Showing papers on "Value (ethics) published in 2011"

Justice for Hedgehogs

Abstract: The fox knows many things, the Greeks said, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. In his most comprehensive work Ronald Dworkin argues that value in all its forms is one big thing: that what truth is, life means, morality requires, and justice demands are different aspects of the same large question. He develops original theories on a great variety of issues very rarely considered in the same book: moral skepticism, literary, artistic, and historical interpretation, free will, ancient moral theory, being good and living well, liberty, equality, and law among many other topics. What we think about any one of these must stand up, eventually, to any argument we find compelling about the rest. Skepticism in all its forms - philosophical, cynical, or post-modern - threatens that unity. The Galilean revolution once made the theological world of value safe for science. But the new republic gradually became a new empire: the modern philosophers inflated the methods of physics into a totalitarian theory of everything. They invaded and occupied all the honorifics - reality, truth, fact, ground, meaning, knowledge, and being - and dictated the terms on which other bodies of thought might aspire to them, and skepticism has been the inevitable result. We need a new revolution. We must make the world of science safe for value.

Identity, Morals, and Taboos: Beliefs as Assets

Abstract: We develop a theory of moral behavior, individual and collective, based on a general model of identity in which people care about “who they are” and infer their own values from past choices. The model sheds light on many empirical puzzles inconsistent with earlier approaches. Identity investments respond nonmonotonically to acts or threats, and taboos on mere thoughts arise to protect beliefs about the “priceless” value of certain social assets. High endowments trigger escalating commitment and a treadmill effect, while competing identities can cause dysfunctional capital destruction. Social interactions induce both social and antisocial norms of contribution, sustained by respectively shunning free riders or do-gooders.

Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics - 25th Anniversary Edition

Abstract: What rational justification is there for conceiving of all living things as possessing inherent worth? In Respect for Nature, Paul Taylor draws on biology, moral philosophy, and environmental science to defend a biocentric environmental ethic in which all life has value. Without making claims for the moral rights of plants and animals, he offers a reasoned alternative to the prevailing anthropocentric view--that the natural environment and its wildlife are valued only as objects for human use or enjoyment. Respect for Nature provides both a full account of the biological conditions for life--human or otherwise--and a comprehensive view of the complex relationship between human beings and the whole of nature. This classic book remains a valuable resource for philosophers, biologists, and environmentalists alike--along with all those who care about the future of life on Earth. A new foreword by Dale Jamieson looks at how the original 1986 edition of Respect for Nature has shaped the study of environmental ethics, and shows why the work remains relevant to debates today.

Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses

Abstract: Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa University of Chicago Press, 2011 This book has much to say that is perceptive about today's undergraduate higher education in the United States. It will be valuable to review the authors' insights. At the same time, it will be as instructive to note the book's weaknesses, and especially what is omitted from the discussion. It is a discussion that is truncated intellectually by the authors' close adherence to the selective awareness that so greatly typifies the mindscape of the contemporary American "establishment" in academia and throughout the commanding heights of American society. That mindscape allows a recognition of many things, but not of others. The authors are both faculty members at major American universities. Richard Arum is a sociology professor at New York University with a tie to the university's school of education. He is the author of several books on education and director of the Education Research Program sponsored by the Social Science Research Council. His co-author, Josipa Roksa, is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia. That the book is published by the University of Chicago Press attests to its presumptive merit. Academically Adrift furnishes an example of something that has long been common in social science writing: a rather thin empirical study serving as the work's own contribution, combined with considerable additional material coming out of the literature on whatever subject is being explored. The function of the authors' own research is thus often to serve more or less as scientistic windowdressing. The reason we say the empiricism for this book is "thin" is that the "longitudinal data of 2,322 students," while seemingly ample, involves students spread over "a diverse range of campuses," including "liberal arts colleges and large research institutions, as well as a number of historically black colleges and universities and Hispanic-serving institutions," all "dispersed nationally across all four regions of the country." This must necessarily mean that the "sample" from any given institution or program was quite small. We are told that the authors didn't concern themselves with the appropriateness of each sample, but left the recruitment and retention of the sample's students to each of the respective institutions. The authors acknowledge that the study included fewer men than women, and more good students than those of "lower scholastic ability." So far as this book is concerned, however, the thinness doesn't particularly hurt the content, since so much of what is said doesn't especially depend upon anything unique found by the authors' own research. A brief summary is provided when the authors say that "we will highlight four core 'important lessons' from our research." These are that the institutions and students are "academically adrift" (which is the basis for the book's title), that students gain surprisingly little from their college experience, that there is "persistent and growing inequality" in the students' learning, and that "there is notable variation both within and across institutions" so far as "measurable differences in students' educational experiences" is concerned. Following the lead of former president Derek Bok of Harvard and of the Council for Aid to Education, the authors' ideal for higher education is that it will enhance students' "capacity for critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing." These are the three ingredients measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), which the authors value most among the various assessment tools. The CLA results, they say, show that "growing numbers of students are sent to college at increasingly higher costs, but for a large proportion of them the gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication are either exceedingly small or empirically nonexistent. …

