Value (ethics)

About: Value (ethics) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 21347 publications have been published within this topic receiving 461372 citations.

The Social Construction of Meaning--A Significant Development for Mathematics Education?.

Abstract: I would like today to direct your attention to what I consider to be a significant new research area for us in mathematics education, and the best way I can do this is to explain not only what it is about, but also how I came to see its value. This talk will therefore be a kind of journey through some ideas and will, I hope, convey something of the flavour, and also the substance, of the new area. However, in order to help you comprehend and evaluate what I have to say you should know that my own working context is in teacher education, at a University Department of Education, and you must also remember that it is within the U.K. system. One consequence is that I start my research from the assumption that the teacher is the most important agent in the whole educational enterprise. Much of the practice of teaching and of teacher education in the U.K. is based on the idea of the "autonomous teacher." This idea is a myth, of course, in the sense that every teacher is subject to all kinds of pressures but it is a myth that we value and preserve. I am not concerned today with whether or not this is a good or a bad myth, but I will be happy to agree for now that it has its dangers as well as its blessings! My research interests have always been concerned with the mysteries and the complexities of the mathematics classroom the context in which teachers try to acculturate pupils into the mathematician's ways of understanding the world. My research philosophy is that of "constructive alternativism" [Kelly, 1955] which means that I look for alternative ways of construing and interpreting classroom phenomena in order that the acculturation process can be achieved more successfully than it is at present. One of the first strands of this research to get developed concerned my work on teachers' decisionmaking. "The teacher as a decision-maker" was a conception designed to catch the process whereby the teacher deals with the many choices occurring both before and during teaching. I was particularly interested in the decisions made during the classroom interactions, now referred to in the research literature as "interactive decision-making" [Shavelson, 1976]. It is a very powerful construct in that it links the work on teachers' knowledge, ideology, attitudes, etc. with the work on teachers' classroom behaviour, methods, language, etc. Various aspects of mathematics teachers' decision-making were learnt [Bishop, 1976a] and many more are waiting to be explored. For example, dealing with pupils' misunderstandings and errors constitutes a large part of a teacher's activity but the decision-making construct forced me to attend to the fact that, in the classroom situation, what is significant is the teacher's perception of the errors and misunderstandings. This is sometimes forgotten by those researchers who study children's errors in a laboratory-like atmosphere away from the interactive classroom. I therefore looked at perrs (teacher perceived errors) and was particularly interested in the teachers' strategies for dealing with these [Bishop, 1976b]. This research developed some very useful activities for teacher education; for example, "freezing" a moment of decision in a video-tape of a lesson and analysing the choices and criteria open to the teacher. Into such discussion it is possible to inject many constructs from psychological research which would otherwise seem very remote from the classroom.

Why We Should Abandon the Misconceived Quest to Reconcile Public Entrepreneurship with Democracy: A Response to Bellone and Goerl's "Reconciling Public Entrepreneurship and Democracy"

Abstract: C arl J. Bellone and George Frederick Goerl (1992) build an intriguing case for public entrepreneurship. By strategically structuring an argument in the tradition of the bureaucracy/democracy debate, they attempt to legitimize the concept of public entrepreneurship by asserting that it can be reconciled with democratic politics and administration.1 Bellone and Goerl's argument presents the underlying values and characteristics of public entrepreneurship (autonomy, a personal vision of the future, secrecy, and risktaking) as being at odds with the values of democratic politics and administration (accountability, citizen participation, open policy-making processes, and "stewardship" behavior). Bellone and Goerl suggest that, although these value orientations appear incompatible, this should not be interpreted to mean that the conflict created by the different value orientations cannot be resolved. Indeed, Bellone and Goerl assert that public entrepreneurship can be squared with democratic principles if it is "civicregarding."

Reduction, Explanation, and Realism

Abstract: What is reduction? Must all discussions of the mind, value, colour, biological organisms, and persons aim to reduce these to objects and properties that can be studied by more basic, physical science? Conversely, does failure to achieve a reduction undermine the legitimacy of higher levels of description or explanation? In recent years philosophers have attempted to avoid these traditional alternatives by developing an account of higher-level phenomena which shows them to be grounded in, but not reducible to, basic physical objects and properties. The contributors to this volume examine the motivations for such anti-reductionist views, and assess their coherence and success, in a number of different fields. Their essays constitute a unified discussion, into which the reader is led by an introductory chapter where the editors set out some of the central claims and questions.

Globalization and Cultural Trends in China

Abstract: Liu Kang argues that globalization is not simply a new conceptual framework through which cultural change in China can be understood; it is a historical condition in which the country's "gaige kaifang" (reform and opening up) has unfolded, and a set of values or ideologies by which it and the rest of the globe is judged. In five clear and concise chapters, Liu examines China's ideological struggles in political discourse, intellectual debate, popular culture, avant-garde literature, the news media and the internet. He constructs an understanding of post-revolutionary Chinese culture, making the case that Mao's ideology has been gutted, and arguing for its value in providing China with its own cultural identity, curbing the excesses of capitalism, and putting forward and alternative model of modernaization.

Actions speak louder than words: The benefits of ethical behaviors of leaders.

Abstract: Ethical scandals in business have led to calls for more ethical or moral leadership. Yet, we still know very little about what characterizes ethical leadership and what its positive consequences actually are. We argue that the major question is not about what leaders value, but rather whether their ethical values are regularly reflected in behavioral patterns across situations and situational challenges. To address this, we have begun to build the Ethical Leadership Behavior Scale, which is based on behaviors reflecting concrete manifestations of ethical values (e.g., fairness, respect) across occasions and situational barriers. A study with 592 employees of 110 work units in two departments provided a first test of this scale and demonstrated that the level of ethical leadership behavior predicts important work-related attitudes (job satisfaction, work engagement, affective organizational commitment) and outcomes (health complaints, emotional exhaustion, absenteeism).