Using empirical data, this research aims to explore the interplay of sustainability-driven leadership (green transformational leadership) and its influence on environmental performance. It delves into the connection between green transformational leadership, facilitated through green innovation, and its effects on employee environmental performance. Additionally, it investigates how employees' green behavior moderates this relationship within Ghanaian industries. A multi-item survey questionnaire was used to collect data from employees and their supervisors working in the manufacturing and service industries in Accra and Kumasi, Ghana. (...) Analysis was conducted on 373 valid responses using SPSS AMOS and PROCESS analysis. The study's results unveiled that green transformational leadership positively influences green innovation, subsequently impacting employee environmental performance within the organization. Moreover, it was discovered that employee green behavior played a moderating role in the connection between green innovation and employee environmental performance. Based on the study's findings, the implications for practitioners are discussed. (shrink)

This paper presents a novel methodology for integrating indigenous knowledge systems into AI development to counter cognitive imperialism and foster inclusivity. By critiquing the dominance of Western epistemologies and highlighting the risks of bias, the authors argue for incorporating diverse epistemologies. The proposed framework outlines a participatory approach that includes indigenous perspectives, ensuring AI benefits all. The methodology draws from AI ethics, indigenous studies, and postcolonial theory, emphasizing co-creation with indigenous communities, ethical protocols for indigenous data governance, and adaptation of (...) AI algorithms. Case studies in natural language processing, content moderation, and healthcare demonstrate the methodology’s effectiveness and importance. By offering a concrete methodology for decolonizing AI, this paper contributes significantly to AI ethics and social justice, providing a roadmap for equitable, culturally respectful AI. (shrink)

The Atumpan, a talking drum central to Akan culture in Ghana, has historically functioned as a musical instrument and a speech surrogate for communicating messages, honouring dignitaries, and preserving oral traditions. In this article, I explore the evolution of the Atumpan’s communicative role in contemporary Akan society, particularly as it intersects with digital communication and globalisation. Using an autoethnographic approach and drawing on musico-linguistic theory, I analyse how the Atumpan’s significance has shifted from a functional speech tool to one more (...) centred on symbolic, ceremonial, and performative meanings. This shift reflects a broader trend in which traditional instruments retain cultural authority but are reshaped by modern technological practices. The article offers insights into the enduring power of the Atumpan in a changing world, and explore ways in which they continue to shape cultural identity, while acknowledging the limitations posed by its diminished role in direct communication in the digital age. (shrink)

The divergence on the subject of faith, which commenced in the first century of Hijrī with debates concerning the faith of those who commit major sins, persisted for centuries with the involvement of numerous sects and schools. The aforementioned debates encompassed a wide range of topics, including the definition of faith, the relationship between faith and deeds, the relationship between faith and Islam, the increase and decrease of faith, the perfection of faith, and exceptions in faith. These diverse perspectives on (...) these issues were reflected in hadith literature. This subject was extensively discussed in muṣannaf hadith sources classified by ahl al-ḥadīt̲h̲ in the 3rd century, and it was included as a separate chapter in al-Buk̲h̲ārī Muslim and Tirmid̲h̲ī’s al-D̲j̲āmiʿ and al-Nasāʾī’s al-Sunan, and as a chapter heading in Ibn Mād̲j̲a’s al-Sunan. It is evident that various sects, factions, and schools of thought rely on the authority of the Prophet and legitimacy of hadiths to substantiate their own perspectives and counter the assertions of their adversaries. Historically, numerous sects and schools of thought have engaged in propagation of falsehoods attributed to the Prophet and fabrication of hadiths in his name. Conversely, muḥaddit̲h̲s or specialists in Hadith, engaged in a persistent effort to combat the fabrication of Hadiths. They regarded the collection of fabricated narrations ascribed to the Prophet as a pivotal aspect of this endeavor. With the beginning of 5th century, studies of muḥaddit̲h̲s that comprised mawḍūʿ narrations came to constitute mawḍū‘āt literature. This article utilizes an analytical approach to elucidate the nature of faith by examining the narratives concerning faith within the context of mawḍūʿāt literature. The investigation does not extend to the veracity of narrations within mawḍūʿāt literature; rather, it is based on the assumption of their fabrication by the author.This approach enables a comparative analysis of understanding of faith in mawḍūʿāt literature and the main hadith sources. Additionally, it sheds light on role of theological and political conflicts in fabrication of hadith. The study's findings indicate the absence of a uniform understanding of faith in mawḍūʿāt literature, thereby unveiling a multifaceted conception of faith, with each sect fabricating narrations that align with their unique interpretation of faith.The paucity of research on understanding of faith in mawḍūʿāt literature, despite the abundance of studies on subject of faith in the main hadith sources, underscores the significance of this article. (shrink)

