Abstractabstract:This article examines the complexity of narratives of space and time which support the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, and the consequences for patients disadvantaged by deficits in social cognition or socioeconomic status in areas relating to literacy. In the context of demonstrating the significance of narratives of space and time in the diagnostic process for multiple sclerosis, the article discusses new strategies for treatment that engage the arts and humanities and presents a brief history of the disease and current diagnostic (...) criteria, before discussing the MS Society of Great Britain and Ireland's awareness and fundraising campaign from the 1980s, and Tom Kempinski's play Duet for One, inspired by the life of cellist Jacqueline du Pré. The conclusion addresses the urgency of heightening patient and clinician awareness of how the presentation, interpretation, and sharing of narrative accounts of disease influence health outcomes and makes suggestions about how to adjust for these biases. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to describe a way of teaching business ethics using the creative arts, especially literature and theater. By drawing on these disciplines for both method and texts, we can more easily make the connection to business as a fully human activity, concerned with how meaning is created. Students are encouraged to understand story-telling and narrative and how these tools lend insight into the daily life of businesspeople. The paper describes two main courses, Business Ethics Through (...) Literature and Leadership, Ethics and Theater, and the rationale for each. We begin by suggesting three main leverage points that the courses engender. We then rely on the words of students who have taken the courses for insights into what they learned. We then critically assess some of the principles that have informed course design over time. We conclude by suggesting that paying attention to the creative arts gives rise to a rather different approach to business ethics, one grounded in the pragmatist tradition in philosophy. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence is shaping strategy, activities, interactions, and relationships in business and specifically in marketing. The drawback of the substantial opportunities AI systems and applications provide in marketing are ethical controversies. Building on the literature on AI ethics, the authors systematically scrutinize the ethical challenges of deploying AI in marketing from a multi-stakeholder perspective. By revealing interdependencies and tensions between ethical principles, the authors shed light on the applicability of a purely principled, deontological approach to AI ethics in marketing. To (...) reconcile some of these tensions and account for the AI-for-social-good perspective, the authors make suggestions of how AI in marketing can be leveraged to promote societal and environmental well-being. (shrink)

Rarely do everyday discussions of ethical issues invoke ethical theories. Even ethicists deploy ethical theories less frequently than one might expect. In my experience, the most powerful ethical arguments rarely appeal to an ethical theory. How is this possible? I contend that ethical argumentation can proceed successfully without invoking any ethical theory because the structure of good ethical argumentation involves leveraging a sturdy norm, where the norm is usually far more specific than a complete ethical theory. To illustrate this idea, (...) I present the argumentative structure of five powerful articles in the ethics literature. I further argue that the present model of ethical argumentation is consistent with the coherence model of ethical justification, but the former need not--and usually should not--invoke the latter explicitly for various practical reasons. (shrink)

This article outlines how the international push for inclusive education cannot be aligned with current education systems centred on neoliberal ideals of individualism, measurement, and competition. The way that these systems are organised means that a proportion of (usually marginalised) students are necessarily excluded. In order to meaningfully address the global education crisis, that sees millions of children and young people either out of school or unengaged with learning, this ontological misalignment must be acknowledged, and discourse and engagement around it (...) must be promoted. Drawing from the work of Donella Meadows, I argue that ‘high leverage points’ (information flows, rules, system goals, mindsets) are crucial places to intervene in education systems. Intervention at such points, while challenging, has the potential to lead to transformational and sustainable change; change that current ‘low leverage point’ initiatives fail to produce. I conclude with a call for further discourse and research into an examination of ‘high leverage points’ within education systems, how they interact, and how the development of an associated framework would be beneficial for researchers and development partners. (shrink)

Sociological theory, as represented in the two main U.S. theory journals, has been diverted from the project of generalized explanation by a propensity for over-refinement, a preference for small-scale conceptual innovations linked to specific and sometimes quite obscure cases, a tendency to focus on heroes of theory rather than their generalizable ideas, and too much attention to the flux and instability of social life. These conclusions are based on a content analysis of 445 journal articles over a recent 11-year period. (...) As an alternative, I propose focusing on high-leverage sociological concepts, those that have explanatory power across multiple settings, subfields, and levels of analysis, as well as the variables that are most important for conditioning their explanatory force. I connect the project with a recessive theme in the work of the mid-20th century sociologist and theorist Robert K. Merton. (shrink)

