Showing papers on "Value (ethics) published in 2002"

Action research for operations management

Abstract: A fundamental methodological question guides this paper: How can operations managers and researchers learn from the applied activity that characterises the practice of OM? To address this question, defines and explores the legitimacy of an action‐oriented research approach in OM, and the particular logic and value of applying action research (AR) to the description and understanding of issues in OM. Begins with a review of the role of empirical research in OM and how AR features within the OM research literature. Introduces the theory and practice of AR and outlines the AR cycle and how AR is implemented. Finally, describes the skills required to engage in AR and explores issues in generating theory. Concludes with the assertion that AR is relevant and valid for the discipline of OM in its ability to address the operational realities experienced by practising managers while simultaneously contributing to knowledge.

Materialism and Well-Being: A Conflicting Values Perspective

Abstract: Over the past decade, materialism has emerged as an important research topic Materialism is generally viewed as the value placed on the acquisition of material objects Previous research finds that high levels of material values are negatively associated with subjective well-being However, relatively little is known about the relationship between materialism and well-being within the broader context of an individual's value system In this article, we examine the relationship between material values and other important life values In addition, we draw on values theory to examine a novel conceptualization of why materialism is antithetical to well-being Specifically, our theory proposes that the individual orientation of material values conflicts with collective-oriented values, such as family values and religious values This state of values conflict creates psychological tension, and this tension is associated with a reduced sense of well-being Using both a survey sample of 373 adults from across the United States and an experimental study of 120 college students, we find considerable support for this conflicting values perspective

The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays

Abstract: Although it is on occasion important and useful to distinguish between factual claims and value judgments, the distinction becomes, Hilary Putnam argues, positively harmful when identified with a dichotomy between the objective and the purely "subjective." Lively, concise, and wise, his book prepares the way for a renewed mutual fruition of philosophy and the social sciences.

Exploring the Phenomenon of Customers' Desired Value Change in a Business-to-Business Context

Abstract: Increasingly, organizations are pushed to adopt customer value strategies in order to grow profits and ensure long-term survival. Yet little is known about the dynamic nature of how customers perceive value from suppliers. The authors present findings from a grounded theory study conducted in a business-to-business context that sheds light on the nature of customers’ desired value change and related contextual conditions. The authors discover that the phenomenon of customers’ desired value change typically occurs in an emotional context, as managers try to cope with feelings of tension. The phenomenon extends well past the change itself into strategies customers use to motivate suppliers to meet their changed needs. Customers’ value change provides a reason for customers to seek, maintain, or move away from relationships with suppliers.

The Option Value of Modularity in Design An Example from Design Rules, Volume 1: The Power of Modularity

Abstract: When the design of an artifact is "modularized," the elements of the design are split up and assigned to modules according to a formal architecture or plan. Some of the modules are "hidden," meaning that design decisions in those modules do not affect decisions in other modules; some of the modules are "visible," meaning that they embody "design rules" that hidden-module designers must obey if the modules are to work together. Modular designs offer alternatives that non-modular ("interdependent") designs do not provide. Specifically, in the hidden modules, designers may replace early, inferior solutions with later, superior solutions. Such alternatives can be modeled as "real options." In Design Rules, Volume 1: The Power of Modularity (MIT Press, 2000) we sought to categorize the major options implicit in a modular design, and to explain how each type can be valued in accordance with modern finance theory. This paper provides an example of the valuation of the modular options "splitting" and "substitution." We show that the key drivers of the "net option value" of a particular module are (1) its "technical potential" (labeled s, because it operates like volatility in financial option theory); (2) the cost of mounting independent design experiments; and (3) the "visibility" of the module in question. The option value of a system of modules in turn can be approximated by adding up the net option values inherent in each module and subtracting the cost of creating the modular architecture. A positive value in this calculation justifies investment in a new modular architecture.

Cultivating a global mindset

Abstract: Executive Overview The economic landscape of the world is changing rapidly and becoming increasingly global. For virtually every medium-sized to large company in developed as well as developing economies, market opportunities, critical resources, cutting-edge ideas, and competitors lurk not just around the corner in the home market but increasingly in distant and often little-understood regions of the world as well. How successful a company is at exploiting emerging opportunities and tackling their accompanying challenges depends crucially on how intelligent it is at observing and interpreting the dynamic world in which it operates. Creating a global mindset is one of the central ingredients required for building such intelligence. In this article, we address the following issues: why mindset matters, what a global mindset is, the value of a global mindset, and finally, what companies can do to cultivate a global mindset.