Cents and Sensibility: Economic Valuation and the Nature of “Nature”1

Abstract: How do we attribute a monetary value to intangible things? This article offers a general sociological approach to this question, using the economic value of nature as a paradigmatic case, and oil spills litigations in France and the United States as real world empirical illustrations. It suggests that a full-blown sociology of economic valuation must solve three problems: the “why,” which refers to the general place of money as a metric for worth; the “how,” which refers to the specific techniques and arguments laymen and experts deploy to elicit monetary translations; and the “then what” or the feedback loop from monetary values to social practices and representations.

How does corporate social responsibility create value for consumers

Abstract: Purpose – Research examining corporate social responsibility (CSR) demonstrates a relatively consistent level of positive support by consumers. However, CSR is poorly defined and little is known about the mechanisms by which this response occurs. This paper seeks to understand how consumers define CSR and how it can enhance the overall value proposition for consumers.Design/methodology/approach – The value typology developed by Sheth et al. is integrated with qualitative data to enhance understanding of these value paths. Interviews were conducted with consumers through the heart of the current recession, when consumers were particularly aware of value when making purchase decisions.Findings – The way in which CSR manifests itself determines consumer support. CSR can provide three forms of value to consumers: emotional, social, and functional. Each of these enhances or diminishes the overall value proposition for consumers. Further, value created by one form of CSR can either enhance or diminish other pro...

Critical Perspectives on Consumers' Role as 'Producers': Broadening the Debate on Value Co-Creation in Marketing Processes

Abstract: This special issue continues the critical engagement with the popular discourses of Prahalad’s value co-creation paradigm and Vargo and Lusch’s service-dominant logic of marketing. The intensity of the debate among marketing scholars over these two marketing and management concepts demonstrates how much is at stake – conceptually and politically – when the roles of consumer and producer become blurred. Economic concepts of value, ownership, consumption, and production need to be redefined, and political ideas of the relationship between the social and the economic require addressing in the age of cognitive, or as we call it, collaborative capitalism. In addition to these broad theoretical challenges, the contributions in this issue zoom in on what arguably constitutes the central question for our specific field: What are the implications of a collaborative capitalism for understanding the place of marketing techniques in value creation? As with all good scholarship, the essays in this issue do not provide definitive answers but instead lead to a more elaborate set of questions. By doing so, they broaden the critical engagement with value co-creation in marketing.

Critical perspectives on consumers' role as 'producers': Broadening the debate on value co-creation in marketing processes.

