Extant research on political corporate social responsibility (PCSR) has not yet addressed how the populist turn impacts PCSR theory and practice. This conceptual article analyzes how populism influences PCSR across a range of political environments. We draw on signaling and screening theories to develop a conceptual model that advances PCSR literature by proposing an information-centric approach. We highlight the necessity of high-quality information as an enabling condition for effective PCSR-related decision-making, and our model explains how the depreciation of information transparency (...) under populism impacts PCSR strategy. We thus contribute to PCSR literature with a new information-based theorization by showing how PCSR depends on the political environment and by enhancing our understanding of the role of the state in the development of PCSR strategies. (shrink)

Responsible research and innovation (RRI) is a governance framework promoted by influential policy makers such as the European Commission and academics from the fields of science and technology studies and management. This book is the first text to serve industry. Inspired by existing Corporate Responsibility standards and principles, it offers a selection of tools that can assist practitioners in implementing RRI in business and industry. -/- Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is integrative. It is a convergence of Technology Assessment (TA) (...) and Ethics, including corporate responsibility. The task of linking RRI to existing frameworks has only just begun. This book is a welcome example, showing how Corporate Responsibility tools can drive the implementation of RRI. Prof. Armin Grunwald, Head of the Office of Technology Assessment at the German Bundestag and Head of the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. -/- This is a simple, short, yet encyclopaedic work designed to help business implement RRI using the many tools of Corporate Responsibility (CR) already in place, everything from ISO9001 to the Ceres Roadmap for Sustainability. It makes clear the ways in which RRI is an extension of ideas already well-developed in CR. I learned a lot reading it. Prof. Michael Davis, Senior Fellow, Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA. (shrink)

This paper analyses the role of external pressures, internal motivations and their interplay, with the intention of identifying whether they drive substantive or instead symbolic implementation of ISO 14001. The context is one of economic crisis. We focus on Greece, where the economic crisis has weakened the country’s institutional environment, and analyse qualitatively new interview data from 45 ISO 14001 certified firms. Our findings show that weak external pressures can lead to a symbolic implementation of ISO 14001, as firms can (...) defend their legitimacy without incurring the costs of internalization in the local market; weak external pressures can lead to substantive implementation of ISO 14001 when firms have strong internal motivations seeking to strategically differentiate from competitors in international markets. Firms internalize ISO 14001 so as to restore their legitimacy and reputation in foreign markets and stimulate their competitiveness; and strong internal motivations pave the way for companies to stimulate their competitiveness by enhancing their efficiency, as some companies might strengthen their position in the local market by implementing ISO 14001 substantively. The contribution of this paper to the literature on ISO 14001 internalization lies in refining existing theory on the importance of internal motivations for the substantive implementation of ISO 14001 in the context of economic crisis. In addition, this paper extends current theory by challenging studies that dismiss the importance of external pressures. We argue that the intensity of external pressures influences the internalization of ISO 14001, but propose that this relationship might not be linear. (shrink)

The widely known but also somewhat esoteric Mach principle envisages a fully relational formulation of physical theories without any reference to a concept of ‘absolute space’. When applied to classical mechanics, under the guise of an extended symmetry group, this procedure is known to lead to an equation of motion with inertial-like forces that are sourced by the mass distribution of the system itself. In this paper we follow a similar procedure and reformulate the Schrödinger equation of non-relativistic quantum mechanics (...) in a fully Machian way. Just like its classical counterpart, the resulting quantum theory is fully relational in the positions and momenta of the bodies comprising a given physical system, leaving no room for the notion of absolute space. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Existing research on certifiable management standards (CMS) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) tends to focus on large companies and is characterised by disagreement about the role of these standards as drivers of CSR. We contribute to the literature by shifting the analytical focus to the behaviour of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that subscribe to multiple CSR related standards. We argue that, in respect of motive and commitment, SMEs are not as different from large companies as the literature suggests, as (...) they are guided by similar institutional and economic motives. Results, based on ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 certified SMEs in Greece, demonstrate that later adopters are more susceptible to coercive and mimetic motives and are less likely to commit fully to the CMS requirements, while earlier adopters react to normative motives and considerations of internal efficiency gains and tend to carry out CMS requirements with greater diligence. (shrink)