Information systems as a reference discipline

Abstract: The conventional wisdom amongst information systems (IS) researchers is that information systems is an applied discipline drawing upon other, more fundamental, reference disciplines. These reference disciplines are seen as having foundational value for IS. We believe that it is time to question the conventional wisdom. We agree that many disciplines are relevant for IS researchers, but we suggest a re-think of the idea of "reference disciplines" for IS. In a sense, IS has come of age. Perhaps the time has come for IS to become a reference discipline for others.

"Mexican Americans Don't Value Education!" On the Basis of the Myth, Mythmaking, and Debunking

Abstract: Notwithstanding evidence to the contrary, a major myth lingers that Mexican Americans, particularly parents of low-socioeconomic status background, do not value education. As a consequence, the myth asserts, Mexican American children experience poor academic achievement. We examine this myth in 3 ways. First, we suggest that the basis for the myth lies in the pseudoscientific notion of "deficit thinking," a mind-set molded by the fusion of ideology and science that blames the victim, rather than holding oppressive and inequitable schooling arrangements culpable. Second, we explore the course of the mythmaking itself. In doing so, we examine several sources (e.g., early master's theses; published scholarly literature, particularly from the "cultural deprivation" and "at risk" child categories). Third, we provide discourse on how the myth can be debunked. This is done by providing strong evidence that Mexican Americans do indeed value education. Our evidentiary forms are (a) the Mexican American people's lo...

Reading Don't Fix No Chevys: Literacy in the Lives of Young Men

Abstract: 1. What's Going Down: A Review of the Current Concerns Around Boys and Literacy 2. Going with the Flow: What Boys Like to Do and Why They Like to Do It 3. Do the Right Thing: The Instrumental Value of School and Reading 4. Mostly Outside, Rarely Inside: Situations That Promote Literacy 5. May I Have the Envelope Please? The Texts Boys Enjoy and Why They Enjoy Them 6. A Profound Challenge: Applications for Classroom Practice Appendixes: A. Major Coding Categories B. Reading Log Directions and Examples C. Category System for the Protocol Analysis and Distribution of Moves by Story

An Experimental Study of Belief Learning Using Elicited Beliefs

Abstract: This paper investigates belief learning. Unlike other investigators who have been forced to use observable proxies to approximate unobserved beliefs, we have, using a belief elicitation procedure (proper scoring rule), elicited subject beliefs directly. As a result we were able to perform a more direct test of the proposition that people behave in a manner consistent with belief learning. What we find is interesting. First to the extent that subjects tend to "belief learn," the beliefs they use are the stated beliefs we elicit from them and not the "empirical beliefs" posited by fictitious play or Cournot models. Second, we present evidence that the stated beliefs of our subjects differ dramatically, both quantitatively and qualitatively, from the type of empirical or historical beliefs usually used as proxies for them. Third, our belief elicitation procedures allow us to examine how far we can be led astray when we are forced to infer the value of parameters using observable proxies for variables previously thought to be unobservable. By transforming a heretofore unobservable into an observable, we can see directly how parameter estimates change when this new information is introduced. Again, we demonstrate that such differences can be dramatic. Finally, our belief learning model using stated beliefs outperforms both a reinforcement and EWA model when all three models are estimated using our data.

The Role of Learning in the Operation of Motivational Systems

Abstract: Acquired behavior is motivated by two forms of incentive learning. Pavlovian incentive learning reflects the acquisition of motivational properties by conditioned stimuli (CSs) through their association with appetitive and aversive reinforcers. Although the influence of appetitive CSs is modulated by primary motivational states, they exert a general motivation influence on appetitive behavior. By contrast, aversive CSs inhibit appetitive behavior. The second process, instrumental incentive learning, determines the incentive value assigned to outcomes of goal-directed, instrumental action. This incentive value, and its control by primary motivational states, has to be learned through experience of the hedonic reactions elicited by the outcome. The two incentive learning processes function in parallel to motivate instrumental behavior. Keywords: action outcome; appetite-aversive interactions; behavioral chain; blocking; cathexis theory; conditioned stimulus; incentive; motivational control; pavlov; primary drives; stimulus-response

