in sustaining their citizens’ national identity, citizens of these countries are unable to protect state sovereignty from this cultural invasion. In order to prevent a political crisis arising from such an invasion, these countries will adopt the strategy of (...) cultural localization. However, this top-down approach overestimates the influence of hegemonic cultures and, thus, overlooks the dynamic nature of cultural development that is generated by people’s agency. This essay rejects this top-down model by arguing that texts cannot dominate people, and that people influence their existence and value. (shrink)

Preston & de Waal are understandably cautious in applying their model to autism. They emphasise multiple cognitive impairments in autism, including prefrontal-executive, cerebellar-attention, and amygdala-emotion recognition deficits. Further empirical examination of imitation ability in autism may reveal deficits in the neural and cognitive basis of perception-action mapping that have a specific relation to the empathic deficit.

A review of the literature on Corporate Codes of Ethics suggests that whilst there exists an informative body of literature concerning the prevalence of such codes, their design, implementation and promulgation, it is also evident that there is a relative lack of consideration of their impact upon members' everyday organizational behaviour. By drawing upon organizational sociology and psychology this paper constructs a contextualist and interpretive model which seeks to enable an analysis and evaluation of their effects upon individual, group and (...) organizational behaviour. (shrink)

Knobe's laudable conclusion that we make sense of our social world based on moral considerations requires a development account of human thought and a theoretical framework. We outline a view that such a moral framework must be rooted in social interaction.

We challenge the classic experience/expression dichotomous account of emotions, according to which experiencing and expressing an emotion are two independent processes. By endorsing Dewey's and Mead's accounts of emotions, and capitalizing upon recent empirical findings, we propose that expression is part of the emotional experience. This proposal partly challenges the purely constructivist approach endorsed by the authors of the target article.

This study shows that professional identity should not be viewed as a composed variable with a uniform structure. Based on the literature and previous research, we view teachers? job satisfaction, self?efficacy, occupational commitment and change in the level of motivation as indicators of teachers? professional identity. Using two?step cluster analysis, three distinct professional identity profiles have empirically been identified, based on data of 1214 teachers working in secondary education in the Netherlands. These profiles differed significantly regarding the indicators of teachers? (...) professional identity. Teachers belonging to the found profiles did not significantly differ in their amount of experience. (shrink)

Throughout their history, symbolic interactionism and critical perspective have been viewed as divergent theoretical perspectives with different philosophical underpinnings. A review of their historical and philosophical origins reveals both points of divergence and areas of convergence. Their underlying philosophies of science and views of human freedom are different as is their level of focus with symbolic interactionism having a micro perspective and critical perspective using a macro perspective. This micro/macro difference is reflected in the divergence of their major concepts, goals (...) and basic tenets. While their underlying philosophies are different, however, they are not necessarily contradictory and areas of convergence may include the concepts of reference groups and looking glass self within symbolic interactionism and ideological hegemony within critical perspective. By using a pragmatic approach and combining symbolic interactionism and critical perspectives, both micro and macro levels come into focus and strategies for change across individual and societal levels can be developed and applied. Application of both symbolic interactionism and critical perspective to nursing research and scholarship offers exciting new opportunities for theory development and research methodologies. In nursing education, these two perspectives can give students added insight into patients' and families' problems at the micro level while, at the same time, giving them a lens to see and tools to apply to problems at the macro level in health care. In nursing practice, a combined symbolic interactionism/critical perspective approach assists nurses to give high-quality care at the individual level while also working at the macro level to address the manufacturers of illness. New research questions emerge from this combination of perspectives with new possibilities for theory development, a transformation in nursing education, and the potential for new practice strategies that can address individual client and larger system problems through empowerment of clients and nurses. (shrink)