Sufficiency principles generally state that it is especially important for justice that people have enough of certain goods, but it can be hard to give a convincing answer as to what level of goods counts as enough. This paper examines a recent sufficiency view by George Sher, who argues that the threshold level of resources and opportunities that the state should provide for each citizen is whatever level gives one enough leverage to obtain further resources and opportunities without inordinate (...) difficulty or sacrifice. The argument relies on the idea that, with regard to resources and opportunities, the sufficient ability to live one’s life effectively requires only that one have enough of them as leverage. While Sher’s general account regarding “what counts as enough?” is promising in countering certain challenges typically raised against sufficiency principles, the approach to determine the threshold of resources and opportunities in terms of leverage is problematic. (shrink)

In this updated and revised version of his 2008 Society for Business Ethics presidential address, Richard Nielsen documents the characteristics and extent of the 2007–2009 economic crisis and analyzes how the ethics issues of the economic crisis are structurally related to a relatively new form of capitalism, high-leverage finance capitalism. Four types of high-leverage finance capitalism are considered: hedge funds; private equity-leveraged buyouts; high-leverage, subprime mortgage banking; and high-leverage banking.The structurally related problems with the four types (...) of high-leverage finance capitalism converged in something of a perfect economic storm. Explanations for the crisis are offered in the context of the type of the high-leverage finance capitalism system that permitted andfacilitated the economic crisis. Ethics issues and potential reforms are considered that may be able to mitigate the destructive effects of what Schumpeter referred to as the “creative destructive” effects of evolutionary forms of capitalism while realizing the Aristotelianeconomic ideal of creating wealth in such a way as to make us better people and the world a better place. (shrink)

An original argument about how scientific models often times distort reality rather than accurately reflect it. And it's this distortion that often gives scientific models their epistemic power.

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons LtdRecent research suggests that infants tend to add words to their vocabulary that are semantically related to other known words, though it is not clear why this pattern emerges. In this paper, we explore whether infants leverage their existing vocabulary and semantic knowledge when interpreting novel label–object mappings in real time. We initially identified categorical domains for which individual 24-month-old infants have relatively higher and lower levels of knowledge, irrespective of overall vocabulary size. (...) Next, we taught infants novel words in these higher and lower knowledge domains and then asked if their subsequent real-time recognition of these items varied as a function of their category knowledge. While our participants successfully acquired the novel label–object mappings in our task, there were important differences in the way infants recognized these words in real time. Namely, infants showed more robust recognition of high domain knowledge words. These findings suggest that dense semantic structure facilitates early word learning and real-time novel word recognition. (shrink)

Ethical or ‘socially sustainable’ sourcing mechanisms mandating labour standards among the suppliers and subcontractors that organisations source goods and services from are becoming more common. The issue of how labour activist groups such as trade unions can encourage organisations to adopt and strengthen these mechanisms within domestic production networks is largely unexplored. Using three cases of domestic sustainable sourcing campaigns developed by unions in Britain, the strategies used by labour activists, the characteristics of the organisations targeted and the motivations of (...) lead firms for improving sourcing practices are analysed. The article makes a significant contribution by demonstrating that organisational susceptibility to reputational risk is a key factor influencing the capacity of activist groups to convince and compel their targets to improve sourcing practices. It argues that different types of organisations are susceptible to reputational damage in different ways, that risk events provide opportunities for unions to strengthen their leverage against target organisations, and that the multidimensional nature of corporate reputation needs to be better considered for understanding how campaigns are framed and executed. (shrink)

Leveraging, according to David M. Anderson and his colleagues, is both a basic principle of human conduct and the most dominant strategy in recent years that individuals, organizations and countries use to pursue their ends. Although many scholars agree that a crisis of "over-leveraging" caused the financial crisis of 2008-2010, it has not been appreciated that an "over-leveraging" crisis has existed in American politics and the American family system as well. This book addresses the need for a "Leverage Mean" (...) (falling between the extremes of too much leverage and too little leverage) in the economy, politics, family life, and international relations. It identifies three different kinds of leveraging-bargaining, resource, and investment and provides an explanatory and normative theory which draws on the fields of economics, political science, sociology, history, psychology, international relations, law, and philosophy. Moreover, it shows how the dissolution of the Cold War, the dismantling of the modern family, and the rise of the Internet along with the deregulation of the financial services industry led to the diffusion of power which has made leveraging of the first importance for everyone. This book should be of interest to social scientists, philosophers, political theorists, public policy makers and politicians. David Anderson and his colleagues are the first to characterize and assess one of the major instruments of power of the contemporary era. This volume represents the best work on leverage since Archimedes and will be widely read and discussed. Benjamin Ginsberg, David Bernstein Professor of Political Science and Chair, Center for Advanced Governmental Studies, Johns Hopkins University Leverage might literally be the operative word of the 21st century. Anderson's volume is a wide-ranging and illuminating study of this fundamental and dynamic concept. Parag Khanna, Senior Fellow, New Amer ica Foundation, author of The Second World: How Emerging Powers Are Redefining Global Competition in the Twenty-first Century. (shrink)

(2008). Leveraging Higher Education's Role in Social Evolution: A Paradigmatic Strategy. World Futures: Vol. 64, Postformal Thought and Hierarchical Complexity, pp. 536-553.