Stem Cells, Tissue Cultures and the Production of Biovalue:

Abstract: This article examines some of the social and philosophical implications of stem cell technologies. Stem cell technologies promise to transform the way that healthy tissues for transplant are sourced and circulated; from a social economy in which citizens donate whole organs to others, to one in which embryos are a major source of therapeutic tissues. This article considers the transformations in concepts of health, bodily relationships and social indebtedness that such a shift might entail. Using the concept of biovalue, this article describes the ways embryos are biologically engineered to act as tissue sources, and considers the relationship between biovalue, health and capital value. It discusses the effects stem cell technologies may have on concepts of the healthy body, particularly on the temporality of ageing, and on understandings of the human more generally.

Value Sensitive Design: Theory and Methods

Abstract: Value Sensitive Design is a theoretically grounded approach to the design of technology that accounts for human values in a principled and comprehensive manner throughout the design process. It employs an integrative and iterative tripartite methodology, consisting of conceptual, empirical, and technical investigations. We explicate Value Sensitive Design by drawing on three case studies. The first study concerns information and control of web browser cookies, implicating the value of informed consent. The second study concerns using high-definition plasma displays in an office environment to provide a virtual window to the outside world, implicating the values of physical and psychological well-being and privacy in public spaces. The third study concerns an integrated land use, transportation, and environmental simulation system to support public deliberation and debate on major land use and transportation decisions, implicating the values of fairness (and specifically freedom from bias), accountability, and support for the democratic process, as well as a highly diverse range of values that might be held by different stakeholders, such as environmental sustainability, opportunities for business expansion, or walkable neighborhoods. We conclude with direct and practical suggestions for how to engage in Value Sensitive Design.

Belief's Own Ethics

Abstract: The fundamental question of the ethics of belief is "What ought one to believe?" According to the traditional view of evidentialism, the strength of one's beliefs should be proportionate to the evidence. Conventional ways of defending and challenging evidentialism rely on the idea that what one ought to believe is a matter of what it is rational, prudent, ethical, or personally fulfilling to believe. Common to all these approaches is that they look outside of belief itself to determine what one ought to believe. In this book Jonathan Adler offers a strengthened version of evidentialism, arguing that the ethics of belief should be rooted in the concept of belief--that evidentialism is belief's own ethics. A key observation is that it is not merely that one ought not, but that one cannot, believe, for example, that the number of stars is even. The "cannot" represents a conceptual barrier, not just an inability. Therefore belief in defiance of one's evidence (or evidentialism) is impossible. Adler addresses such questions as irrational beliefs, reasonableness, control over beliefs, and whether justifying beliefs requires a foundation. Although he treats the ethics of belief as a central topic in epistemology, his ideas also bear on rationality, argument and pragmatics, philosophy of religion, ethics, and social cognitive psychology.

A simple statistical method for measuring how life events affect happiness

Abstract: Background Life events—like illness, marriage, or unemployment—have important effects on people. But there is no accepted way to measure the different sizes of these events upon human happiness and psychological health. By using happiness regression equations, economists have recently developed a method. Methods We estimate happiness regressions using large random samples of individuals. The relative coefficients of income and life events on happiness allow us to calculate a monetary ‘compensating amount’ for each kind of life event. Results The paper calculates the impact of different life events upon human well-being. Getting married, for instance, is calculated to bring each year the same amount of happiness, on average, as having an extra £70 000 of income per annum. The psychological costs of losing a job greatly exceed those from the pure drop in income. Health is hugely important to happiness. Widowhood brings a degree of unhappiness that would take, on average, an extra £170 000 per annum to offset. Well-being regressions also allow us to assess one of the oldest conjectures in social science—that well-being depends not just on absolute things but inherently on comparisons with other people. We find evidence for comparison effects. Conclusion We believe that the new statistical method has many applications. In principle, it can be used to value any kind of event in life.