At the heart of entrepreneurship are imagination, creativity, novelty, and sensitivity. It takes these qualities to develop a new product or service and bring it to market, to envision the possible impacts a new product may make and come up with novel and creative solutions to problems that may arise. These qualities go to make up what could be called the spirit of entrepreneurship, a spirit that involves the ability to handle the experimental nature of entrepreunerial activity. These same qualities (...) are crucial for moral decision making, and an ethical approach which emphasizes imagination, creativity, and has an experimental thrust is much better adapted to the entrepreneurial activity and much more relevant to the unique situations that entrepreneurs face. In this sense, the process approach to ethics developed in this article is a unifying framework that brings together the activity of entrepreneurship and moral decision making. (shrink)

Many theoretical developments in the business and society field do not pay enough attention to the policy environment in which business functions and through which corporate behavior is largely shaped to respond to social problems. Part of this problem may be due to the lack of a firm philosophical foundation for public policy providing legitimacy for the concept in relation to the market system. American pragmatism offers such a foundation and overcomes many of the tensions between the market and public (...) policy by puffing the concept of the individual and community in proper perspective. (shrink)

. Atomic individualism is embedded in most definitions of stakeholder theory, and as a result, stakeholders are not integral to the basic identity of the corporation which is considered to be independent of, and separate from, its stakeholders. Feminist theory has been suggested as a way of developing a more relational view of the corporation and its stakeholders, but it lacks a systematically developed conceptual framework for undergirding its own insights. Pragmatic philosophy is offered as a way of providing this (...) theoretical undergirding for . a relational understanding of the firm and its stakeholders. (shrink)

Digital hyperconnectivity is a defining fact of our time. In addition to recasting social interaction, culture, economics, and politics, it has profoundly transformed the self. It has created new ways of being and constructing a self, but also new ways of being constructed as a self from the outside, new ways of being configured, represented, and governed as a self by sociotechnical systems. Rather than analyze theories of the self, I focus on practices of the self, using this expression in (...) a looser, more general sense than that used by Foucault. I begin by considering and reformulating two early lines of argument about the web as a medium for exploring and emancipating the self. Subsequent sections show how digital hyperconnectivity has engendered new ways of objectifying, quantifying, producing, and regulating the self—considered both as active, reflexive practices and as systemic, data- and algorithm-driven processes. I conclude by reflecting on the broader implications of contemporary modes of governing the self and by underscoring the ways in which hyperconnectivity has colonized the territories of the self, conscripting the self into the service of techno-social systems. (shrink)

My paper argues that Luc Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology makes an important contribution to two central concerns of critical theory: the empirical analysis of the contradictions and conflicts of capitalist societies and the reflexive clarification of the epistemological and normative grounds of critique. I show how Boltanski’s assessment of the limitations of Bourdieu’s critical sociology significantly influenced his pragmatic sociology of critique and explication of the political philosophies present in actors’ practices of dispute and justification. Although pragmatism has revealed how social (...) life involves considerable uncertainty, Boltanski contends that critique needs to take into account how institutions generate semantic security, as well as symbolic violence. Boltanski’s endeavour to reformulate critique is compared with influential alternative conceptions, notably those of Habermas, Castoriadis, and Honneth. Despite its potential deficiencies and weaknesses, Boltanski’s reformulation of critique is found to be of considerable theoretical significance. In particular, Boltanski’s analysis of the role critique has played in the reorganization of capitalism can be extended, and his work is suggestive of how some of the intentions of critical theory can be pursued in new ways. (shrink)

This paper suggests that pragmatism makes a distinctive contribution to the theory and practice of radical democracy. It investigates the relation ship between the renewal of interest in pragmatism and the recent attempts to develop radical democratic alternatives to political liberalism. With particular reference to the contemporary critical social theory of Habermas and Honneth, the paper outlines key dimensions of the civic republican, deliberative democratic and reflexive cooperative reconstructions of John Dewey's conception of democracy. These reconstructions are shown to have (...) explicated important pragmatist insights concerning public participation in civic associations, the discursive practices of deliberation, and the cooperative organization of the division of labour. However, it is argued that each of these reconstructions pre suppose some facet of the additional pragmatist understanding of the creativity of action and that the most distinctive contributions of pragmatism to radical democratic theory and practice derive from a notion of democracy as instituted and emergent meaning. (shrink)

