Context: Although there are rich descriptive accounts of skill acquisition in the literature, there are no satisfactory explanatory models of the cognitive processes involved. Problem: The aim of the paper is to explain some key phenomena frequently observed in the acquisition of motor skills: the loss of conscious access to knowledge of the structure of a skill and the awareness that an error has been made prior to the receipt of knowledge of results. Method: In the 1970s, the first author (...) implemented a computer program model of the cognitive processes involved in learning and skill acquisition, based on a series of empirical investigations. Recently, with assistance from the second author, the model has been reviewed, updated and re-implemented. Result: The model provides a constructivist account of skill acquisition and associated phenomena. Implications: The model adds to the understanding of motor skill acquisition and will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in physical therapy and sports science. It is also provides a constructivist cognitive architecture that can be fruitfully contrasted with non-constructivist cognitive architectures well-known in cognitive science. (shrink)

There are two different, and somewhat competing, strategic explanations for why firms certify for ISO 14001. On the one hand, firms may seek to reinforce their present strategies thereby further enhancing their competitive advantage. On the other hand, firms may use ISO 14001 as a mechanism to reorient their strategies, so that a clear signal is sent about the firm's change in strategic positioning. This paper aims to identify the most likely explanation for early adopters of ISO 14001. Using a (...) matched pair design, we test these alternative explanations on a sample of US firms that certified for ISO 14001 in the first two years after its introduction. In particular, we tested whether ISO 14001 was used to reinforce or reorient firm strategies in respect to the natural environment, corporate social responsibility, quality, and internationalization. We found that firms that certified early for ISO 14001 had considerable environmental legitimacy and a strong international presence. We also found that the firm's commitment to corporate social responsibility and quality were not significantly different between certified and non-certified firms. These findings suggest that early adopters of ISO 14001 leaned towards reinforcing rather than reorienting their firm strategy, which calls into question the ultimate reach of ISO 14001. (shrink)

This paper examines stakeholder responses to impression management tactics used by firms that express environmental commitment. We inductively analyzed data from 98 open-ended questionnaires and identified two impression management tactics that led respondents to believe that a firm was credible in its commitment to the natural environment. Approximately, half of the respondents responded to illustrative impression management tactics that provide images of, and/or broad-brush comments about, the firm's commitment to the natural environment. The other half responded to demonstrative impression management (...) tactics, which provide specific facts and details about the firm's operations. The research results provide important insights into the effects of organizational transparency. In this paper, we explore these findings and provide directions for future research. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop an argument to show why we expect that multinational companies will ensure that they communicate credibly about their environmental responsibility, across all their subsidiaries. Credible environmental communication helps to increase the firm’s legitimacy and reduce its liability of foreignness on an issue that is globally relevant. We develop a measure to test if there is a standardized level of environmental communication credibility on the country-specific web sites of MNC subsidiaries around the world and find, in (...) fact, that there is considerable variation across countries, among subsidiaries of different firms and among subsidiaries of the same multinational. We discuss the reasons for this and the implications for firm legitimacy. (shrink)

Femicide is an ongoing public health and human rights crisis of global proportions. Currently, however, there is a relative vacuum of ethics theory and discussion about femicide amongst the health professions. This article draws from three illustrative case examples along the continuum of femicide to explore contemporary ethical concerns relevant to addressing gender-based violence and death through clinical medicine and public health. Using an epistemic justice framework, we analyze the relative invisibility of femicide in public health discourse today, and renew (...) a conversation about ethical issues inherent to health interventions and policy-making around femicide. (shrink)

Prior research on sustainability in business often assumes that decisions on social and environmental investments are made for instrumental reasons, which points to causal relationships between corporate financial performance and corporate social and environmental commitment. In other words, social or environmental commitment should predict higher financial performance. The theoretical premise of sustainability, however, is based on a systems perspective, which implies a tighter integration between corporate financial performance and corporate commitment to social and environmental issues. In this paper, we describe (...) the important theoretical differences between an instrumental and integrative logic in managing business sustainability. We test the presence of each logic using data from 738 firms over 13 years and find evidence of integrative logic applied in business. (shrink)

