The study of social values has its origins in the study of both cross cultural and within cultural differences in latent or manifest definitions of the right social order to achieve the good life. To this extent, the social scientific literature is replete with references to them. Yet, researchers either use the term values Social values are often used interchangeably with that of attitudes or treated as a post-hoc explanatory concept. When values are the focal research point, such endeavours predominantly (...) depart from universal and reductionist understandings of their functions, meanings and structures. Through tracing the roots of key theoretical and empirical investigations in values, originating in the work of Charles Morris, Gordon Allport, Florence Kluckhohn and Fred Strodtbeck, Milton Rokeach and Shalom Schwartz, we reveal the common as well as the different tenets underpinning their work. It will be shown that these accounts have lost sight of the importance of plurality and context. We claim that a renewed program of research in values is needed, which should be characterised by methodological pluralism in order to investigate a) value plurality, b) value specificity and c) values as properties and as processes. (shrink)

This paper provides an alternative theoretical conceptualisation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in order to further our understanding of prosocial organisational behaviour. We argue that consumption provides a perspective that enables theorists to escape the confines of existing CSR literature. In our view the organisation is re-imagined as an arena of consumption where employees are engaged in a quest for value, constructing and confirming their identities as consumers. Using the award-winning tour operator Laskarina Holidays as an illustrative case, it is (...) suggested that CSR can provide combinations of functional, social, emotional, epistemic and conditional value. This new perspective on CSR facilitates the coexistence of a plurality of values that are relativistically constructed and narrativised by organisational stakeholders. Our consumption paradigm provides a thought provoking means of reconciling divergent perspectives and encourages further interdisciplinary research. We argue that future research should begin, not by asking the question of why organisations assume responsibility, but by contemplating the notion of why organisations consume responsibility. (shrink)

This paper will explore the relationship between Mezirow's concept of reflexivity and Bourdieu's theory of habitus in order to develop a more robust framework within which critical reflection can take place. Nurse educators have sought to close the theory practice gap through the use of critical reflection. However, we are not convinced that this has produced the depth and quality of reflection required. Furthermore, the contexts in which critical reflection takes place is often sidelined or erased so that the whole (...) impetus in the literature is to educate nurses in reflection rather than empower nurses to understand the complex circumstances and barriers that obstruct critical reflection. This paper argues that the reason for this position is that nurse education does not always acknowledge the role that personal and cultural values systems have on reflective practices. The literature search was undertaken using CINHAL and MEDLINE. Keywords included: values systems, habitus, and critical reflection. Inclusion criteria were determined by the theoretical approach and included seminal texts, from as far back as 1956, to identify key themes. Although critical reflection is a potentially powerful way of enhancing care it has often failed to do so. It is suggested that this is because nurse educators have frequently used models of reflection without considering the impact that student's personal values systems has on their perceptions of care and subsequently care delivery. The purpose of this paper is to promote deeper levels of reflection and is part of a programme of research aimed at developing a more robust approach to reflection in educational practice. (shrink)

The contribution that may come from the general science of signs, semiotics, to the planning and development of education and learning at all levels, from early schooling through to university education and learning should not be neglected. As Umberto Eco claims in the “Introduction” to the Italian edition of his book Semiotica and Philosophy of Language (1984: xii, my trans.), “[general semiotics] is philosophical in nature, because it does not study a particular system, but posits the general categories in light (...) of which different systems can be compared. And for general semiotics philosophical discourse is neither advisable nor urgent: it is simply constitutive.” To the title of their book Semiotic Theory of Learning, at the centre of our attention in the present text, Andrew Stables, Winfried Nöth, Alin Olteanu, Sébastien Pesce, and Eetu Pikkarainen, rightly add the subtitle New Perspectives in the Philosophy of Education. This multivoiced contribution to research in learning and education in a semiotic framework has a unifying reference in the semiotics of Charles S. Peirce, but without disregarding an array of other distinguished exponents of the teaching and education sciences from different disciplines, semioticians and philosophers alike. This book, a polyphonic effort, with its appeal to “act otherwise,” and to do so investing in learning and education, no doubt makes a significant contribution in such a direction: education for transformation, for humanizing social change. Beyond evidencing what to us are particularly interesting aspects of the topics under discussion in Semiotic Theory of Learning, we also propose to continue and amplify this multivoiced dialogue. While highlighting still other aspects and contributions made by the same semioticians and philosophers presented by the authors of this book, involving such figures as Charles Peirce, Charles Morris, Thomas Sebeok, John Deely, etc., we have further introduced other voices made to resound throughout, whether directly or indirectly, like that of Victoria Welby, Mikhail Bakhtin, Emmanuel Levinas, Adam Schaff, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Marcel Danesi, Augusto Ponzio, and Genevieve Vaughan. (shrink)

Despite recognition as an important, potentially unifying construct within the social sciences and humanities, value lacks an overarching theoretical framework. One theory within the social sciences, personal construct theory, is suggested as a theoretical foundation for human values, and an attempt to situate values within this theory is presented. It is argued that human values are core constructs in the language of personal construct theory, while ordinary beliefs are peripheral constructs. Various implications and applications of this formulation are discussed.