The explosion of health-related costs in U.S. firms over more than a decade is a huge concern for managers. The initiation of Health and Safety programs at the firm level is an adequate Corporate Social Responsibility initiative to contain this evolution. However, in spite of their documented efficiency, firms underinvest in those programs. This appears as a puzzle for health economists. In this paper, we uncover a strong negative relation of financial leverage to the implementation of H&S programs. The (...) negative impact of debt on investment and CSR activities is generally interpreted as an efficient disciplinary effect of debt on managers. H&S are particularly well suited to revisit this evidence, given their strong profitability and homogeneity across firms. Very interestingly, the negative effect is stronger for firms with high free cash flows, for which debt is used to prevent overinvestment. This strongly suggests that debt, while disciplining managers, also discourages investments which are valuable both for firms and society. (shrink)

AI technologies are ubiquitous, manifesting in various forms and applications. Nowadays, many of them are presented as being general purpose, though this sometimes translates into having unclear purposes. Within this landscape, establishing normative criteria for the functioning of (some of) these artefacts has grown increasingly complex. In this work, we advocate the use of teleological explanation as a suitable ally in addressing the challenges arising in this scenario. We defend the idea that teleological explanation is particularly useful in the case (...) of artefacts in general, and we discuss how, with some adaptation, it can be leveraged to support the assessment of AI artefacts according to their purpose(s). Our contribution is thus threefold: (1) exploiting some of the assumptions adopted in teleological explanation to support the clarification of (general-purpose) AI artefacts’ purpose(s); (2) assisting in the comparison and assessment of AIs via metrics inspired by the literature concerning teleological explanation; and (3) providing insights for defining a unified framework for designing AI benchmarks. (shrink)

The global segmentation of production and distribution has resulted in highly complex global value chains where vertical and horizontal dynamics are equally important in determining working conditions and providing points of leverage for labour. Borrowing notions of multi-level governance, we propose an analytical framework for describing and explaining success and failure of labour agency when attempting to improve working conditions along GVCs. Our starting point is that the high complexity of GVCs and the absence of a global overarching authority (...) have been balanced by the emergence of governance mechanisms of different forms and at different levels. An assessment of these mechanisms, which emphasize process over institutions, reveals how different types of interactions and interdependencies along GVCs impact on labour’s use of power. We argue that, in order to fully situate labour agency within governance debates, any future research agenda needs to be driven by micro-level bottom-up approaches. (shrink)

Word embeddings derived from large language corpora have been successfully used in cognitive science and artificial intelligence to represent linguistic meaning. However, there is continued debate as to how well they encode useful information about the perceptual qualities of concepts. This debate is critical to identifying the scope of embodiment in human semantics. If perceptual object properties can be inferred from word embeddings derived from language alone, this suggests that language provides a useful adjunct to direct perceptual experience for acquiring (...) this kind of conceptual knowledge. Previous research has shown mixed performance when embeddings are used to predict perceptual qualities. Here, we tested if we could improve performance by leveraging the ability of Transformer-based language models to represent word meaning in context. To this end, we conducted two experiments. Our first experiment investigated noun representations. We generated decontextualized (“charcoal”) and contextualized (“the brightness of charcoal”) Word2Vec and BERT embeddings for a large set of concepts and compared their ability to predict human ratings of the concepts’ brightness. We repeated this procedure to also probe for the shape of those concepts. In general, we found very good prediction performance for shape, and a more modest performance for brightness. The addition of context did not improve perceptual prediction performance. In Experiment 2, we investigated representations of adjective–noun phrases. Perceptual prediction performance was generally found to be good, with the nonadditive nature of adjective brightness reflected in the word embeddings. We also found that the addition of context had a limited impact on how well perceptual features could be predicted. We frame these results against current work on the interpretability of language models and debates surrounding embodiment in human conceptual processing. (shrink)