Abstract: This special issue continues the critical engagement with the popular discourses of Prahalad’s value co-creation paradigm and Vargo and Lusch’s service-dominant logic of marketing. The intensity of the debate among marketing scholars over these two marketing and management concepts demonstrates how much is at stake — conceptually and politically — when the roles of consumer and producer become blurred. Economic concepts of value, ownership, consumption, and production need to be redefined, and political ideas of the relationship between the social and the economic require addressing in the age of cognitive, or as we call it, collaborative capitalism. In addition to these broad theoretical challenges, the contributions in this issue zoom in on what arguably constitutes the central question for our specific field: What are the implications of a collaborative capitalism for understanding the place of marketing techniques in value creation? As with all good scholarship, the essays in this issue do not provide...

Imagining personhood differently: person value and autonomist working-class value practices

Abstract: Theories of the good and proper self (the governmental normative subject, be it a reflexive, enterprising, individualising, rational, prosthetic, possessed self) or even the self produced in conditions not of its own making, such as Bourdieu’s habitus, all rely on ideas about self-interest, investment and/or ‘playing the game’. As people are increasingly expected to publicly legitimate themselves as good and worthy subjects and as capital increasingly enters the spaces of intimacy and bio-politics, we need to consider the limits of our theoretical imaginaries for understanding the value production necessary to the performance of personhood. Specifically, most of the theories we have for understanding the connections between personhood and value reproduce and legitimate the normative, hinging our theoretical imaginary to the dominant symbolic, making proper personhood an exclusive resource predicated on constitution by exclusion; where limits define the norm, the margins the centre and the improper the proper. How then can we understand how people who are excluded from the possibilities of accruing and attaching value to themselves, who are positioned outside of the dominant symbolic as the constitutional limit for the proper self or as the zero limit to culture, develop value/s? Drawing upon three different empirical research projects the paper builds on my previous critique of the self as a classed concept to develop a different perspective on value. It argues that an analysis of autonomist working class sociality offers us ways to imagine personhood and person value that are often imperceptible to the bourgeois gaze.

Between affiliation and autonomy: navigating pathways of women's empowerment and gender justice in rural Bangladesh.

Abstract: Inasmuch as women's subordinate status is a product of the patriarchal structures of constraint that prevail in specific contexts, pathways of women's empowerment are likely to be "path dependent" They will be shaped by women's struggles to act on the constraints that prevail in their societies, as much by what they seek to defend as by what they seek to change The universal value that many feminists claim for individual autonomy may not therefore have the same purchase in all contexts This article examines processes of empowerment as they play out in the lives of women associated with social mobilization organizations in the specific context of rural Bangladesh It draws on their narratives to explore the collective strategies through which these organizations sought to empower the women and how they in turn drew on their newly established "communities of practice" to navigate their own pathways to wider social change It concludes that while the value attached to social affiliations by the women in the study is clearly a product of the societies in which they have grown up, it may be no more context-specific than the apparently universal value attached to individual autonomy by many feminists

Ubuntu as a Moral Theory and Human Rights in South Africa

Abstract: There are three major reasons why ideas associated with ubuntu are often deemed to be an inappropriate basis for a public morality in today's South Africa. One is that they are too vague; a second is that they fail to acknowledge the value of individual freedom; and a third is that they fit traditional, small-scale culture more than a modern, industrial society. In this article, I provide a philosophical interpretation of ubuntu that is not vulnerable to these three objections. Specifically, I construct a moral theory grounded on Southern African world views, one that suggests a promising new conception of human dignity. According to this conception, typical human beings have a dignity by virtue of their capacity for community, understood as the combination of identifying with others and exhibiting solidarity with them, where human rights violations are egregious degradations of this capacity. I argue that this account of human rights violations straightforwardly entails and explains many different elements of South Africa's Bill of Rights and naturally suggests certain ways of resolving contemporary moral dilemmas in South Africa and elsewhere relating to land reform, political power and deadly force. If I am correct that this jurisprudential interpretation of ubuntu both accounts for a wide array of intuitive human rights and provides guidance to resolve present-day disputes about justice, then the three worries about vagueness, collectivism and anachronism should not stop one from thinking that something fairly called 'ubuntu' can ground a public morality.

