Background: As actors with the key responsibility for the protection of human research participants, Research Ethics Committees (RECs) need to be competent and well-resourced in order to fulfil their roles. Despite recent programs designed to strengthen RECs in Africa, much more needs to be accomplished before these committees can function optimally.Objective: To assess training needs for biomedical research ethics evaluation among targeted countries.Methods: Members of RECs operating in three targeted African countries were surveyed between August and November 2007. Before implementing (...) the survey, ethical approvals were obtained from RECs in Switzerland, Cameroon, Mali and Tanzania. Data were collected using a semi-structured questionnaire in English and in French.Results: A total of 74 respondents participated in the study. The participation rate was 68%. Seventy one percent of respondents reported having received some training in research ethics evaluation. This training was given by national institutions (31%) and international institutions (69%). Researchers and REC members were ranked as the top target audiences to be trained. Of 32 topics, the top five training priorities were: basic ethical principles, coverage of applicable laws and regulations, how to conduct ethics review, evaluating informed consent processes and the role of the REC.Conclusion: Although the majority of REC members in the targeted African countries had received training in ethics, they expressed a need for additional training. The results of this survey have been used to design a training program in research ethics evaluation that meets this need. (shrink)

Abela and Murphy (J Acad Mark Sci 36(1):39–53, 2007 ) examined Service-Dominant (S-D) logic (Vargo and Lusch, J Mark 68(1):1–17, 2004 ) from the viewpoint of Marketing Ethics and concluded that whilst S-D logic does not have explicit ethical content, the Foundational Premises (FPs) of S-D logic do have implicit ethical content. They also conclude that what may be needed to make the implicit more explicit is the addition of another FP. The aim of this article is to explore whether (...) S-D logic needs to be modified, if one wishes to construct a theoretical framework for analysis of Marketing that has ethical considerations fully integrated. We critically evaluate the claim that the FPs are inherently ethical and conclude that S-D logic should be modified. We offer an additional FP for consideration that relates to the role of personal and societal values in the co-creation of value. This FP is necessary because of the role that the ethical positions of actors play in exchange behaviour. However, it should be pointed out that whilst the article explores the ethical potential of S-D logic it does not privilege any particular ethical position or code. These concerns will be addressed in subsequent articles: the aim here is to establish the underlying rationale for including an explicit commitment to ethics in S-D logic. (shrink)

This book offers a radical reformulation of the pluralist position in 'English School' theory, providing an account of world politics that is normatively progressive and rooted in the significance of multiple community membership to human lives.

Hannah Arendt's approach to politics focuses on action and conduct, rather than institutions, constitutions, and states. In light of Arendtian conceptions of politics, essays in this book challenge conventional IR theories. The contributions on agency explore concepts and categories of political action that enable individuals to act politically and to re-make the world in new, unpredictable ways. The contributions on structure explore how Arendt provides new critical purchase upon often reified structures and categories.

This paper reports the results of a workshop held in January 2013 to begin the process of establishing standards for e-learning programmes in the ethics of research involving human participants that could serve as the basis of their evaluation by individuals and groups who want to use, recommend or accredit such programmes. The standards that were drafted at the workshop cover the following topics: designer/provider qualifications, learning goals, learning objectives, content, methods, assessment of participants and assessment of the course. The (...) authors invite comments on the draft standards and eventual endorsement of a final version by all stakeholders. (shrink)

The papers in this volume represent the views of a range of experts in a variety of language-related disciplines on the role which context plays in language learning and language understanding. The authors provide various theoretical constructs which help impose order on the apparent chaos of contextual factors which may have an influence on the production and comprehension of speech events. They focus on a variety of types of context, including the context established by different speech communities, interpersonal contexts, the (...) classroom context, and the context provided by the linguistic code itself. The papers illustrate how the treatment of context varies across the disciplines of linguistics, historical stylistics, applied linguistics, and psycholinguistics. Each paper is prefaced by an editorial introduction to help the reader trace out common themes and points of conflict. (shrink)

Famously, Aristotle in his discussion of friendship in Books 8 and 9 of the Nicomachaean Ethics (EN) introduces a tripartite distinction in friendship. Friendships are either friendships of pleasure or of utility or of character. This typology has struck a responsive chord among many other writers on friendship. Nevertheless it is our contention that there is a fourth important category of friendship that has been overlooked in the philosophical literature. We call this fourth category, asymmetrical friendship. Asymmetrical friendships do not (...) fit the Aristotelian tripartite classification in that they are not friendships of pleasure or of utility nor are they recognizably what Aristotle means by character friendship even though they may hold much in common in various ways with character friendship. We will have little to say about friendships of pleasure or utility. Instead we will elucidate our fourth category of asymmetrical friendships in contradistinction to Aristotle’s notion of character friendships. Aristotle thinks that character friendships are neither friendships of pleasure nor utility but instead are ones in which the friends care for each other for their own sakes. We show that the tradition of Aristotelian thinking requires character friendship to be symmetrical in various ways that we will explain soon. In contrast we argue that asymmetrical friendships are also not friendships of pleasure or utility but like character friendships are ones in which the friends care for each other for their own sakes. Such friendships appear especially valuable to us in the phenomenology of our lives. Thus they are unlike friendships of pleasure or utility that may also be asymmetrical in various ways. And they are therefore also unlike Aristotle’s symmetrical and certainly valuable character friendships that seldom appear at all in our imperfect lives lived as they are in an imperfect world. (shrink)

Survey of the reception history of E.L. Doctorow, the controversial American author.

In this case (5) yields the result that A and D are I-related, but neither is I-related to B or C – the original person has two beginnings of existence. To get round this we need to add to (5)’s right-hand side the condition that there is no pair of distinct, simultaneously occurring person-stages u and v such that u is R-related to x and y and v is R-related to x and no pair of distinct, simultaneously occurring personstages u (...) and v such that u is R-related to x and y and v is R-related to y. In fact this condition can replace (iic) on the RHS of (5). (shrink)