Science appeared in modern Greece in the first decades after its establishment as a sovereign state in 1828. The University of Athens, the Royal Observatory, the Botanical Garden, and the Natural History Museum were quickly established as spaces of scientific activity. Greek scientists were enthusiastic participants in the emerging Greek public sphere, often not only as science experts, but also as poets, intellectuals and political personae. In a space whose cultural, intellectual and historical boundaries were still being negotiated, the choice (...) of language was not a given but a pressing, sensitive national desideratum. This article examines how Greek scientists used languages to communicate with their peers and with their publics, how they handled terminology and nomenclature, and how the issues surrounding the Greek language in particular affected their practice as scientists. The article aims to show that, in nineteenth-century Greece, languages were not passive, neutral vehicles of communication, but rather integral components of the practice of science. (shrink)

How happy it is to recall Imre Lakatos. Now, fifteen years after his death, his intelligence, wit, generosity are vivid. In the Preface to the book of Essays in Memory of Imre Lakatos, the editors wrote:... Lakatos was a man in search of rationality in all of its forms. He thought he had found it in the historical development of scientific knowledge, yet he also saw rationality endangered everywhere. To honor Lakatos is to honor his sharp and aggressive criticism as (...) well as his humane warmth and his quick wit. He was a person to love and to struggle with. The book before us carries old and new friends of that Lakatosian spirit further into the issues which he wanted to investigate. That the new friends include a dozen scientific, historical and philosophical scholars from Greece would have pleased Lakatos very much, and with an essay from China, he would have smiled all the more. But the key lies in the quality of these papers, and in the imaginative organization of the conference at Thessaloniki in summer 1986 which worked so well. (shrink)

This paper presents an emerging aspect of intentionality through recent Artificial Intelligence (AI) developments in art and design. Our main thesis is that, if we focus just on the outcome of the artistic process, the intentionality of the artist does not have any relevance. Intention is measured as a result of actions regardless of whether they are human-based or not as long as there is an esthetical value intersubjectively acknowledged. In other words, what matters is the ‘intentio’ embedded in the (...) work of art (the output) rather than the ‘intendere’ (the process). By considering the former aspect, intentionality becomes free of human intervention, therefore 'unintentional'. This thesis is supported through a range of examples related to AI in general and AI art in particular. However, in the case of a self-driving vehicle, the macro-goal of the system is fixed by humans, even though the AI system itself will take care of decomposing the macro-goal into a set of micro-goals and take the corresponding decisions. In the case of art, the system does not need to have any exterior goal to the extent that art is pure freedom of expression, as many philosophers have acknowledged. In this sense, the decisions of any AI system generating art or design are independent of humans and must be judged only on the ground of the final outcome. A work of art will be judged ‘artistic’ to the extent that humans will recognize an artistic intent in the work itself. In particular, the introduction of random processes makes an AI-generated artwork fully independent of human creativity. (shrink)

LetSbe the group of finitely supported permutations of a countably infinite set. Let$K[S]$be the group algebra ofSover a fieldKof characteristic 0. According to a theorem of Formanek and Lawrence,$K[S]$satisfies the ascending chain condition for two-sided ideals. We study the reverse mathematics of this theorem, proving its equivalence over$RC{A_0}$ to the statement that${\omega ^\omega }$is well ordered. Our equivalence proof proceeds via the statement that the Young diagrams form a well partial ordering.

The romance Imberios and Margarona does not belong to the Renaissance. It does not acknowledge many of the issues which become current in the age of Humanism: the value of individual consciousness, to name but one, will wait until the seventeenth century to be explored in Greek literature. And yet, the vintage of Imberios is hybrid: being late medieval and modelled after a popular European prototype, it slants ever so gently towards what will later be fully fledged humanistic sensibilities.