We examine the association between societal trust and the levels of CEO compensation and the proportion of equity-based compensation of 897 firm-years from 18 countries over the 2007–2013 period. We find both the levels of CEO compensation as well as the proportion of equity-based compensation to be lower in countries with higher levels of societal trust. This suggests that costly regulations on CEO compensation may not be as necessary in jurisdictions with higher levels of societal trust. We also examine the (...) association between pay disparity and societal trust. Consistent with our finding of lower pay at the CEO rank, we find pay disparities are lower in countries with higher levels of societal trust. (shrink)

1. Although a number of personality variables have been identified by various authors as the determinants of religious behavior, independent of specific religious denomination, the results of the studies under consideration certainly appear to be inconsistent with such claims. It is suggested instead that the personality correlates of religious behavior vary with the specific religious denomination. 2. For most people religious belief and religious observance are acquired or learned in the socialization process. In a culture in which there is no (...) social pressure to conform in relation to religious behavior , individual differences in adult religious behavior may be a result of certain personality differences. In the Israeli Jewish sample a number of personality variables were found to covary with religious belief and/or observance. Religious belief and observance, however, were also highly significant sources of variance in subjects' values. These value differences probably influence the what and how of the socialization process which in turn may be responsible for some-although probably not all-of the personality variables associated with religious behavior. 3. In cultures which are characterized by strong social pressure in relation to religious conformity, e. g. the culture represented by our United States Protestant sample, the religious behavior of many individuals will be a result of their need to conform rather than other personality variables directly related to their religious behavior as such. Thus in the United States Protestant sample conformity and variables associated with it were the only significant sources of variance in subjects' religious behavior. The results of our studies indicate the importance of differentiating between religious belief and observance which is merely the result of social conformity and religious belief and observance which is also the result of other variables which are more directly related to religious behavior as such. Presently we are in the process of constructing instruments to measure these two types of religious behavior. 4. Finally, it is suggested that in trying to discover the determinants of individual differences in religious behavior there has been too much emphasis on motivational variables and not enough on environmental factors. A social learning model may be the best suited for the investigation of the sources of individual differences in religious behavior. (shrink)

The subject of this study, the step forward—which the author felt to be ‘of evolutionary value’—was occasioned by a Delphi discussion. The debate was opened by Varga's (2003, 2006a) contrastive exposition of diagnoses of present history with respect to Hungary's accession to the European Union, offered by some leading Hungarian sociologists (Henrik Kreutz, Kálmán Kulcsár, Iván Szelényi, Iván Vitányi), in which he tried to place the views of these authors in a value sociological system by Charles Morris (1956, 1964) and (...) Geert Hofstede (1991). In Morris’ case, this involved recourse to his combination of two systems: one semiotic, the other axiological; in Hofstede's, to his system of ‘software of the mind’ embracing axiology and organizational psychology. This synthesis was opposed by Kreutz (2006a) who offered a new ordering principle which he advanced as truer to life. The present confrontation between the value sociological synthesis advanced by Kreutz, on the one hand, and the trends hallmarked by the names of Morris and Hofstede, on the other hand, provided the author with an opportunity to find a resolution of the tension between desired and desirable, for which he has gained some side light from Robert K. Merton's (1957) theory of the different degrees of insulation of role–activities from observability by members of the role–set (and which has derived further refinement from Jean–Paul Sartre's conception of ‘glance and shame’). (shrink)

Intersemiotic translation (IT) was defined by Roman Jakobson (The Translation Studies Reader, Routledge, London, p. 114, 2000) as “transmutation of signs”—“an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.” Despite its theoretical relevance, and in spite of the frequency in which it is practiced, the phenomenon remains virtually unexplored in terms of conceptual modeling, especially from a semiotic perspective. Our approach is based on two premises: (i) IT is fundamentally a semiotic operation process (semiosis) and (ii) (...) IT is a deeply iconic-dependent process. We exemplify our approach by means of literature to dance IT and we explore some implications for the development of a general model of IT. (shrink)