Although regulators have identified ethical lapses as a key factor contributing to auditors’ failure to detect their clients’ fraudulent financial reporting, research using ethical theory to examine auditors’ fraud detection remains limited. We provide evidence on the joint effect of ethical idealism and trait skepticism on auditors’ fraud judgments. Ethical idealism reflects an individual’s concern for the welfare of others while trait skepticism reflects an individual’s disposition to validating a proposition. Forsyth theorizes that there is an association between ethical idealism (...) and tolerance for deception. Drawing on that insight, we posit that ethical idealism and trait skepticism have a complementary effect on auditors’ fraud planning performance. This is because the former determines an auditor’s tolerance for allowing a client to get away with an ethically questionable act while the latter is important in determining how evidence is generally sought and evaluated. We used the Forsyth ethical position questionnaire to measure ethical idealism and the Hurtt :149–171, 2010) scale to measure trait skepticism. Our results indicate that there is a significant positive association between trait skepticism and the number of effective audit procedures but only for auditors who have high ethical idealism. The results highlight the importance of measuring and controlling for the effects of these traits when evaluating fraud detection performance. The paper also contributes by showing that an ethics theory can generate additional understanding of and insights into an important accounting phenomenon. (shrink)

Kwame Gyekye offers a philosophical interpretation and critical analysis of the African cultural experience in modern times. Critically employing Western political and philosophical concepts to clear, comparative advantage, Gyekye addresses a wide range of concrete problems afflicting postcolonial African states, such as ethnicity and nation-building, the relationship of tradition to modernity, the nature of political authority and political legitimation, political corruption, and the threat to traditional moral and social values, practices, and institutions in the wake of rapid social change.

A political and philosophical manifesto considers the ramifications of a world in which Western society is divided from other cultures, evaluating the limited capacity of differentiating societies as compared to the power of a united world.

K. Anthony Appiah, the author of the internationally best-selling Cosmopolitanism, analyzes what causes societies to end cruelty and injustices - such as slavery, foot binding, or honor killing. Can a government through its laws halt egregious violations of human decency and can mere moral instruction bring an end to human suffering? No, says Appiah, demonstrating how reform succeeds only when it enlists the primal human sense of honor. When it comes to morality, honor is the lever arm that connects what (...) we know to what we do. (shrink)

This text explores the ethical significance of identity, including our gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion and sexuality, for our obligations to others and to ourselves.

Abusua do funu. The matriclan loves a corpse. AKAN PROVERB My father died, as I say, while I was trying to finish this book. His funeral was an occasion for strengthening and reaffirming the ties that bind me to Ghana and “my father's house'...

Good Agricultural Practices are central to sustainability standards and certification programmes in the global cocoa chain. Pruning is one of the practices promoted in extension services associated with these sustainability efforts. Yet concerns exist about the low adoption rate of these GAPs by smallholder cocoa farmers in Ghana. A common approach to addressing this challenge is based on creating enabling conditions and offering appropriate incentives. We use the concepts of inscription and affordance to trace the vertically coordinated travel of recommended (...) pruning from research to extension and farming sites, and to describe how pruning is carried out differently at each site. Our analysis suggests that enactments of pruning at the extension site reduce the number of options and space for interactions, and this constrains making the practice meaningful to farmers’ repertoires. The conventions guiding and legitimising actions at this site, reinforced by sustainability standards, certification schemes and associated inspections and audits, favour standardised recommendations and consequently narrow room for context-specific diagnostics and adaptions. Therefore, we reframe the adoption problem as a matter of fit between different sites in the ‘agricultural research value chain’ embedded in the operational cocoa chain. Our contribution problematises the dominant framing of low adoption and highlights that the movement of pruning and the sequential enactment at different sites constrain the affordances available for rendering the practice meaningful to farmers’ repertoires. Consequently, addressing the low uptake of GAPs requires institutional work towards conventions that can construct a fit between sites along the agricultural research value chain. (shrink)