The romance Imberios and Margarona does not belong to the Renaissance. It does not acknowledge many of the issues which become current in the age of Humanism: the value of individual consciousness, to name but one, will wait until the seventeenth century to be explored in Greek literature. And yet, the vintage of Imberios is hybrid: being late medieval and modelled after a popular European prototype, it slants ever so gently towards what will later be fully fledged humanistic sensibilities.

What was science for the Orthodox Greek theologian of the nineteenth century? How did it feature in his (theologians were all men at the time) own work? This article is an attempt to describe the science and religion interactions by placing Greek Orthodox theologians of the nineteenth century in the center of the historical narrative, rather than treat them as occasional deuteragonists in the scientists’ historiography. The picture that emerges is far more complicated than one of antagonism, indifference, conflict, or (...) coexistence. Greek theologians saw themselves as scientists and treated theology as a positive, rational science. They developed strategies to delineate their disciplinary borders and safeguard their identity as expert scholars by harnessing their university and academic credentials. For that reason, they had to invoke famous German and other Western theologians, while ensuring that they were seen as true defenders of Orthodox Christianity. The idea of science was an integral part of this achievement. (shrink)

In Neither Physics Nor Chemistry, Kostas Gavroglu and Ana Simoes examine the evolution of quantum chemistry into an autonomous discipline, tracing its development from the publication of early papers in the 1920s to the dramatic changes ...

This is a companion to a paper by the authors entitled “Gödel’s natural deduction,” which presented and made comments about the natural deduction system in Gödel’s unpublished notes for the elementary logic course he gave at the University of Notre Dame in 1939. In that earlier paper, which was itself a companion to a paper that examined the links between some philosophical views ascribed to Gödel and general proof theory, one can find a brief summary of Gödel’s notes for the (...) Notre Dame course. In order to put the earlier paper in proper perspective, a more complete summary of these interesting notes, with comments concerning them, is given here. (shrink)

Some thirty years ago, two proposals were made concerning criteria for identity of proofs. Prawitz proposed to analyze identity of proofs in terms of the equivalence relation based on reduction to normal form in natural deduction. Lambek worked on a normalization proposal analogous to Prawitz's, based on reduction to cut-free form in sequent systems, but he also suggested understanding identity of proofs in terms of an equivalence relation based on generality, two derivations having the same generality if after generalizing maximally (...) the rules involved in them they yield the same premises and conclusions up to a renaming of variables. These two proposals proved to be extensionally equivalent only for limited fragments of logic. The normalization proposal stands behind very successful applications of the typed lambda calculus and of category theory in the proof theory of intuitionistic logic. In classical logic, however, it did not fare well. The generality proposal was rather neglected in logic, though related matters were much studied in pure category theory in connection with coherence problems, and there are also links to low-dimensional topology and linear algebra. This proposal seems more promising than the other one for the general proof theory of classical logic. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to connect the proof theory and the model theory of a family of propositional logics weaker than Heyting's. This family includes systems analogous to the Lambek calculus of syntactic categories, systems of relevant logic, systems related toBCK algebras, and, finally, Johansson's and Heyting's logic. First, sequent-systems are given for these logics, and cut-elimination results are proved. In these sequent-systems the rules for the logical operations are never changed: all changes are made in the structural (...) rules. Next, Hubert-style formulations are given for these logics, and algebraic completeness results are demonstrated with respect to residuated lattice-ordered groupoids. Finally, model structures related to relevant model structures (of Urquhart, Fine, Routley, Meyer, and Maksimova) are given for our logics. These model structures are based on groupoids parallel to the sequent-systems. This paper lays the ground for a kind of correspondence theory for axioms of logics with implication weaker than Heyting's, a correspondence theory analogous to the correspondence theory for modal axioms of normal modal logics.The first part of the paper, which follows, contains the first two sections, which deal with sequent-systems and Hubert-formulations. The second part, due to appear in the next issue of this journal, will contain the third section, which deals with groupoid models. (shrink)

