bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Political Ontology
Authors: Hay Colin
Published: September 2009

This article examines the relevance of ontology to political analysis. It explains that as political science became more reflexive and less confident that it was before, ontological concerns have increasingly come to the fore. It stresses the fact that no political analysis has ever been ontologically neutral. It discusses the concept of political ontology, the status of ontological claims, and ontological disputes in political analysis. It also highlights the consistent disparity between the often tacit and normalized analytical assumptions of existing mainstream approaches to political analysis and those which emerge from sustained ontological reflection.
Mistaken Ideas and Their Effects
Authors: Clarke Lee
Published: September 2009

This article describes the negative effects of mistaken ideas focusing on the case of the history of U.S. nuclear war planning and diplomacy. It suggests that nuclear war planning and nuclear war talking were poorly coordinated and there was no overarching coordination of the two systems, which allowed each to be driven by different dynamics, with different audiences for their actions and different environmental constraints. Deterrence rhetoric was also used misleadingly to try to convince audiences that America's war planning was animated by rational, intellectual considerations. That rhetoric was aimed at misleading domestic and foreign audiences into believing that civilian politicians both were in control of nuclear weapons and understood the technologies they had at their disposal.
Language, Its Stakes, and Its Effects
Authors: Gal Susan
Published: September 2009

This article aims to illustrate how linguistic practices affect politics, focusing on the naturalization of institutional power through linguistic means. It considers how narratives, frames, and discursive genres of various kinds are used in public events to construct and occasionally subvert popular understandings of political processes. It discusses the so-called linguistic nationalism, the effects of state actions on the linguistic usages of their populations, and talks about how linguistic repertoires and language ideologies of speakers oriented not to states but to global networks that are outside the purview of standardization.
Historical Knowledge and Evidence
Authors: Franzosi Roberto
Published: September 2009

This article analyses the importance of evidence and historical knowledge in contextual political analysis focusing on the works of historian Carlo Ginzburg. It suggests that the works of Ginzburg, his methodological and his epistemological writings, and autobiographical considerations raise many questions and doubts concerning the issues of historical knowledge and evidence. It discusses the skill of Ginzburg as a master storyteller and highlights the difference between historians and social scientists in terms of their opinion about facts, evidence, and data.
Why and How Place Matters
Authors: Therborn Göran
Published: September 2009

This article describes the importance of the concept of place in politics. It discusses the origins of place and the ancient tradition in politics and suggests that place matters in three kinds of politics: democratic, military, and symbolic. It explains that places mold actors, structure their life chances, and provide them with identities and traditions of social and political action. Places are strategic sites of action and the creation, development, or destruction of places form an important part in political agendas.
Population Composition as an Object of Political Struggle
Authors: Kertzer David I. , Arel Dominique
Published: September 2009

This article examines the conception of population composition as an object of political struggle. It acknowledges that census holds a powerful sway over political analysts and explains that census becomes a political battleground not due to vitiation of what should be a technical exercise, but rather because of its fundamental role in representing groups. It identifies the agents of category construction in census and describes the three models of linking state-recognized identity categories to political power and evaluates their application to Soviet ethnogenesis. It suggests that the decision to categorize the composition of a population along cultural markers, and the formulation of these categories are political choices and that the affirmation of an identity by an individual on the census, within the repertoire offered, is a matter of choice.
Duchamp's Urinal: Who Says What's Rational When Things Get Tough?
Authors: Apter David E.
Published: September 2009

This article examines the relevance of discourse in politics taking Duchamp's urinal as an example. It suggests that discourse is not a major concern in social and political analysis and proposes that discourse theory is more than an addendum to political science. It attempts to make the case that discourse theory is, for political analysis a way of understanding those aspects of politics that have to do with context and meaning. It analyses how events are endowed with meaning and examines in these terms how discourse becomes a source as well as a means of political power.
The Behavioral Revolution and the Remaking of Comparative Politics
Authors: Pye Lucian
Published: September 2009