This research applies the impression management theory of exemplification in an accounting study by identifying and measuring differences in both auditor and public perceptions of exemplary behaviors. The auditors were divided into two groups, one of which reported self-perceptions (A-S) while the other group reported their perceptions of a typical auditor (A-O). There were two separate public groups, which gave their perceptions of a typical auditor and were divided based on their levels of accounting sophistication. The more sophisticated public group (...) was comprised of bank loan officers (LO) while the less sophisticated public group consisted of investment club members (IC). Comparisons were made on 30 behaviors contained in the AICPA Code of Professional Conduct, which served as the basis for the research instrument. Profile analysis, a special form of MANOVA technique, was used to analyze the results. A-S perceptions were the highest of the four treatment levels and were significantly higher (i.e., more exemplary) than the perceptions of both the A-O and LO groups. The more sophisticated user group (LO) provided the lowest perceptions of the four treatment levels. For at least four of the six measures, the LO treatment group perceived the typical auditor to be less exemplary than both the IC and A-O treatments. There were no differences in perceptions between the A-O group and IC. Additional analysis revealed that auditors overrated the degree to which the public relied on financial statements. However, both public groups reported a reasonably high level of reliance on financial statements when making decisions. (shrink)

Charles Taylor’s conception of the relationship between democracy and social creativity developed through a critical synthesis of various traditions, including the Romantic Movement and liberal political philosophy. However, it is argued that Taylor’s understanding of the implications of religion and revolution significantly differentiates his standpoint from that of pragmatism and theories of democratic creativity. Taylor’s defence of religious transcendence is shown to give rise to tensions with the latter perspective. The theorists of democratic creativity suggest that democracy originates in the (...) rupturing of religious significations and their closure of meaning. Taylor essentially inverts these arguments and perceives that the loss of transcendence may lead to a closed world structure. Taylor claims that the dilemmas of the modern immanent frame were prefigured in the French Revolution’s inability to generate an institutional form consistent with its understanding of democracy and that social creativity should be qualified in light of this historical experience. (shrink)

According to Maria Markus, the development of a particularly open and interested moral-psychological disposition towards the other is critical to the endeavour of subjects to realize the decent society. Drawing on the work of George Herbert Mead, it will be argued that such a sense of decency involves not just a normative commitment to reciprocity but a reflexive appreciation of the significance of the other to the formation of the self. Meads sketches of intersubjective freedoms are shown to provide a (...) critical perspective on unjust social relations from the standpoint of the utopian horizon of a decent society. Meads conception converges, as well as contrasts, with Markuss perspective on civil society and the regulative ideal of the decent society. Significantly, Markuss account of the problem of the potential divergence between the decency of institutions and the decency of human relationships highlights the difficulties of interconnecting democratic justice and intersubjective freedoms. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether managerial rhetoric in the Management Discussion and Analysis section of 10-K filings can help gauge the level of managerial opportunism in a firm. We find that the use of trust-related words is connected to inefficient investment decisions and poor operating performance. Furthermore, firms making more frequent use of trust-related words are subject to less monitoring by institutional investors or analysts. Their accounting also relies more heavily on discretionary accruals. These results are consistent with the notion that (...) managerial rhetoric to advertise trustworthiness points towards agency problems plaguing the firm. (shrink)