Sara Suleri has written recently, in Meatless Days, of being treated as an "otherness machine"-and of being heartily sick of it.20 Perhaps the predicament of the postcolonial intellectual is simply that as intellectuals-a category instituted in black Africa by colonialism-we are, indeed, always at the risk of becoming otherness machines, with the manufacture of alterity as our principal role. Our only distinction in the world of texts to which we are latecomers is that we can mediate it to our fellows. (...) This is especially true when postcolonial meets postmodern; for what the postmodern reader seems to demand of Africa is all too close to what modernism-in the form of the postimpressionists-demanded of it. The role that Africa, like the rest of the Third World, plays for Euro-American postmodernism-like its better-documented significance for modernist art-must be distinguished from the role postmodernism might play in the Third World; what that might be it is, I think, too early to tell. What happens will happen not because we pronounce on the matter in theory, but will happen out of the changing everyday practices of African cultural life.For all the while, in Africa's cultures, there are those who will not see themselves as Other. Despite the overwhelming reality of economic decline; despite unimaginable poverty; despite wars, malnutrition, disease, and political instability, African cultural productivity grows apace: popular literatures, oral narrative and poetry, dance, drama, music, and visual art all thrive. The contemporary cultural production of many African societies, and the many traditions whose evidences so vigorously remain, is an antidote to the dark vision of the postcolonial novelist. 20. Sara Suleri, Meatless Days, p. 105. Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor of philosophy and literature at Duke University, is the author of a number of books, including For Truth in Semantics, Necessary Questions, and In My Father's House, a collection of essays on African cultural politics. His first novel, Avenging Angel, was published in 1990. (shrink)

Judeo-Christian and Anglo-Saxon forms of marriage have injected patrilineal values and companionate expectations into the Akan matrilineal family structure. As Anthony Appiah demonstrates, these infusions have generated severe strains in the matrikin social structures and, in extreme cases, resulted in the break up of families. In this essay, I investigate the ideological politics at play in this patrilinealization of Asante society.

Through most of the twentieth century, life scientists grew increasingly sceptical of the biological significance of folk classifications of people by race. New work on the human genome has raised the possibility of a resurgence of scientific interest in human races. This paper aims to show that the racial sceptics are right, while also granting that biological information associated with racial categories may be useful.

Some three score years ago, the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess found himself dissatisfied with “what are called ‘theories of truth’ in philosophical literature.” “The discussion has already lasted some 2500 years,” he wrote. “The number of participants amounts to a thousand, and the number of articles and books devoted to the discussion is much greater.” In this great ocean of words, he went on, the philosophers had often made bold statements about what “the man in the street” or “Das Volk” (...) or “la conscience humaine” made of truth or Wahrheit or vérité. And Naess had a few simple questions about these claims: “How do the philosophers know these things? What is the source of their knowledge? What have they done to arrive at it? … their writings,” he complained, “contain almost nothing of this matter.”1 And so Naess began the research that resulted in the publication in 1938 of his first book in English: “Truth” As Conceived By Those Who Are Not Professional Philosophers. (shrink)

This article defends an account of racism as centrally an ideology, a system of illusory ideas. It argues that the relevant ideology has the effect of oppressing people of some racial identities, an idea it explains and explores. It defines ‘racialism’ as a kind of essentialism about racial identities and argues that it is false. Both racialism and the vice of racism, which consists of having morally impermissible attitudes to people in virtue of their racial identities, are among the consequences (...) of racial ideology. On this view, not all differential treatment on the basis of racial identity is racist. (shrink)

This chapter identifies three domains of philosophical questions about work. First, an ontological issue: What is work? This question is both historical and conceptual, as questions in social ontology usually are. Second, an ethical issue: How does work fit into the good life? The hard problem here is to substitute, in new economic conditions, for the four main things a good job currently does: first, produce the goods and services we need, while also providing people with income, sociability, and significance. (...) These are issues on which many popular writers on the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” and on globalization have, of course, written for some time. But what’s lacking, the chapter claims, is serious organized reflection on the normative issues raised by these challenges. And that leads to the third cluster of concerns: How should law and other sources of normative authority be configured to allow work to contribute to the flourishing of workers, and how should the opportunities and rewards of work be shared? (shrink)