The paper demonstrates the utility of the project to identify and deploy high-leverage sociological concepts that I recently advocated in these pages (Brint 2025). The paper takes up two of the high-leverage concepts identified in that paper: (1) interaction ritual chains, and (2) social closure mechanisms. The paper begins with a summary of my 2025 argument. The paper then discusses the two concepts using the framework advanced there. I show how the two fit the criteria I established for (...) identifying high-leverage sociological concepts. I provide illustrations of how they have been deployed across a wide range of settings, subfields, and levels of analysis. I also suggest revisions in the existing conceptualizations and applications to improve their analytical and explanatory power, and I identify conditioning variables that influence their impact on social relations. (shrink)

Democratic ownership in the sphere of economic production is often contrasted with capitalist ownership along the lines of transferability of legal rights, such as profit and governance rights. If capitalist ownership implies full transferability of legal rights in production, democratic ownership anchors legal rights with the current generation of workers in the firm. A worker cooperative is generally considered the best practical proxy for a democratic firm (Ellerman, 2021; Erdal, 2012); however, worker cooperatives remain rare in contemporary economies, while the (...) capitalist form of enterprise continues to dominate the markets despite contrary predictions by intellectual giants like John Stuart Mill. Why did democratic ownership fail to achieve scale? Worker cooperatives are most commonly established from scratch or by fully converting a capitalist firm. In this chapter, we argue that cooperatives have faced challenges because they did not introduce a mechanism that would allow for the gradual conversion of capitalist ownership into democratic ownership. We introduce an alternative proposal that can help scale democratic ownership using the mechanism of leveraged gradual cooperative conversions. In the literature, this solution is described as the “Cooperative ESOP”, since it uses the ESOP leveraged financing mechanism, which is attached to a cooperative vehicle (Ellerman et al., 2022 and Appendix). We argue that the mechanism of gradual and leveraged conversion, with the aid of institutional support, can help democratic ownership grow in our economies and become mainstream. (shrink)

A critical review of Collin Rice's book, Leveraging Distortions: Explanation, Idealization, and Universality in Science.

A recent virtual symposium in search for leverage points in business ethics education, organized by the Teaching Business Ethics section of the Journal of Business Ethics, has yielded a number of suggestions that we would like to share with our readers and, in particular, with educators and researchers who are passionate about andragogic innovations. This is not intended as a comprehensive research manifesto, but rather as a collegial conversation around matters that have preoccupied us for a long time.

In this extended case study, we examine how business leaders translate a responsible leadership mindset into practice. By studying the leadership team and stakeholders of a large US college dining provider, we found that organization executives leverage the lenient market category of local food to successfully connect with and satisfy the interests of different stakeholder groups. We show that lenient categories, those with ambiguity and unclear boundaries, could be used by organizations as strategic devices to integrate the diverse needs (...) of their stakeholders and foster positive stakeholder relationships. Based on our findings, we develop a theoretical model to illustrate how responsible leaders take advantage of meaning structures of the market category they have adopted to achieve both financial and social benefits for a broad range of stakeholders. (shrink)

When I think of the single change that would most successfully transform our teaching practice and leverage truly significant benefits, it would be to bring much more of what learners already know into the classroom so that it can be shared, examined, refined and improved. At present, it would seem that the majority mode of teaching in the areas of ethics and social responsibility does a rather poor job of this, tending instead towards silencing the wisdom that is in (...) the room in order that external perspectives can be more easily “instilled”. From many years of experimenting with a wide variety of approaches to teaching the subject, I find this to be deeply suboptimal and would seriously suggest that we ought to shift our practices in ways that make learners’ perspectives our primary material of interest. (shrink)

The utilisation of artificial intelligence (AI) in assessments is making headway and is increasingly changing the landscape of the field of education. The leaders and policymakers of higher education institutions should be cognisant of their significant role in ensuring that AI is used responsibly and ethically and implemented with human oversight. The two objectives of this study were firstly to determine the lecturer’s perspectives and experiences with implementing the Traffic Light Model in assessments. Secondly, the lecturer’s insights should be leveraged (...) to inform policy development and further implementation of TLM in the institution. The results of this inquiry provided a platform for policymakers to acknowledge and review the improvements that can be made with implementing the Model. (shrink)

Unmet legal needs contribute to housing, income, and food insecurity, along with other conditions that harm health and drive health inequity. Addressing health injustice requires new tools for the next generations of lawyers, doctors, and other healthcare professionals. An interprofessional group of co-authors argue that law and medical schools and other university partners should develop and cultivate Academic Medical-Legal Partnerships (A-MLPs), which are uniquely positioned to leverage service, education, and research resources, to advance health justice.