Conceptualizing Culture: Possibilities for Political Science

Abstract: This essay makes a case for an anthropological conceptualization of culture as “semiotic practices” and demonstrates how it adds value to political analyses. “Semiotic practices” refers to the processes of meaning-making in which agents' practices (e.g., their work habits, self-policing strategies, and leisure patterns) interact with their language and other symbolic systems. This version of culture can be employed on two levels. First, it refers to what symbols do—how symbols are inscribed in practices that operate to produce observable political effects. Second, “culture” is an abstract theoretical category, a lens that focuses on meaning, rather than on, say, prices or votes. By thinking of meaning construction in terms that emphasize intelligibility, as opposed to deep-seated psychological orientations, a practice-oriented approach avoids unacknowledged ambiguities that have bedeviled scholarly thinking and generated incommensurable understandings of what culture is. Through a brief exploration of two concerns central to political science—compliance and ethnic identity-formation—this paper ends by showing how culture as semiotic practices can be applied as a causal variable.

Who’s Afraid of Legal Pluralism?

Abstract: In the roughly thirty years in which the concept legal pluralism has been used in legal and social scientific writings on complex normative systems, the concept has become a subject of emotionally loaded debates. Though originally introduced with modest ambition as a ’sensitizing’ concept, drawing attention to the probability and frequent existence of parallel or duplicatory legal regulations of the same domain of social action or organisation within one political organisation, the discussion is increasingly dominated by the exchange of conceptual a priori’s and stereotypes as well as by cliches over those who use them. Rather than looking at the heuristic value of the concept in use, for describing, analysing and evaluating empirical complex normative situations, the conceptual struggles tends to create two camps, effacing the many differences in assumptions and approaches to law in society. Starting with Tamanaha’s paper on the folly of legal pluralism (1993), one can even observe the emergence ...

Conflicts among human values and trust in institutions

Abstract: Institutions contribute to maintaining social order and stability in society. At the same time, they restrain the freedom of individuals. Based on the theory of value structure and content (Schwartz, 1992), we hypothesized about the relations of people's trust in institutions to their value priorities. More precisely, we predicted and found that the level of trust in various institutions correlated positively with values that stress stability, protection, and preservation of traditional practices, and negatively with values that emphasize independent thought and action and favour change. In addition, we demonstrated that groups defined on the basis of religious affiliation or political orientation exhibited contrasting value priorities on the same bipolar dimension. Moreover, differences in value priorities accounted for the fact that religious individuals and right-wing supporters expressed more trust in institutions than non-religious individuals and left-wing supporters.

Common Mistakes in Making Value Trade-Offs

Abstract: Value trade-offs define how much must be gained in the achievement of one objective to compensate for a lesser achievement on a different objective. Value trade-offs that adequately express a decision maker's values are essential both for good decision making in multiple-objective contexts and for insightful analyses of multiple-objective decisions. This paper identifies and illustrates 12 important mistakes frequently made that limit one's ability to determine useful value trade-offs. It then suggests how to avoid making these mistakes. The intent is to provide practical advice for making good value trade-offs, and hence, better decisions.