This article argues against the view that affirmative action is wrong because it involves assigning group rights. First, affirmative action does not have to proceed by assigning rights at all. Second, there are, in fact, legitimate “group rights” both legal and moral; there are collective rights—which are exercised by groups—and membership rights—which are rights people have in virtue of group membership. Third, there are continuing harms that people suffer as blacks and claims to remediation for these harms can fairly treat (...) the (social) property of being black as tracking the victims of those harms. Affirmative action motivated in this way aims to respond to individual wrongs; wrongs that individuals suffer, as it happens, in virtue of their membership in groups. Finally, the main right we have when we are being considered for jobs and places at colleges is that we be treated according to procedures that are morally defensible. Morally acceptable procedures sometimes take account of the fact that a person is a member of a certain social group. (shrink)

_Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah explores how early social scientists developed our modern understandings of society through their theories of religion_ The foundations of modern social science were built on the study of religion, the acclaimed thinker Kwame Anthony Appiah argues. Delving into the intellectual currents of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he investigates how formative thinkers—notably Edward Burnett Tylor, Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber—grappled with the concepts of society and religion as interdependent categories. Appiah shows (...) how their efforts to define religion, or evade the task, mark the power and limitations of social thought in ways that persist among theorists today. Religion was not merely an object of study but a framework through which early social scientists established sociology as a discipline. Appiah also examines more recent work in both interpretive sociology and evolutionary and cognitive psychology about the mechanisms through which communities form beliefs and values—while underscoring the enduring significance of these earlier debates for contemporary social thought. Throughout, he intertwines storytelling, historical analysis, and philosophical reflection to show how our ideas about society and culture have been, and continue to be, forged in dialogue with religious questions. (shrink)

Gaining ethical approval for qualitative health research and implementing all the planned research processes in a proposed study are not straightforward endeavours. The situation becomes more complex when qualitative research is conducted in a cross-national healthcare and academic context. Also, it is even exhausting when the study is student-based, as student researchers may be considered novices and inexperienced researchers, especially for field-based research. Our aim in this reflective paper is to present, reflect, and discuss the experiences of a doctoral researcher (...) in dealing with two independent institutional review boards in Canada and Ghana during an interdisciplinary Ph.D. project and the ethical dilemmas encountered while collecting data in Ghana. Based on the researcher’s experiences, it became apparent that consent and its documentation can have cultural implications in different settings; hence, institutional review boards must exercise reflexivity in their protocol review practice. Also, sharing research data with participants and institutional leaders while maintaining participant confidentiality and privacy in institutional ethnographic research requires sensitivity to bi-lateral ethical values. With the experiences shared in this paper, we advocate for a dialogic ethical review process in qualitative research where researchers and research ethics boards engage in ongoing dialogue rather than the usual prescriptive format research ethics reviews often assume. (shrink)

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This book aims to allow readers with no previous exposure to professional philosophy to gain an understanding of the approaches and the positions current in the field and to prepare them for further reading.

The more passages one examines in the translations from Arabic to Latin and from Arabic to English and other modern languages, the more mistakes one comes across in the translation of the Arabic expression ‘alā al-qaṣd al-awwal . The mistakes stem from the failure to distinguish between two senses of the expression, one an adverb, and the other a famous philosophic concept. Failing to distinguish between the two senses, the translators translated the phrase literally, often with unsatisfactory results. In this (...) paper, I shall indicate a Greek word which was rendered by the Arabic ‘alā al-qaṣd al-awwal. I shall refer to some English translations from the Arabic and show how wrong they are. I shall suggest that in Arabic philosophy itself al-Fārābī, rather than Avicenna, may have been the origin of the philosophic concepts of “first and second intentions.” I shall point out that although these concepts may have been introduced into Latin scholasticism by Raymond Lull, he could not have derived them from the Logic of al-Ghazālī, as has been alleged. (shrink)

Les Européens semblent se jouer à nouveau des Africains, mais avec des armes différentes des fusils utilisés pendant conquêtes et colonisations. L’ambigüité entretenue autour du terme « restitution » par les musées européens, en particulier allemands et britanniques, en constitue un exemple frappant. Par restitution, ils entendent souvent prêts temporaires ou permanents d’objets d’art africains. Car, admettre la restitution définitive de ces objets revient à reconnaître la réalité des raids et pillages coloniaux ainsi que le génocide de certains peuples. Des (...) excuses juridiques sont également avancées. Kwame Opoku considère qu’il n’y a pas de difficulté juridique s’il y a volonté de faire. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Physicalism The Argument for Physicalism Quasi‐Physicalism Conclusion.