BackgroundInstitutional review boards (IRBs) have been criticised for delays in approvals for research proposals due to inadequate or inexperienced IRB staff. Artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models (LLMs), has significant potential to assist IRB members in a prompt and efficient reviewing process.MethodsFour LLMs were evaluated on whether they could identify potential ethical issues in seven validated case studies. The LLMs were prompted with queries related to the proposed eligibility criteria of the study participants, vulnerability issues, information to be disclosed (...) in the informed consent document (ICD), risk–benefit assessment and justification of the use of a placebo. Another query was issued to the LLMs to generate ICDs for these case scenarios.ResultsAll four LLMs were able to provide answers to the queries related to all seven cases. In general, the responses were homogeneous with respect to most elements. LLMs performed suboptimally in identifying the suitability of the placebo arm, risk mitigation strategies and potential risks to study participants in certain case studies with a single prompt. However, multiple prompts led to better outputs in all of these domains. Each of the LLMs included all of the fundamental elements of the ICD for all case scenarios. Use of jargon, understatement of benefits and failure to state potential risks were the key observations in the AI-generated ICD.ConclusionIt is likely that LLMs can enhance the identification of potential ethical issues in clinical research, and they can be used as an adjunct tool to prescreen research proposals and enhance the efficiency of an IRB. (shrink)

The overturn of Roe v. Wade has resulted in fewer rights and resources for people seeking abortion care, particularly in the South. The Hyde Amendment has historically restricted abortion access for those enrolled in Medicaid. We argue here that its guarantees of minimum abortion coverage should be leveraged to offset harms where possible.

This article explores how a farming community in Wellington (Bovlei) moved from dependence towards an empowered community through non-profit organisations’ (NPOs) transformative community development initiatives, undertaken together with the church’s social capital. This example serves as the backdrop to explore critical viewpoints by various scholars who are critical about how the church engages in an unequal and unjust society. The critical questions that remain are the following; who is the church?, what is the church’s role as a change agent? and (...) how should churches leverage social capital for development? Although various definitions have been given in conceptualising the church and its role in society, through this article, the author engages with the social capital theory in understanding how the transformation came about in this community by describing the churches’ involvement through a case study. (shrink)

Much scholarship on boundary-making focuses on dyadic relationships between “us” and “them.” Yet the presence of multiple categories within societies allows for complex interactions among more than two potentially relevant groups. To capture this phenomenon and its dynamics better, we develop the concept of leveraging: the strategic manipulation of social distance among three or more constructed groups for political gain. The use of one group as a lever against another may involve stigmatizing or elevating categories of people along boundaries of (...) race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender, class, sexual orientation, or other salient social markers. We theorize these processes and identify the motivations of the initiators of leveraging as well as the range of possible responses to it. We use a pair of empirical case studies drawn from contemporary Europe and additional examples from other settings to demonstrate the relevance of the concept. Conceptualizing leveraging both improves our scholarly understanding of group-making processes and offers political actors tools for interpreting and responding to a common set of strategic practices. (shrink)

Children at about age 18 months experience acceleration in word learning. This vocabulary explosion is a robust phenomenon, although the exact shape and timing vary from child to child. One class of explanations, which we term collectively as leveraged learning, posits that knowledge of some words helps with the learning of others. In this framework, the child initially knows no words and so learning is slow. As more words are acquired, new words become easier and thus it is the acquisition (...) of early words that fuels the explosion in learning. In this paper we examine the role of leveraged learning in the vocabulary spurt by proposing a simple model of leveraged learning. Our results show that leverage can change both the shape and timing of the acceleration, but that it cannot create acceleration if it did not exist in the corresponding model without leveraging. This model is then applied to the Zipfian distribution of word frequencies, which confirm that leveraging does not create acceleration, but that the relationship between frequency and the difficulty of learning a word may be complex. (shrink)

This article discusses connections between grounded action, leverage points, and paradigm transformation and transcendence. Part one provides background on Meadows' (1999) approach to leverage points as well as the concept of paradigms. Part two argues that grounded action is inherently suited for leverage points analysis and paradigm-based interventions. Part three offers an example of individual paradigm transformation in the educational context vis-à-vis Olson's (2006) grounded theory of driven succeeding. The article concludes with considerations of how the application (...) of grounded action in one classroom might leverage system-wide paradigm transformation. (shrink)