In 1843, Søren Kierkegaard said, “ It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.” Management researchers are often attracted to the business and society domain because of a desire to impact management practice to create a better world. However, they often do not have the impact that they hope, because researchers tend to rely on historical data, but managers seek insights that inform future (...) actions. In this commentary, we describe our impact journey in three distinct moments in time. In the last one, both researchers and managers live forward. (shrink)

Talks about a man who had it all - looks, wealth, culture, fame, travel, career - and gave it all up to find for himself the answer to his question, Is there actually anything like freedom, enlightenment or liberation behind all the abstractions the religions have thrown at us? This book aims to introduce you to the unknown truth of life.

The purpose of the study is to investigate whether internal and external institutional environmental conditions play a role in the institutionalization of strategic commitment to corporate social responsibility (CSR) among Indian firms in the wake of the mandatory CSR norms or not (where the firms of certain size and profitability are mandated to spend on CSR). The study examines the fixed effects regression on balanced panel data collected from the annual reports and Prowess database of Bombay Stock Exchange-listed firms. Our (...) results show that both internal and external institutional environments play a major role in diffusing a strategic commitment to CSR among firms. Furthermore, we find that firms indulge in frequency, outcome, and trait-based imitations while learning from peer firms to attain legitimacy from their stakeholders. Overall, our findings show that vicarious learning through imitation plays an important role in making firms truly committed to CSR instead of just donating money or greenwashing. To the best of our knowledge, our study is among the pioneering attempts to look at the impact of both internal and external environments on institutionalizing CSR commitment among firms in India. (shrink)

Preventing sexual and gender-based violence—and mitigating its devastating impacts on individuals and societies—is a central challenge of public health. A Woman in Berlin is 34-year-old journalist Marta Hillers’s first-hand account of life during the 1945 Red Army occupation of Berlin at the conclusion of World War II, when Russian soldiers collectively raped 2 million German civilians. Reflecting upon Hillers’s testimony, I argue that historical narratives about large-scale acts of sexual and gender-based violence deserve a more central place in public health (...) discourse. I also question how the ethical challenges of memorializing and studying mass crimes might inform future public health efforts to advance gender equity and mitigate sexual violence globally. (shrink)

India today is facing value crisis. Drift started during the British era and since then it has been witnessing continuous erosion of values. At that time the man who came to India’s rescue was Mahatma Gandhi, man of principles and values who never compromised with his values. He along with his powerful values of truth and non-violence helped India regain its strength. Almost after 64 years of freedom there is a heartfelt need to go back to these values for effective (...) management and survival. This article is an endeavour for reviving these time-tested values and to draw insights for management of organization. The values like truth, non-violence, renunciation, humility, equanimity, etc., at the organization’s roots may provide it a firm footing in this turbulent scenario. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to map the emotional competencies of Mahatma1 Gandhi through biographical analysis of his life which is divided into seven phases, as this will give the real insight that how he managed his emotions in different phases of his life and over the longer period of time. The Emotional Competency Inventory framework given by Daniel Goleman is used, which helps in mapping the Emotional Competencies on five parameters i.e., Self Awareness, Self Regulation, Self Motivation, Empathy, (...) Social Skills. Further, the article brings out that which particular component was low, medium or high in which particular phase of his life. (shrink)

Prior research in strategic decision making has relied primarily on the application of economic and financial models within strategic decisions. Environmentaland social issues have, as a result, been force-fit into existing models, rather than developing a deep understanding of how these ‘soft’ issues are actually incorporated into strategic decisions. This study aims to fill this gap by investigating how social and environmental concerns are addressed in strategic decisions. It does so inductively, by interviewing 29 professionals addressing corporate social responsibility and (...) 110 strategic decision makers in 19 companies in Canada. This paper reports some of the interim findings. (shrink)

