What makes human beings intentional and thinking subjects? How does their intentionality and thought connect with their social nature and their communal experience? How do the answers to these questions shape the assumptions which it is legitimate to make in social explanation and political evaluation? These are the broad-ranging issues which Pettit addresses in this novel study. The Common Mind argues for an original way of marking off thinking subjects, in particular human beings, from other intentional systems, natural and artificial. (...) It holds by the holistic view that human thought requires communal resources while denying that this social connection compromises the autonomy of individuals. And, in developing the significance of this view of social subjects--this holistic individualism--it outlines a novel framework for social and political theory. Within this framework, social theory is allowed to follow any of a number of paths: space is found for intentional interpretation and decision-theoretic reconstruction, for structural explanation and rational choice derivation. But political theory is treated less ecumenically. The framework raises serious questions about contractarian and atomistic modes of thought and it points the way to a republican rethinking of liberal commitments. (shrink)

This edition includes two important texts illustrating Kants's view of history along with notes and a comprehensive bibliography.

The 'Evolution of Cooperation' addresses a simple yet age-old question; If living things evolve through competition, how can cooperation ever emerge? Despite the abundant evidence of cooperation all around us, there existed no purely naturalistic answer to this question until 1979, when Robert Axelrod famously ran a computer tournament featuring a standard game-theory exercise called The Prisoner's Dilemma. To everyone's surprise, the program that won the tournament, named Tit for Tat, was not only the simplest but the most "cooperative" entrant. (...) This unexpected victory proved that cooperation - one might even say altruism - is mathematically possible and therefore needs no hidden hand or divine agent to create and sustain it. A great roadblock to the understanding of all sorts of behavior was at last removed. The updated edition includes an extensive new chapter on cooperation in cancer cells and among terrorist organizations. (shrink)

This book reformulates the sociological subdiscipline known as the sociology of knowledge. Knowledge is presented as more than ideology, including as well false consciousness, propaganda, science and art.

This book contains a cohesive overview of the most important theories and insights in the field of business ethics. At the same time, it further tailors these theories to the situation in which organizations function, presenting criteria that can be used to measure, assess, improve and report on corporate integrity.

The implicit social contract between large companies and their employees has been recently revised to emphasize workforce flexibility and the financial responsibility of individual employees for their own employment and benefits-related decisions. The most recent aspect of this social contract to be significantly changed is health care benefits. On the basis of in-depth case studies of health benefits purchasing at 15 large United States employers, the authors found that the reported use of a purchasing technique called managed competitionhas enabled firms (...) to bring health benefits purchasing in line with other elements of the revised social contract. An important minority of companies in our study appear to have retained a different, “employer responsibility” approach toward employee health benefits, leading them to move more gradually to managed competition purchasing and refrain from instituting heavy premium cost sharing or cutting coverage for their employees. These findings are preliminary and deserve further study as to their generalizability and persistence. (shrink)