In this article, we analyse the role that artificial intelligence (AI) could play, and is playing, to combat global climate change. We identify two crucial opportunities that AI offers in this domain: it can help improve and expand current understanding of climate change, and it can contribute to combatting the climate crisis effectively. However, the development of AI also raises two sets of problems when considering climate change: the possible exacerbation of social and ethical challenges already associated with AI, and (...) the contribution to climate change of the greenhouse gases emitted by training data and computation-intensive AI systems. We assess the carbon footprint of AI research, and the factors that influence AI’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in this domain. We find that the carbon footprint of AI research may be significant and highlight the need for more evidence concerning the trade-off between the GHG emissions generated by AI research and the energy and resource efficiency gains that AI can offer. In light of our analysis, we argue that leveraging the opportunities offered by AI for global climate change whilst limiting its risks is a gambit which requires responsive, evidence-based, and effective governance to become a winning strategy. We conclude by identifying the European Union as being especially well-placed to play a leading role in this policy response and provide 13 recommendations that are designed to identify and harness the opportunities of AI for combatting climate change, while reducing its impact on the environment. (shrink)

Issues with current food systems have been problematised through various lenses, including concerns about the dominance of intensively produced animal-source foods (ASFs) or ultra-processed foods (UPFs) in diets on health, environmental sustainability and/or justice grounds. In this commentary, we argue that there is value in adopting a more common framing and approach for these food systems issues based on the understanding that ASFs and UPFs are interlinked manifestations of financialised food systems prioritising the interests of a select few large corporations (...) and their shareholders. Firstly, we outline some of the common drivers of the proliferation of UPFs and ASFs in current food systems, including a regulatory environment that prioritises the interests of large corporations and financiers above other considerations. Based on ecological regulation theory, we then propose multi-sectoral policy options and collective actions to improve both human and planetary health. These include (but are not limited to): re-orienting agricultural subsidies toward more agroecological operations; prioritising equity-focused measures, such as a universal basic income; land use value taxes; and revitalising competition policy to address agri-food industry consolidation. Implementing the proposed actions will likely require strong coordination and advocacy from various civil society groups. We suggest that a framing centred on financialised food systems may create space for allies to mobilise and effectively draw on collective resources, including public health, food sovereignty alliances, labour unions, farmers, small-scale agri-food businesses and retailers, consumer groups, animal welfare groups, governments without vested interests, and intergovernmental organisations. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the Guam Department of Education's (GDOE) decolonization efforts and the potential role of Philosophy for Children (P4C) as a strategic tool for its advancement. I begin with a discussion of Guam's colonial context and its implications for contemporary education on the island. While the GDOE's current attempts to decolonize Guam's public education emphasize the need for an "official body of knowledge," many CHamoru scholars and activists have argued that it is not enough. This paper agrees (...) that such content-based reforms are insufficient and advocates for a more nuanced approach to education through P4C. Drawing on the P4C literature and decolonial education, I argue that while P4C alone may not bring about structural change, its pedagogical framework offers a promising alternative when adapted to indigenous contexts. The paper proposes that P4C can serve as a "Trojan Horse" within public schools, fostering decolonial acts of resurgence by elevating indigenous knowledge, welcoming indigenous masters, and empowering CHamoru students within a Westernized educational setting. (shrink)

The legal industry is characterized by the presence of dense and complex documents, which necessitate automatic processing methods to manage and analyse large volumes of data. Traditional methods for extracting legal information depend heavily on substantial quantities of annotated data during the training phase. However, a question arises on how to extract information effectively in contexts that do not favour the utilization of annotated data. This study investigates the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) as a transformative solution for the (...) extraction of legal terms, presenting a novel approach to overcome the constraints associated with the need for extensive annotated datasets. Our research delved into methods such as prompt-engineering and fine-tuning to enhance their performance. We evaluated and compared, to a rule-based and BERT systems, the performance of four LLMs: GPT-4, Miqu-1-70b, Mixtral-8x7b, and Mistral-7b, within the scope of limited annotated data availability. We implemented and assessed our methodologies using Luxembourg’s traffic regulations as a case study. Our findings underscore the capacity of LLMs to successfully deal with legal terms extraction, emphasizing the benefits of one-shot and zero-shot learning capabilities in reducing reliance on annotated data by reaching 0.690 F1 Score. Moreover, our study sheds light on the optimal practices for employing LLMs in the processing of legal information, offering insights into the challenges and limitations, including issues related to terms boundary extraction. (shrink)

Should companies’ human rights responsibilities arise, in part, from their “leverage”—their ability to influence others’ actions through their relationships? Special Representative John Ruggie rejected this proposition in the United Nations Framework for business and human rights. I argue that leverage is a source of responsibility where there is a morally significant connection between the company and a rights-holder or rights-violator, the company is able to make a contribution to ameliorating the situation, it can do so at modest cost, (...) and the threat to human rights is substantial. In such circumstances companies have a responsibility to exercise leverage even though they did nothing to contribute to the situation. Such responsibility is qualified, not categorical; graduated, not binary; context-specific; practicable; consistent with the social role of business; and not merely a negative responsibility to avoid harm but a positive responsibility to do good. (shrink)