Enacting entrepreneurship as social value creation

Abstract: The social plays an important role in entrepreneurship, but one that is not well understood. We argue that the social conditions of entrepreneurs, as well as the social nature of opportunities, affect the entrepreneurial process. Hence it is conceptually useful to understand enterprise as socially situated. Accordingly, this article examines the enactment of a socialized opportunity to explore the process of entrepreneurial growth. We find that a conceptualization of social value creation usefully develops our understanding and challenges the view that economic growth is the only relevant outcome of entrepreneurship. Our case study shows how social value is created in multiple forms at different centres and on different levels: from individual self-realization over community development to broad societal impact. We also find complex interrelations between the different levels and centres, thus, we argue that entrepreneurship is as much a social as an economic phenomenon.

Embedded Sustainability: The Next Big Competitive Advantage

Abstract: Companies know how to meet the demands of shareholder value: years of managerial excellence testify to this achievement. Many also know how to create stakeholder value – through traditional approaches such as CSR and philanthropy which predictably lead to trade-offs and added costs. What remains elusive is discovering is how to meet both shareholder and stakeholder requirements in the core business – without mediocrity and without compromise – creating value for the company that cannot be disentangled from the value it creates for society and the environment. What if sustainability was embedded into the DNA of your organization? How can you incorporate environmental, health and social value into its very core? Many companies, despite their best intentions, "bolt on" sustainability as an afterthought to their core strategies. They trumpet green initiatives and social philanthropy which lie at the margins of the business, with symbolic wins that inadvertently highlight the unsustainability of the rest of their activities. Today's ecological and social pressures require a different business response – one that existing strategy frameworks fail adequately to address. In Embedded Sustainability, authors Chris Laszlo and Nadya Zhexembayeva explain and predict how companies can better leverage global challenges for enduring profit and sustained growth. They introduce the marquis concept of embedded sustainability: the incorporation of environmental, health, and social value into the heartbeat of the product life-cycle with no trade-off in price or quality – no social or green premium. This book helps readers to comprehend and implement the notion of embedded sustainability. At its best, embedded sustainability is invisible, similar to quality. In addition to delivering socially and environmentally conscious products for consumers, it is capable of considerably motivating employees. Most of all, it enables smart companies to create even more value for both their shareholders and stakeholders.

Open government and e-government: democratic challenges from a public value perspective

Abstract: We consider open government (OG) within the context of e-government and its broader implications for the future of public administration. We argue that the current US Administration's Open Government Initiative blurs traditional distinctions between e-democracy and e-government by incorporating historically democratic practices, now enabled by emerging technology, within administrative agencies. We consider how transparency, participation, and collaboration function as democratic practices in administrative agencies, suggesting that these processes are instrumental attributes of administrative action and decision making, rather than the objective of administrative action, as they appear to be currently treated. We propose alternatively that planning and assessing OG be addressed within a "public value" framework. The creation of public value is the goal of public organizations; through public value, public organizations meet the needs and wishes of the public with respect to substantive benefits as well as the intrinsic value of better government. We extend this view to OG by using the framework as a way to describe the value produced when interaction between government and citizens becomes more transparent, participative, and collaborative, i.e., more democratic.

Further insights into perceived value and consumer loyalty: A "Green" perspective

Abstract: “Green consumption” is an increasingly important topic in today's society. The effect of the ecological value provided by traditionally non-green products, such as automobiles, on their consumer's post-purchase behavior, such as brand or model loyalty, requires further clarification. The present study provides qualitative and quantitative insights from car users on how the ecological aspect of consumption integrates into the link between perceived value and consumer loyalty intentions (value–loyalty link). In general, car usage is accompanied by perceived functional, economic, emotional, and social value. Perceived ecological value is shown to have a significant impact on these four value dimensions. The relevance of “green to have quality,” “green to save money,” “green to feel good,” and “green to be seen” in relation to loyalty intention is discussed. Results of a structural equation model and multigroup analysis provide the opportunity to derive both theoretical and applied implications. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Oxford Studies in Metaethics