Current books on evolutionary theory all seem to take for granted the fact that students find evolution easy to understand when actually, from a psychological perspective, it is a rather counterintuitive idea. Evolutionary theory, like all scientific theories, is a means to understanding the natural world. Understanding Evolution is intended for undergraduate students in the life sciences, biology teachers or anyone wanting a basic introduction to evolutionary theory. Covering core concepts and the structure of evolutionary explanations, it clarifies both what (...) evolution is about and why so many people find it difficult to grasp. The book provides an introduction to the major concepts and conceptual obstacles to understanding evolution, including the development of Darwin's theory, and a detailed presentation of the most important evolutionary concepts. Bridging the gap between the concepts and conceptual obstacles, Understanding Evolution presents evolutionary theory with a clarity and vision students will quickly appreciate. (shrink)

The article deals with the legal, political, philosophical and religious dimensions of Socrates’ trial and execution. It considers the issue in five separate aspects: 1) the validity of charging Socrates with impiety and corrupting the youth of the Athens; 2) the legal basis of the philosopher’s indictment; 3) the then manner of conducting a legal trial in the Athens; 4) the extent to which Socrates’ conviction can ultimately be characterized as unjust and — finally — 5) the cultural ramifications of (...) the philosopher’s trial and execution. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the ongoing university reform in Russia by underlining historical roots and peculiarities of its system of higher education. It is pointed out that the Soviet model of economy, political and ideological bias deeply impacted the university system and enforced its estrangement from foreign universities. A limited number of the best Soviet higher education institutions which provided a military-oriented education and fundamental research were re-casted along the so called “PhysTech” system after the end of the WWII. As a (...) result of this system, higher education and R&D in Russia is not presently competitive in the educational international market. Closing the gap between Russian universities and the “global university” approach and raising university competitiveness are the main objectives of the current reform in science and education. As universities are considered core actors of knowledge economy, a new set of federal and national research universities was created. However, reform faces numerous conceptual and institutional obstacles, risks and constraints are significant, and positive outcomes elusive. (shrink)

Les absents jouent un rôle considérable dans la création des signes qui servent, dans toute société, à désigner, nommer, et même instituer les places des présents et celles des absents tout en mettant du sens dans leurs relations. La sémiotique conçoit ainsi le processus d'humanisation à travers la création des signes alors que la psychanalyse a permis, à sa manière, de voir combien le monde des absents participe à la construction psychique du sujet. La fonction de l'absence perceptive chez le (...) bébé est également étudiée dans cet ouvrage dans sa contribution à la transformation des signes gestuels binaires en signes ternaires qui intègrent du sens. Ces transformations sémiotiques sont aussi éclairées par le regard des poètes et des philosophes présents dans cet ouvrage. (shrink)

The purpose of this work is to present Gentzen-style formulations of S5 and S4 based on sequents of higher levels. Sequents of level 1 are like ordinary sequents, sequents of level 1 have collections of sequents of level 1 on the left and right of the turnstile, etc. Rules for modal constants involve sequents of level 2, whereas rules for customary logical constants of first-order logic with identity involve only sequents of level 1. A restriction on Thinning on the right (...) of level 2, which when applied to Thinning on the right of level 1 produces intuitionistic out of classical logic (without changing anything else), produces S4 out of S5 (without changing anything else). This characterization of modal constants with sequents of level 2 is unique in the following sense. If constants which differ only graphically are given a formally identical characterization, they can be shown inter-replaceable (not only uniformly) with the original constants salva provability. Customary characterizations of modal constants with sequents of level 1, as well as characterizations in Hilbert-style axiomatizations, are not unique in this sense. This parallels the case with implication, which is not uniquely characterized in Hilbert-style axiomatizations, but can be uniquely characterized with sequents of level 1. These results bear upon theories of philosophical logic which attempt to characterize logical constants syntactically. They also provide an illustration of how alternative logics differ only in their structural rules, whereas their rules for logical constants are identical. (shrink)