Due to G-7 countries' commitment to sustaining United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 8, which focuses on sustainable economic growth, there is a need to investigate the impact of tax revenue and institutional quality on economic growth, considering the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in the G-7 countries from 2012 to 2022. Cross-Sectional Augmented Autoregressive Distributed Lag (CS-ARDL) technique is used to analyze the data. The study's findings indicate a long-run equilibrium relationship among the variables under examination. The causality results can (...) be categorized as bidirectional, unidirectional, or indicating no causality. Based on the CS-ARDL results, the study recommends that G-7 governments and policymakers prioritize and strengthen the integration of AI into their institutions to stimulate growth in both the short- and long-term. However, the study cautions against overlooking the interaction between AI and tax revenue, as it did not demonstrate support for economic growth. While the interaction between AI and institutional quality shows potential for contributing to growth, it is crucial to implement robust measures to mitigate any potential negative effects that may arise from AI's interaction with tax systems. Therefore, the study suggests the development of AI-friendly tax policies within the G-7 countries, considering the nascent nature of the AI sector/industry. (shrink)

Designing a virtual environment within a digital game occupies a large part of the design procedure, requiring holistic attention and a broad arrangement of the game constituents. Considering other design disciplines, they occupy a unified design methodology; however, a comprehensive literature review reveals the lack of the intended design methodology in the digital game domain's virtual environment development, despite a currently proposed theoretical methodology trying to dissolve the issue. Hence, this research aims to determine the industry's requirements and provide a (...) set of assets included in current digital games as an initial step of providing such a design methodology for the domain. In this regard, the researchers reverse-engineered ten selected digital games, understanding the current condition of digital games via adopting the mentioned currently available design methodology. This dataset reveals a lack in the assets of the story layer in the recent digital games, despite their focus on being story-based. This dilemma leads to long text or speech conversations between game characters, disrupting the players while following the game. The current design focuses on environmental resources only, however, as a virtual landscape, the story needs to be reinforced to be a balanced and well-designed game. Hence, increasing the ratio of the assets in this layer will advance the games' interactivity. Also, as future work, this data set could pave the way for a digital game industry design tool regarding the virtual environment. (shrink)

First, the authors should be congratulated for bringing our attention to this important issue. They have made important observations about what may be holding us back in efforts to make progress in...

This systematic review synthesises the available evidence regarding the European understanding of workplace spirituality (definitions), the importance of spirituality and religion (evidence) as well as spiritual leadership (meaning and practice) in for-profitorganizations. The search for eligible studies was conducted in OPAC Plus, SCOPUS, Science Direct, JSTOR, EBSCO, and Google Scholar from 2007/01 to 2017/07. Three independent scholars extracted the data. Twenty studies were included (two mixed-methods, eight quantitative, ten qualitative) for the final quality assessment. A study quality assessment and thematic (...) analysis was conducted. This review gives suggestions for study quality improvement and reporting. Thematically, two different approaches to religion and spirituality (R/S) were detected: a) work has a spiritual dimension and b) religious and spiritual orientation as “spiritual capital”. Studies demonstrated positive effect on job satisfaction, health, commitment, company productivity and sustainability; Christian leadership does not address personal religious orientation; the spiritual dimension may lead to a change of perspective; workplace spirituality may exploit people for profit-oriented business goals; non-white Muslims experience discrimination. This systematic review provides robust evidence and findings for evidence-informed policymaking and encourages a more rigorous research in this field of study. (shrink)

Analytic semantics got its start when Frege pointed out differences in cognitive content between sentences that in some good sense “say the same.” Frege put cognitive content (in the form of sense) at the heart of semantic content. Most prefer nowadays to see cognitive contents as generated by semantic contents in context; a sentence's cognitive significance is an aspect rather of the information imparted by its use. I argue for a particular version of this idea. Semantic contents generate cognitive contents (...) by operating levers in a larger piece of machinery, involving also the presupposition P one is leaning on and the subject matter M under discussion. A sentence's cognitive content is what its literal-content-restricted-to-P-worlds says about M. It's by triggering different presuppositions and/or different subject matters that coreferential names make their distinctive mark on a sentence's felt information value. (shrink)

As anthropologists, we welcome Peterson and colleagues (2026) call to consider dementia caregiving as relational and dyadic—an approach resonant with longstanding anthropological challenges to the...