Strikingly, theorizing about digital technologies has led us to recognize many habitual subjects of research as figures against fields that are also worthy of study. Communication, for example, becomes visible only against the field of silence. Silence is critically important for the construction of reality – and the social construction of reality has a complement, the also necessary contemplative construction of reality. Silence is so sensitive and fragile that an inability to achieve it, or to get rid of it, or (...) to correct the wrong kind of silence often provides early indicators of individual, group, communal, and society-wide stresses from information technologies. Indeed, we might treat difficulties with silence as miners treated canaries in coal mines, as early warning signals. The story has already been told that nightingales in London now have to sing so loudly in order to be heard above the ambient noise that the birds are in danger of breaking the noise ordinance law. Surely something has gone awry if nightingales break the law when they sing. Finding ways to protect silence as an arena of personal and social choice is a particularly poignant, evocative, and instructive ethical and policy horizon at this frontier moment for the human species. This article introduces the theory of the contemplative construction of reality, explores what the study of silence tells us about reality construction processes, and outlines a research agenda. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that to understand minded agency – the capacity we typically find instantiated in instances of human behaviour that could sensibly be questioned by asking “What did you do?” – one needs to understand childhood, i.e. the trajectory of learning to act. I discuss two different types of trajectory, both of which seem to take place during childhood and both of which might be considered crucial to learning to act: a growth of bodily control (GBC) and (...) a growth in taking responsibility (GTR). The discussion of GTR takes up about half of the entire paper. In the final two sections I argue that GTR is the most promising trajectory in terms of which to understand a child’s process of learning to act. (shrink)

The modern self, with its inwardness, its freedom and its individuality, suffers, Taylor tells us, from disenchantment. Moreover, disenchantment has come in spite of the advance, to which Taylor wishes to give full credit, that modernity has made in giving great value to ordinary life at work and in the family. For religion, though still present as one layer of sentiment among many in the historical deposits that compose modern culture, has given ground to “disengaged instrumentalism” or to its antagonist, (...) romantic “expressivism”. Taylor, a philosopher of uncommonly generous spirit, is willing to find good in each of these orientations: the first, for example, has with utilitarianism put the relief of needless suffering at the top of the moral agenda, along with redeeming from superstitious repression a number of innocent pleasures; the second has deepened human capacity, on the one hand by deepening emotions, on the other hand by gaining for them intellectual respect. (shrink)

Smith's famous invocation of the invisible hand -according to which self-interest promotes the greater good — has popularly been seen as a fundamental challenge to business ethics, a field committed to the opposite premise that the public interest cannot be advanced unless economic egoism is restrained by a more socially conscious mindset, one that takes into account the legitimate needs of stakeholders and the reciprocity inherent in networked relationships. Adam Smith has been brought into the discipline to show that his (...) authority cannot be summoned to fully support the free market sceptics of business ethics. Little has been done, however, to illustrate that Smith's moral writings actually contain the fundamentals of a business ethics teaching for managers who necessarily work within a variety of networks. This article analyses his moral thought to infer a Smithean framework of business ethics for managers. Smith believes that self-interest should be subordinated to moral imperatives, even in the business world. However, Smith rejects the principles of corporate social responsibility on the argument that benevolent impulses cannot be expected to prevail in the commercial arena. Instead of consciously trying to advance the social good, Smith's ideal manager will endeavour to personally live up to the standards enforced by an impartial spectator of his conduct, a theoretical entity reflecting the ethical requirements posed by the manager's social networks and stakeholder relationships. While this internalized onlooker expects a limited degree of benevolence, the overriding demand is for the manager to abide by the dictums of justice and prudence. (shrink)

This paper explores the process of human-horse communication using ethnographic data of in-depth interviews and participant observation. Guided by symbolic interactionism, the paper argues that humans and horses co-create a language system by way of the body to facilitate the creation of shared meaning. This research challenges the privileged status of verbal language and suggests that non-verbal communication and language systems of the body have their own unique complexities. This investigation of humanhorse communication offers new possibilities to understand the subjective (...) and intersubjective world of non-verbal language using beings—human and nonhuman alike. (shrink)

This article draws on in-depth interviews with nine white, middle-class, male-to-female transsexuals to examine how they produce and experience bodily transformation. Interviewees’ bodywork entailed retraining, redecorating, and reshaping the physical body, which shaped their feelings, role-taking, and self-monitoring. These analyses make three contributions: They offer support for a perspective that embodies gender, further transsexual scholarship, and contribute to feminist debate over the sex/gender distinction. The authors conclude by exploring how viewing gender as embodied could influence medical discourse on transsexualism and (...) have personal and political consequences for transsexuals. (shrink)