Abstract: Notes on Contributors Introduction 1. The Relational Nature of the Good 2. Value and Reasons to Favor 3. On Being Social in Metaethics 4. Reasons, Commitment, and the Will 5. Two Dualisms of Practical Reason 6. On the (In)Significance of Moral Disagreement for Moral Knowledge 7. Moral Error Theory and the Belief Problem 8. Truth Conditions and the Meaning of Ethical Terms 9. Properties for Nothing, Facts for Free? Expressivism's Deflationary Gambit 10. Believing in Expressivism 11. Tempered Expressivism Index

How to Foster and Sustain Engagement in Virtual Communities

Abstract: Getting customers engaged is one of the most significant challenges for firm-sponsored virtual communities. This article describes the efforts that managers can undertake to foster and sustain customer engagement through a firm-sponsored virtual community. A sponsor must understand consumer needs and motivations, promote member participation, and motivate members to cooperate by making them feel embedded and empowered. In assessing and communicating the benefits of engagement, managers should consider three interlocking sources of engagement value, namely, participatory value, relational value, and financial value.

Teenagers and their virtual possessions: design opportunities and issues

Abstract: Over the past several years, people have increasingly acquired virtual possessions. We consider these things to include artifacts that are increasingly becoming immaterial (e.g. books, photos, music, movies) and things that have never traditionally had a lasting material form (e.g. SMS archives, social networking profiles, personal behavior logs). To date, little research exists about how people value and form attachments to virtual possessions. To investigate, we conducted a study with 21 teenagers exploring the perceived value of their virtual possessions, and the comparative similarities and differences with their material things. Findings are interpreted to detail design and research opportunities and issues in this emerging space.

The Value of Values in Cross-Cultural Research: A Special Issue in Honor of Shalom Schwartz:

Abstract: The centrality of values in cross-cultural research has more than doubled over the last three decades. This Special Issue investigates values across cultures and focuses on two main levels: individual and national. At the individual level, values express broad, trans-situational motivational goals, affecting individuals’ interpretation of situations, preferences, choices, and actions. At the national level, values reflect the solutions groups develop in response to existential challenges and relate to the way social institutions function. The authors review the role of values at each level and present eight articles included in the special issue, showing the value of values in cross-cultural research.

Roles as resources: A social roles perspective of change in value networks

Abstract: This paper contributes to the understanding of value co-creation and co-production by exploring how social roles can be drawn upon as resources for change in value networks. By broadening the marketing emphasis on dyadic perspectives of social roles to that of a network perspective, a social role is conceptualized as a particular set of practices that connects one actor to one or more other actors. In this way, social roles act as resources for change in value networks because they can lead to social norms and establish social positions, or sets of value-creating relationships connected to a particular actor. The proposed framework suggests that actors continually draw on social roles and social positions as resources in their efforts to co-create value with different actors. Given this, we argue that recent, notable changes in social roles within value networks can be more specifically associated with co-production, or the joint development of potential, exchangeable resources.

Innovation Design: Creating Value for People, Organizations and Society

Abstract: Innovation Design presents an approach to designing shared value for businesses, non-profit organizations, end-users and society. The societal and economic challenges we are currently facing - such as the aging population, energy scarcity and environmental issues - are not just threats but are also great opportunities for organizations. Innovation Design shows how organizations can contribute to the process of generating value for society by finding true solutions to these challenges. And at the same time it describes how they can capture value for themselves in business ecosystems that care for both people and planet.This book covers:· Creating meaningful innovations that improve quality of life, engage users and provide value for organizations and other stakeholders; · Guiding the creation of shared value throughout the innovation process, with a practical and integrative approach towards value that connects ideas from economics, psychology, sociology and ecology; · Designing new business models and business ecosystems to deliver sustainable benefits for all the involved parties and stakeholders, addressing both tangible and intangible value.Innovation Design gives numerous examples of projects and innovations to illustrate some of the challenges and solutions you may encounter in your journey of designing meaningful innovations and creating shared value. It also offers practical methods and tools that can be applied directly in your own projects. And in a fast-changing world, it provides a context, a framework and the inspiration to create value at every level: for people, for organizations and for the society in which we live

Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security

Abstract: "If you've got nothing to hide," many people say, "you shouldn't worry about government surveillance." Others argue that we must sacrifice privacy for security. But as Daniel J. Solove argues in this book, these arguments and many others are flawed. They are based on mistaken views about what it means to protect privacy and the costs and benefits of doing so. In addition to attacking the "Nothing-to Hide Argument," Solove exposes the fallacies of pro-security arguments that have often been used to justify government surveillance and data mining. These arguments - such as the "Luddite Argument,"the "War-Powers Argument," the "All-or-Nothing Argument," the "Suspicionless-Searches Argument," the "Deference Argument," and the "Pendulum Argument" - have skewed law and policy to favor security at the expense of privacy.The debate between privacy and security has been framed incorrectly as a zero-sum game in which we are forced to choose between one value and the other. But protecting privacy isn't fatal to security measures; it merely involves adequate oversight and regulation. The primary focus of the book is on common pro-security arguments, but Solove also discusses concrete issues of law and technology, such as the Fourth Amendment Third Party Doctrine, the First Amendment, electronic surveillance statutes, the USA-Patriot Act, the NSA surveillance program, and government data mining.

Blaming, praising, and protecting our humanity: the implications of everyday dehumanization for judgments of moral status.

Abstract: Being human implies a particular moral status: having moral value, agency, and responsibility. However, people are not seen as equally human. Across two studies, we examine the consequences that subtle variations in the perceived humanness of actors or groups have for their perceived moral status. Drawing on Haslam's two-dimensional model of humanness and focusing on three ways people may be considered to have moral status - moral patiency (value), agency, or responsibility - we demonstrate that subtly denying humanness to others has implications for whether they are blamed, praised, or considered worthy of moral concern and rehabilitation. Moreover, we show that distinct human characteristics are linked to specific judgments of moral status. This work demonstrates that everyday judgments of moral status are influenced by perceptions of humanness.

Carebots and Caregivers: Sustaining the Ethical Ideal of Care in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract: In the early twenty-first century, we stand on the threshold of welcoming robots into domains of human activity that will expand their presence in our lives dramatically. One provocative new frontier in robotics, motivated by a convergence of demographic, economic, cultural, and institutional pressures, is the development of “carebots”—robots intended to assist or replace human caregivers in the practice of caring for vulnerable persons such as the elderly, young, sick, or disabled. I argue here that existing philosophical reflections on the ethical implications of carebots neglect a critical dimension of the issue: namely, the potential moral value of caregiving practices for caregivers. This value, I argue, gives rise to considerations that must be weighed alongside consideration of the likely impact of carebots on care recipients. Focusing on the goods internal to caring practices, I then examine the potential impact of carebots on caregivers by means of three complementary ethical approaches: virtue ethics, care ethics, and the capabilities approach. Each of these, I argue, sheds new light on the contexts in which carebots might deprive potential caregivers of important moral goods central to caring practices, as well as those contexts in which carebots might help caregivers sustain or even enrich those practices, and their attendant goods.

Land-Use Regulations and Property Values: The “Windfalls Capture” Idea Revisited

Abstract: The idea of reaping the 'windfalls' in land values due to planning decisions is by no means new. The underlying rationale is that much of the value of real property is created not by the landowner’s work, but by government policies that grant development rights or by broad economic and social trends. Governments need the funds collected for financing public services of various kinds. This paper opens with the conceptual debate about value capture and its rationale, presenting the positions of proponents as well as critics. Drawing on the author’s comparative research on the laws and practices in 13 advanced-economy countries around the world, the paper then addresses the degree to which recapture of the “unearned increment” from planning decisions is indeed a viable approach. Should policymakers adopt it for financing or incentivizing the delivery of public services and affordable housing? Only three countries among the 13 have adopted laws and policies about value capture at some point in their history. What lessons may be learned from their experiences? The findings show that the idea of value capture in its pure form has failed to catch on widely among advanced economies, with only a few exceptions. However, the basic idea of the “unearned increment” as a financial source for public services has not died away. In recent decades, several “mutations" of this idea have been gaining popularity in many countries, but in widely different forms and degrees. I call these "indirect modes" of value capture. These are much more complex and less “elegant” than the direct value-capture notion, and present legal and public-policy challenges. Yet in some contexts, these modes are more realistic instruments for funding public services. The paper concludes with a set of assumptions (for further research) about the legal-administrative conditions for the successful application of the indirect modes of value capture. These are still lacking even in some advanced-economy countries.