Despite the theoretically important role of green human resource management (HRM), relatively little research has been discovered so far about this role particularly in the Oil and Gas industry. We contribute to fill this gap by developing and testing a set of hypotheses to provide a first attempt at analyzing the antecedents and outcomes of green HRM practices in the Qatari Oil and Gas industry. Data were collected from 144 managers and analyzed using Partial least squares (PLS). The analysis shows (...) that both top management support and internal environmental orientation positively influence green HRM, which in turn has a significant positive impact on environmental performance. The results also provide evidence for the mediating effect of green HRM on the links between both top management support and internal environmental orientation, and environmental performance. Moreover, environmental performance is found to positively influence organizational performance. The implications of these results for theory and HRM practices in the Oil and Gas industry are taken into consideration. (shrink)

This paper examines whether appealing to learners’ moral identity makes a significant contribution to improving their ethical decision making beyond traditional, rule-based teaching. In response to criticisms leveled at rule-based ethics teaching by alternative approaches, we identify moral identity theory and experiments in moral psychology as useful sources to draw on for the creation of a new, identity-based ethics teaching approach. We develop and apply a set of regular self-reflection focused writing tasks added to the traditional teaching program over a (...) one-semester period, and assess the outcomes of an overall sample of 149 postgraduate business school students, who were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: exposure to both identity-based tasks and rule-based teaching, exposure to rule-based teaching only, and the control condition. Our findings show that, while the three groups reported the same level of ethical decision making at the beginning of the semester, at the end of the semester the students who were exposed to both identity-based and rule-based teaching reported higher level of ethical decision making compared to those who were only exposed to rule-based education. In addition, the students who received rule-based teaching reported higher ethical decision making compared to those in the control condition. These results suggest that a teaching approach which appeals to the learner’s moral identity can act as an effective leverage point when complementing rule-based teaching. This simple approach should be widely adopted as common practice in graduate business schools. (shrink)

Partnerships can play an important role in addressing environmental concerns and fostering environmental improvement. In this context, we argue that a more elaborate understanding is needed of how partners intend to reach beyond the partnership boundaries and target stakeholders at the firm, industry, supply-chain, or societal levels. As environmental improvement is intertwined with the process of change, we build on the theory of planned change to explain how the focus on selected partnership mechanisms may help partners anticipate and overcome barriers (...) when targeting environmental improvement at these different levels. We test our framework, using a sample of 566 environmental partnerships formed in the USA, and provide rich insights into how partners intend to reach beyond the partnership boundaries. From a practical perspective, these insights may inform corporate managers’ decision to configure environmental partnerships in terms of the target group and suitable partnership mechanism. From a theory perspective, the study helps develop a more systematic understanding of what partners intend to do and when partnerships may provide benefits in addressing level-specific change barriers. These insights provide a first step in positioning partnerships in the broader context of environmental change and encourage future research to move from the intentions to the actual outcomes. (shrink)

Obesity is a public health problem influenced by behavioral patterns that span an ecological spectrum of individual-level factors, social network factors and environmental factors. Both individual and environmental approaches necessarily include significant influences from social networks, but how and under what conditions social networks influence behavior change is often not clearly mapped out either in the obesity literature or in many intervention designs. In this paper, we provide an analysis of recent empirical work in obesity research that explicates social network (...) influences on eating behaviors. We argue that a relational rather than individualistic view of personhood should help us better understand the content and context of social network relations that inform health behavior choices. We introduce the concept of ‘identity-constitutive affiliations’ as the glue that binds these social relationships together. Finally, we outline the implications for public health ethics in the development of effective interventions to address overweight and obesity, leveraging the content and context of social network ties to reinforce healthy (or alter unhealthy) eating. More complex treatment of positive and negative behaviors stemming from social network connections should lead to more comprehensive theoretical models of health behavior change and more effective public health interventions. (shrink)

Firms usually need to attract debt to form and grow, but increasing financial leverage also entails increased risks and costs for stakeholders, such as customers and employees. Accordingly, past research suggests that for common commercial firms (CCFs), which prioritize profits, higher leverage leads to lower sales growth and higher employment costs. However, Certified B Corporations (CBCs) distinguish themselves by having a credible prosocial mission and, therefore, might be better insulated against the adverse effects of higher leverage. Using (...) a European multi-country matched sample of 136 CBCs and 136 CCFs, we find that the negative relationship between leverage and sales growth and the positive relationship between leverage and employment costs are weaker for CBCs than CCFs. Taken together, due to their certified prosocial mission, CBCs enjoy an advantage in debt financing compared to CCFs. (shrink)