Thinking from Things: Essays in the Philosophy of Archaeology

Abstract: Alison Wylie, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, 357 pages.Reviewer: Erika EvasdottirColumbia UniversityOne of the most enduring--and endearing--consequences of the New Archaeology is that it continues to make people think long and hard about the nature of archaeology, the questions it can and cannot answer, and the goals it ought to have in a changing world. Alison Wylie has produced a marvelous catalogue of all the ways in which New Archaeology has made her think over the years. She thereby exemplifies the possibilities engendered by the combination of theory and practice and shows throughout the value of inquiry to the discipline. Students of anthropology as well as archaeology would do well to read this book not so much for the substance, but as an example of how to be a curious, well rounded, and--above all--a thinking archaeologist.Wylie begins her tale in 1973, in the summer after her first year of undergraduate studies, at the excavations at Fort Walsh, Saskatchewan. Archaeology was then a discipline deep in the throes of the revolutions begun in the late 1960s by the New Archaeologists. In reading her account it struck me how funny, almost quaint, the rhetoric of New Archaeology seems today, more than 30 years on, and how deeply misplaced the urgency of its posturing. Yet nevertheless, Wylie manages also to convey--and to remind those of us who have forgotten--the excitement of feeling like one was truly participating in a revolution. It was a time that made thinking acceptable, fun, and productive. The process of thinking itself became a site of competition and struggle. Archaeology had till then never been (or seen itself as) an oasis for the practical, taciturn, rugged outdoorsy type; perhaps we first needed a 1950s male-oriented "science" of archaeology in order to break down the contempt felt for the effete armchair thinker before we could move on to find creativity, diversity, and even room for the traditional male ego in more complex theories. For being the true proximate cause of the flowering of the many schools of archaeology that followed, Wylie reminds us to feel ungrudging gratitude for even the most acerbic of the New Archaeologists.To anyone who prefers the polemical statement, Wylie's writing can be frustrating because it is, and has always been, marked by a calm, even tone that refuses the rhetorics of extremist posturing or the grandiose statement. She refuses to ally herself with any school in particular. She is fundamentally confident in the persistent resistance of the archaeological record to the play of theory, but she is no processualist. Her basic certainty does not stop her from reading newer and more complex theories and reaching to the feminists, the interpretivists, and the critical theorists, but she is certainly no post-processualist. Wylie's school is the middle road: the work of archaeologists may be more complex than heretofore expected, but it is both possible and worth doing and, most importantly, new knowledge about the past can indeed be accumulated. In Wylie's mind, everyone and every theory has something important to contribute to archaeology's common task. While each idea spurs her to consider the situation from a different angle, she never loses her own sense of where she stands on the basic issues.That sense of certainty combined with the ability to see something important in every theory is a rare and laudable trait. …

Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic

Abstract: Acknowledgements.Introduction.1. A Theory in Ruins.2. The Value of Agony.3. From Hegel to Beckett.4. Heroes.5. Freedom, Fate and Justice.6. Pity, Fear and Pleasure.7. Tragedy and the Novel.8. Tragedy and Modernity.9 Demons.10. Thomas Mann's Hedgehog. Notes. Index.

Commodification, culture and tourism

Abstract: This article revisits the question of tourism’s role in the commodification of culture. I argue that an acceptance of a cause and effect relationship between tourism and cultural commodification requires an acceptance of a problematic notion of ‘authenticity’. This is because the belief that tourism causes cultural commodification is based on a largely unexamined reliance on Marx’s labor theory of value, source of what Barbara Herrnstein Smith has referred to as a ‘double discourse of value’, in which an intrinsic and sacred cultural sphere of value is presumed to circulate independent of an unstable and profane economic sphere of value. Given the social fact that everything, including ‘culture’, is a potential commodity, it would be useful for research to focus on how individuals and groups in host societies gain access to new forms of exchange rather than simply on the fact of commodification.

Shadows of Power: An Allegory of Prudence in Land-Use Planning

Abstract: Shadows of Power examines public policy and in particular, the communicative processes of policy and decision-making. It explore the important who, how and why issues of policy decisions. Who really takes the decisions? How are they arrived at and why were such processes used? What relations of power may be revealed between the various participants?Using stories from planning practices, this book shows that local planning decisions, particularly those which involve consideration of issues of 'public space' cannot be understood separately from the socially constructed, subjective territorial identities, meanings and values of the local people and the planners concerned. Nor can it be fully represented as a linear planning process concentrating on traditional planning policy-making and decision-making ideas of survey analysis-plan or officer recommendation-council decision-implementation. Such notions assume that policy-and decision-making proceed in a relatively technocratic and value neutral, unidirectional, step-wise process towards a finite end point. In this book Jean Hiller explores ways in which different values and mind-sets may affect planning outcomes and relate to systemic power structures. By unpacking these and bring them together as influences on participants' communication, she reveals influences at work in decision-making processes that were previously invisible.If planning theory is to be of real use to practitioners, it needs to address practice as it is actually encountered in the worlds of planning officers and elected representatives. Hillier shed light on the shadows so that practitioners may be better able to understand the circumstances in which they find themselves and act more effectively in what is in reality a messy, highly politicised decision-making process.