This paper examines stakeholder responses to impression management tactics used by firms that express environmental commitment. We inductively analyzed data from 98 open-ended questionnaires and identified two impression management tactics that led respondents to believe that a firm was credible in its commitment to the natural environment. Approximately, half of the respondents responded to illustrative impression management tactics that provide images of, and/or broad-brush comments about, the firm’s commitment to the natural environment. The other half responded to demonstrative impression management (...) tactics, which provide specific facts and details about the firm’s operations. The research results provide important insights into the effects of organizational transparency. In this paper, we explore these findings and provide directions for future research. (shrink)

Monitoring of clinical trials is important to ensure adherence to protocol, to safeguard the rights of research participants and to achieve compliance with principles of good clinical practice. Recent regulatory changes in India require Ethics Committees to keep an oversight of ongoing clinical trials including on-site monitoring. In this article, we share the experience of on-site monitoring of clinical trials by the Ethics Committee of a tertiary care, academic and research centre in India. We found a large number of shortcomings (...) in the areas of informed consent, adverse events, insurance and reimbursement, which would not have been detected by off-site document review. Interestingly, many shortcomings were also not detected by on-site monitoring arranged by clinical trial sponsors. We therefore conclude that on-site monitoring of ongoing clinical trials is a highly important activity for Indian Ethics Committees. (shrink)

Collaborative filtering recommender system (CFRS) plays a vital role in today’s e-commerce industry. CFRSs collect ratings from the users and predict recommendations for the targeted product. Conventionally, CFRS uses the user-product ratings to make recommendations. Often these user-product ratings are biased. The higher ratings are called push ratings (PRs) and the lower ratings are called nuke ratings (NRs). PRs and NRs are injected by factitious users with an intention either to aggravate or degrade the recommendations of a product. Hence, it (...) is necessary to investigate PRs or NRs and discard them. In this work, opinion mining approach is applied on textual reviews that are given by users for a product to detect the PRs and NRs. The work also examines the effect of PRs and NRs on the performance of CFRS by evaluating various measures such as precision, recall, F-measure and accuracy. (shrink)

Recommender system depends on the thoughts of numerous users to predict the favourites of potential consumers. RS is vulnerable to malicious information. Unsuitable products can be offered to the user by injecting a few unscrupulous “shilling” profiles like push and nuke attacks into the RS. Injection of these attacks results in the wrong recommendation for a product. The aim of this research is to develop a framework that can be widely utilized to make excellent recommendations for sales growth. This study (...) uses the methodology that presents an enhanced clustering algorithm named as modified density peak clustering algorithm on the consumer review dataset to ensure a well-formed cluster. An improved recurrent neural network algorithm is proposed to detect these attacks in hybrid RS, which uses the content-based RS and collaborative filtering RS. The results are compared with other state of the art algorithms. The proposed method is more suitable for E-commerce applications where the number of customers and products grows rapidly. (shrink)