Freeing Ourselves from Neo-Colonial Domination in Research

Abstract: One of the challenges for Māori researchers… has been to retrieve some spacefirst, some space to convince Māori people of the value of research for Māori; second, to convince the various, fragmented but powerful research communities of the need for greater Māori involvement in research; and third, to develop approaches and ways of carrying out research which take into account, without being limited by, the legacies of previous research, and the parameters of both previous and current approaches.

I/S Attitudes: Toward Theoretical and Definitional Clarity...

Abstract: There has long been a recognized need to measure the "success" or efficacy of information systems and the implementation process. Various constructs related to success have been suggested such as user attitudes, use, performance, and value. The attitude construct has received a great deal of attention for both theoretical and operational reasons. This paper focuses on the need for a convincing theoretical model linking systems or policies and user attitudes on the one hand, and user attitude and performance or value on the other. Using job satisfaction research as a reference discipline for understanding the relationship between attitudes and performance, a model of I/S attitudes, beliefs, and performance is developed. This model suggests that performance is affected by the correspondence or "fit" between the task requirements and the functionality of the I/S environment. In addition a distinction between beliefs and attitudes is recommended. While satisfaction might be best determined by measuring attitudes, the correspondence between task and functionality is best determined by measuring beliefs. The implications of this model for future research are discussed.

Building new identities in teacher preparation for inclusive education in Ghana

Abstract: “We want our classrooms to be just and caring, full of various conceptions of the good. We want them to be articulate, with the dialogue involving as many persons as possible, opening to one another, opening to the world” (Greene 1993 as cited in Nieto & Bode, 2008). These words sum up inclusive education as a multifaceted practice that deals with value and belief systems, invites and celebrates diversity and difference arising from family background, social class, gender, language, socio-economic background, cultural origin or ability with human rights and social justice at its core. In this paper we reflect critically on current pedagogical practices in Ghana in relation to inclusive education. Using a critical post-colonial discursive framework the paper takes up the challenge to problematise the existing pedagogical practices, which are intensely oppressive. It examines the impact of colonial and cultural practices (beliefs, values, norms) on teaching and learning, using data obtained from three focus groups with 21 student teachers, a total of 42 hours of non-participant observation of their classroom teaching and existing research commentaries. We found that current pedagogical practices are prescriptive, mechanistic, and do not value student diversity and different learning styles. We conclude with new directions for teacher education programs in Ghana that value and celebrate diversity, and difference.

The nature and processes of market co-creation in triple bottom line firms: Leveraging insights from consumer culture theory and service dominant logic

Abstract: This paper contributes theoretical and practical understandings regarding market co-creation by cross-fertilizing insights from consumer culture theory (CCT) on the production of meaning with service-dominant logic (SDL) on the co-creation of value. Examining nine firms acting to achieve environmental, social, and economic sustainability, we suggest that cultural meanings are an important part of the value elaborated in SDL, and conversely that such value informs the meanings emphasized in CCT. Findings demonstrate three levels of meaning and value negotiated by multiple actors in markets: cosmological principles, norms and standards, and individual judgments and interpretations. Discussion deciphers key overlaps and distinctions between meaning and value, operand and operant resources, and economic, social and environmental domains as they converge in market co-creation. Contributions theorize asymmetries of value and meaning in the intricate interweaving of social and market domains characterizing conte...