Peter Berger (1929) is an American sociologist best known for his collaboration with Thomas Luckman in writing The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. That book argues that human reality, and knowledge of it, is a social construct, emerging from the individual or group’s interaction with larger social structures (institutions). Social structures, once widely adopted, lose their history as social constructions (objectivation), and come over time, by the people who live within them, to be deemed natural realities independent of human construction (reification). Berger predicted, in his later book, The Sacred Canopy, near-term all-encompassing secularization of religion, which prediction has proved false, especially in the third world (as Berger himself has acknowledged in his later work, Desecularization).

神圣的帷幕 : 宗教社会学理论之要素 = The sacred canopy elements of a sociological theory of religion

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Methods of critical discourse analysis

World Report ニューヨーク

Anyone who watches the television news has seen images of firefighters rescuing people from burning buildings and paramedics treating bombing victims. How do these individuals make the split-second decisions that save lives? Most studies of decision making, based on artificial tasks assigned in laboratory settings, view people as biased and unskilled. Gary Klein is one of the developers of the naturalistic decision-making approach, which views people as inherently skilled and experienced. Since 1985, Klein has conducted fieldwork to find out how people tackle challenges in difficult, nonroutine situations. Sources of Power is based on observations of humans acting under such real-life constraints as time pressure, high stakes, personal responsibility, and shifting conditions. In addition to providing information that can be used by professionals in management, psychology, engineering, and other fields, the book presents an overview of the research approach of naturalistic decision making and expands our knowledge of the strengths people bring to difficult tasks.

Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions

The Planning Commission of India posted the draft Document of the 12th Five year Plan on its website in the first week of December 2012 for feedback from the public before it is adopted by the National Development Council (NDC) on 28 December and declared the Five Year Plan for the country from 2012 to 2017. The stated vision of the Plan Document is “of India moving forward in a way that would ensure a broad-based improvement in living standards of all sections of the people through a growth process which is faster than in the past, more inclusive and also more environmentally sustainable”. This mantra of “faster, sustainable and more inclusive growth”’ is indeed ideal and laudable, but the question is how can we make it possible? More importantly, what could be the consequences if we fail?

Twelfth Five Year Plan

Social movements driven by a combination of religious nationalism and economic fundamentalism are globally grabbing the levers of political, economic, and intellectual control. The consequence is a...

Religious Ethics: An Antidote for Religious Nationalism

For more than three decades, business ethics has suggested and evaluated strategies for multinationals to address abject deprivations and weak regulatory institutions in developing countries. Critical appraisals, internal and external, have observed these concerns being severely constrained by the overwhelming prioritization of economic values, i.e., economism. Recent contributions to business ethics stress a re-imagination of the field wherein economic goals are downgraded and more attention given to redistribution of wealth and well-being of the weaker individuals and groups. Development ethics, a lesser known field of normative enquiry, already offers nuanced justifications against economism which business ethicists can use in their current attempts to wean the field from old habits.

Weaning Business Ethics from Strategic Economism: The Development Ethics Perspective

Anxieties stemming from rising inequalities have led significant sections of the world’s population to reject democratic practices and place their trust in politicians with fascist tendencies who promise to wrest control of their destinies from elites. Ironically, elite interests, far from being threatened, are bolstered by the rise of fascism, as discredited democratic institutions can be dismantled with impunity. The emerging alliance between the neoliberal project and fascist politics is a phenomenon that the business and society scholarship is ill-equipped to confront as it remains trapped in the same neoliberal pro-elite paradigms that neglect meaningful attention to material (in)equality and focus instead on ensuring a minimum floor of rights required for subsistence. Neglecting the concentration of wealth among the elite, particularly in countries with historic legacies of inequalities based on race, caste, ethnicity, and religion, creates ideal conditions for the eruption of fascisms premised upon programmatic denial of the full range of civil rights to one or more sections of the population, so that even the floor minimum becomes impossible to achieve for all. This paper argues that corporate collusions with fascism can be challenged only by a commitment to redistribution of wealth and creating critical citizens and by generating knowledge that can question authority: in other words, scholarship must become a subversive activity.

Big Business and Fascism: A Dangerous Collusion

A recent trend in policy responses the rising public resentments with inequality is to prod the wealthy into spending a fraction of their profits on projects that promote social welfare. Legitimati...

Semantic dilution of inequality: a smoke-screen for philanthrocapitalism

Making connections between religious epics and insider trading is not as misplaced as it sounds. This article investigates whether literary texts like the Mahabharata and the Gita are harmless enough for unsupervised extraction of moral lessons. Arguing that the concerns of anyone interested in improving the quality of corporate governance in India are not trivial, particularly for those who champion the use of such religious texts for enhancing corporate morality, this essay suggests that adopting the Kantian notion of reflective judgments offers a strategy to reduce the risks of wrong lessons being drawn from religious epics.

Prabhir Vishnu Poruthiyil

Papers

Religious Ethics: An Antidote for Religious Nationalism

Weaning Business Ethics from Strategic Economism: The Development Ethics Perspective

Big Business and Fascism: A Dangerous Collusion

Semantic dilution of inequality: a smoke-screen for philanthrocapitalism

Using Religious Epics for Enhancing Morality