BackgroundIt has been argued that ethics review committees—e.g., Research Ethics Committees, Institutional Review Boards, etc.— have weaknesses in reviewing big data and artificial intelligence research. For instance, they may, due to the novelty of the area, lack the relevant expertise for judging collective risks and benefits of such research, or they may exempt it from review in instances involving de-identified data.Main bodyFocusing on the example of medical research databases we highlight here ethical issues around de-identified data sharing which motivate the (...) need for review where oversight by ethics committees is weak. Though some argue for ethics committee reform to overcome these weaknesses, it is unclear whether or when that will happen. Hence, we argue that ethical review can be done by data access committees, since they have de facto purview of big data and artificial intelligence projects, relevant technical expertise and governance knowledge, and already take on some functions of ethical review. That said, like ethics committees, they may have functional weaknesses in their review capabilities. To strengthen that function, data access committees must think clearly about the kinds of ethical expertise, both professional and lay, that they draw upon to support their work.ConclusionData access committees can undertake ethical review of medical research databases provided they enhance that review function through professional and lay ethical expertise. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Bridge From Analysis to Action:Psychodynamic Analyses of Religion and Michael S. Hogue's American ImmanenceAJ Turner (bio)I. IntroductionThe purpose of this essay is to work constructively with Michael S. Hogue's groundbreaking American Immanence: Democracy for an Uncertain World to demonstrate how psychodynamic analyses of religion are essential theoretical allies in the fight for resilient democracy. The "revolution in mind"1 that psychodynamic approaches contribute, especially in their analyses of religion, (...) both complements and complicates socio-political theory as a whole. In the improvisational spirit of "yes-and," the goal here is not to identify and decry the failures and shortcomings of Hogue's theopolitical vision but rather to inspire the recovery of a sibling discourse—a kind of "rebirth of a forgotten alternative"2—that also draws deeply from the American immanental tradition in order to add psychodynamic depth to Hogue's timely and important analysis. Psychodynamic theories of religion shed light on how symbolic identifications, including and especially ultimate concerns, structure personal and collective experience. By engaging religion and theology sympathetically, constructively, and creatively, theorists such as Rollo May, Gordon Allport, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, and Ernest Becker departed from the skepticism, reductionism, and dismissal that characterized psychoanalytic analyses of religion in the wake of Freud.3 Each of these figures, and especially Becker whose work will be a focus in this essay, are noteworthy interlocutors for extending Hogue's theopolitical theorizing of resilient democracy, particularly in how they drew unique inspiration from the American immanental tradition [End Page 44] in their social analyses. In this respect, they provide a more robust theorization of the psychosocial conditions of the associational ethos needed to connect Hogue's conception of resilient democracy with forms of agonistic organization and democratic activism. Briefly stated, psychodynamic approaches are a helpful bridge for connecting these proposals to strategies of organization, their impediments, and collective action.In this way, both psychodynamic analyses of religion and Hogue's theopolitical innovation insist that no revolutionary political change is possible, and certainly not of the kind or scale needed to counter our wickedly entangled global crises, without a deep engagement with theological imaginaries. They differ, however, in their theoretical aims. Whereas Hogue compellingly argues for the political upshot of a theology deriving from the American immanental tradition, psychodynamic analysts of religion focus on the function of ultimate concerns in individual and collective life. In other words, American Immanence rests on a methodology of analyzing the philosophical and theological assumptions that have contributed to our climate crises and then presenting clear and compelling articulation of an alternative paradigm meant to open up new ways of being. In contrast psychodynamic analyses leverage conceptual clarity of psychic reality for the fundamentally therapeutic aim of transformation. At their best, both approaches share what could be called an etiological orientation to ontological questions in order to provide liberative alternatives through rational understanding and clarification, but the terrain, and thus the problems they hope to mitigate in their analyses are focused differently. Extending the visual metaphor, they are different lenses highlighting different areas of the same landscape. Furthermore, it must be said that neither are sufficient in themselves, but the psychodynamic theorists of religion to be highlighted in this essay share deeply with Hogue's heading in American Immanence.II. A Problematic AssumptionIn emphasizing and attempting to explain4 the role of non-rational processes in the both individual and social processes of perception and organization of experience, psychodynamic theories confound a widely held and problematic assumption that the triumph of rational analysis is the hallmark for building the society to which we should aspire. Political theory in general, [End Page 45] especially as it has taken its cues from a rationalist legacy about the inherently liberating force of Reason, has been weighted toward an assumption that its task of exposing the mystifications of power would suffice in inspiring more "rational" and therefore necessarily equitable social organization. This speaks to the longstanding socio-political interest in "consciousness raising" tactics, which are often meant to dispel "false consciousness." It even comes across in the emphases of Deweyan pragmatists on education. Psychologists of all stripes point out that this approach... (shrink)

For many Christians, personal experiences of God provide an important ground or justification for accepting the truth of the gospel. But we are sometimes mistaken about our experiences, and followers of other religions also provide impressive testimonies to support their religious beliefs. This book explores from a philosophical and theological perspective the viability of divine encounters as support for belief in God, arguing that some religious experiences can be accepted as genuine experiences of God and can provide evidence for Christian (...) beliefs. (shrink)

A. W. Price explores the varying ways in which context is relevant to our reasoning about what to do.

Publicación compilatoria que recoge los avances que en los últimos tiempos se han producido en materia normativa sobre acceso a los recursos genéticos, en un intento por implementar los principios del Convenio sobre la Diversidad Biológica (1992).