Do the Means Always Justify the Ends, or Do the Ends Sometimes Justify the Means? A Value Protection Model of Justice Reasoning

Abstract: This study explored whether personal identity concerns relate in important ways to how people decide whether an event is fair or unfair. Because moral mandates are selective expressions of values that are central to people’s sense of personal identity, people should be highly motivated to protect these positions from possible threat. Consistent with predictions based on a value protection model of justice, whether people had a moral mandate on abortion, civil rights, or immigration was completely independent of the perceived procedural fairness of political institutions when those institutions posed no salient threat to these policy concerns. However, strength of moral mandate, and not prethreat judgments of procedural fairness of the Supreme Court or a state referendum, predicted perceived procedural fairness, outcome fairness, decision acceptance, and other indices of moral outrage when either the Supreme Court or a state referendum posed a possible threat to perceivers’ moral mandates.

Ancient DNA in anthropology: Methods, applications, and ethics

Abstract: Anthropologists were quick to recognize the potential of new techniques in molecular biology to provide additional lines of evidence on questions long in- vestigated in anthropology, as well as those questions that, while always of interest, could not have been ad- dressed by more traditional techniques. The earliest an- cient DNA studies, both within anthropology and in other fields, lacked rigorous hypothesis testing. However, more recently the true value of ancient DNA studies is being realized, and methods are being applied to a wide variety of anthropological questions. We review the most common methods and applications to date, and describe promising avenues of future research. We find that ancient DNA analyses have a valuable place in the array of anthropo- logical techniques, but argue that such studies must not be undertaken merely to demonstrate that surviving DNA is present in organic remains, and that no such work should be performed before a careful consideration of the

Museums, society, inequality

Abstract: Museums, Society, Inequality explores the wide-ranging social roles and responsibilities of the museum. It brings together international perspectives to stimulate critical debate, inform the work of practitioners and policy makers, and to advance recognition of the purpose, responsibilities and value to society of museums. Museums, Society, Inequality examines the issues and: * offers different understandings of the social agency of the museum * presents ways in which museums have sought to engage with social concerns, and instigate social change * imagines how museums might become more useful to society in future. This book is essential for all museum academics, practitioners and students.

Commodified meanings, meaningful commodities: Re-thinking production-consumption links through the organic system of provision

Abstract: Agro-food researchers have yet to systematically theorize how the social life of food intersects with a political economy of food production. Yet without such understanding, activists are unlikely to affect the politics of production in intended ways. It is crucial to understand how the meanings that animate the politics of consumption are translated and distributed as surplus value and rent, and, for that matter, how surplus value and rent value are translated into meanings. This paper is a preliminary attempt to further that understanding by considering these translations in organic food provision. It begins with some recent interventions in conceptualizing taste and then explores their significance in value creation and distribution. It then considers what they offer in understanding the taste for organics specifically. Ultimately, I argue that certain of these tastes present considerable, if different, problems for the commodification of organic food, which are only resolved by a re-making of organic meanings together with unintended distributions of value

Exploratory Study of Hong Kong Teacher Education Students' Epistemological Beliefs: Cultural Perspectives and Implications on Beliefs Research

Abstract: This paper reports a study of epistemological beliefs of Hong Kong teacher education students in which such four belief dimensions have been identified. The result is similar to that found by Schommer with North American university students in that the number of dimensions is the same but the nature of the dimensions is different. The paper hypothesizes that these differences can be accounted for in terms of differences in cultural context. In particular, the difference in dimensions concerned with authority–expert knowledge and effort and learning reported in this study might be explained by value differences between Western (North American) and non-Western (Hong Kong Chinese) culture. From a methodological perspective, the interview data also imply difficulties in measuring knowledge beliefs and one finding from the study is that in-depth interviews to complement quantitative data are necessary for trustworthy study of epistemological beliefs.

The role of ethical obligation and self-identity in ethical consumer choice

Abstract: Many variables have been proposed as additions to the theory of planned behaviour structure, and evidence exists to support the value of a measure of ethical obligation and self-identity. Furthermore, some research has suggested that ethical obligation may serve as an antecedent to attitude as well as intention. This paper presents findings from a large scale survey that highlights the usefulness of ethical obligation and self-identity in the prediction of intention. Additionally, the role of both these variables in the prediction of attitude is also suggested. This is examined within the ‘ethical’ context of fair trade grocery purchases. Methodological implications for further research are discussed.