This article examines how new types of performance appraisal reconfigure everyday personal relationships at work. These systems deploy smartphone technologies to be used continuously by individuals to rate each other. Our aim is to show, in concrete terms, how these practices claim to configure a democratic space where individuals are liberated to express their views about each other’s work. On the contrary, we argue that by being placed in continuous confrontation with each other’s ratings, the genuine space for democratic contestation, (...) for the establishment of a genuine community, as well as for critique and dissent is—paradoxically—narrowed down. The first section of this article explores the context in which managerialism has become consolidated at the centre of neo-liberal politics in a dialogue with some of Mouffe’s and Rancière’s arguments. We use Rancière’s concept of “policing” to understand how managerial techniques subvert genuine democratic spaces, modes of participation and expression. Using performance appraisal systems as an example, the second part of the article provides a critical investigation which shows how managerialism intervenes at the very roots of possible democratic engagement and undermines dissent in subtle ways. (shrink)

This paper, a sequel to Models for normal intuitionistic modal logics by M. Boi and the author, which dealt with intuitionistic analogues of the modal system K, deals similarly with intuitionistic analogues of systems stronger than K, and, in particular, analogues of S4 and S5. For these prepositional logics Kripke-style models with two accessibility relations, one intuitionistic and the other modal, are given, and soundness and completeness are proved with respect to these models. It is shown how the holding of (...) formulae characteristic for particular logics is equivalent to conditions for the relations of the models. Modalities in these logics are also investigated. (shrink)

Ambient Intelligence provides the potential for vast and varied applications, bringing with it both promise and peril. The development of Ambient Intelligence applications poses a number of ethical and legal concerns. Mobile devices are increasingly evolving into tools to orientate in and interact with the environment, thus introducing a user-centric approach to Ambient Intelligence. The MINAmI (Micro-Nano integrated platform for transverse Ambient Intelligence applications) FP6 research project aims at creating core technologies for mobile device based Ambient Intelligence services. In this (...) paper we assess five scenarios that demonstrate forthcoming MINAmI-based applications focusing on healthcare, assistive technology, homecare, and everyday life in general. A legal and ethical analysis of the scenarios is conducted, which reveals various conflicting interests. The paper concludes with some thoughts on drafting ethical guidelines for Ambient Intelligence applications. (shrink)

Textbook descriptions of the foundations of Genetics give the impression that besides Mendel’s no other research on heredity took place during the nineteenth century. However, the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, and the criticism that it received, placed the study of heredity at the centre of biological thought. Consequently, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin himself, Francis Galton, William Keith Brooks, Carl von Nägeli, August Weismann, and Hugo de Vries attempted to develop theories of heredity under an evolutionary perspective, (...) and they were all influenced by each other in various ways. Nonetheless, only Nägeli became aware of Mendel’s experimental work; it has also been questioned whether Mendel even had the intention to develop a theory of heredity. In this article, a short presentation of these theories is made, based on the original writings. The major aim of this article is to suggest that Mendel was definitely not the only one studying heredity before 1900, if he even did this, as may be inferred by textbooks. Although his work had a major impact after 1900, it had no impact during the latter half of the nineteenth century when an active community of students of heredity emerged. Thus, textbooks should not only present the work of Mendel, but also provide a wider view of the actual history and a depiction of science as a social process. (shrink)

Models for the Lambek calculus of syntactic categories surveyed here are based on frames that are in principle of the same type as Kripke frames for intuitionistic logic. These models are extracted from the literature on models for relevant logics, in particular the ternary relationed models introduced in the early seventies. The purpose of this brief survey is to locate some open completeness problems for variants of the Lambek calculus in the context of completeness results based on various types of (...) ternary relational models. (shrink)