This article analyses the emergence of the behavioural approach in comparative politics after World War 2. The behavioural approach had four significant dimensions. These are the emphasis on methodology upon quantification and the statistical analysis of data sets, the recognition that all political acts involve choices by specific agents or decision, and the uninhibited exploration of the concepts and findings of the other social sciences. This article describes the factors that triggered the so-called behavioural revolution in comparative politics including the stress between universal and contextualized knowledge, work on political development and modernization theory, and the Social Science Research Council's (SSRC) establishment of the Committee on Comparative Politics.
Material Evidence (1): Archaeology
Authors: Humphries Mark
Published: September 2009

This article on material evidence for early Christianity begins with examples of the intersection of archaeology, pseudo-archaeology, and media attention. Such instances demonstrate that the study of the early Christian material record frequently excites extraordinary emotions. While such concerns will be attached particularly to discoveries associated with the period of the New Testament, the study of early Christian archaeology as a whole has often been held in tension between what might be termed ‘dogmatic concerns’ and ‘scientific archaeology’. While the discussion surveys the range of archaeological evidence for early Christianity and the potential avenues of inquiry that it opens up for modern scholars, it also offers a critical summary of how the study of early Christian archaeology has developed, and how interpretations have often been driven by interests extraneous to the evidence itself.
Palaeography and Codicology
Authors: Mathisen Ralph W.
Published: September 2009

The study of both Greek and Latin palaeography was furthered by the publication of many manuscript facsimiles beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, and of indexes of manuscript catalogues and microfilm catalogues in the twentieth. The study of papyrus documents has its own sub-discipline: papyrology. Codicology, on the other hand, studies the materials from which books were constructed. Diplomatics studies the provenance (origin) of charters and archival documents. Taken together, codicology and palaeography have much to tell about how early Christian writings were preserved from antiquity until the modern day. Materials that were used for bookmaking included papyrus, wax tablets, parchment, and vellum. They were fabricated into books in two formats: the scroll and the codex.
The West (1): Italy, Gaul, and Spain
Authors: Humphries Mark
Published: September 2009

For centuries, the historiographical model of Gregory of Tours has dominated efforts to trace the history of Christianity in western Europe. However, even where archaeological evidence was admitted, it tended to be considered within a theological framework. These days, the approach to the evidence is altogether more sophisticated: all forms of evidence are considered as much as possible in the context of the societies in which they were produced. This article capitalizes on these new approaches and challenges traditional accounts of the development of Christianity in western Europe that emphasize ecclesiastical structures for their own sake. It aims to locate the history of early western Christianity – and not just the Church – in the social contexts in which it evolved and to illuminate its development by appealing to the widest range of sources possible.
The East (1): Greece and Asia Minor
Authors: Van Dam Raymond
Published: September 2009

The apostle Paul was primarily responsible for the initial introduction of Christianity in western, central, and southern Asia Minor and in the Greek peninsula. During the mid-first century his evangelism had taken him from the first communities of Christians in Palestine and Syria as far as the northern frontier regions in the Balkans. Paul's writings were even more influential; in particular, his letters were included in the canon of the New Testament, along with the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles. As a result, while the Gospels of course highlighted Jesus's ministry in Palestine, much of the rest of the New Testament represented the concerns of early Christian communities in Asia Minor and Greece. Asia Minor in particular retained its vital importance in eastern Christianity for centuries, producing several of the major theologians of late antiquity.
The Biblical Canon
Authors: Holmes Michael W.
Published: September 2009

Christianity has, for much of its history, worked with a closed canon of scripture, ‘canon’ in the sense of a clearly defined and authoritative list of writings considered to be scripture. In such circumstances, every document that is viewed as ‘scripture’ is at the same time also considered to be ‘canonical’. After defining key terms, this article discusses Jewish Scriptures in early Christianity such as the canon of the Septuagint, and the formation of a Second Testament in early Christianity. A significant portion of the Christian scriptures was taken over from the Jewish milieu out of which the Christian movement emerged.
Women and Gender
Authors: Kraemer Ross S.
Published: September 2009

Emerging scholarship in the late 1970s was beginning to inquire about the reliability of ancient male depictions of women, and about how male interests might shape their representations of female experience. The section on the history of scholarship would thus have been relatively brief, particularly if the emphasis was on scholarship of the last several decades. This article deals with several overlapping issues, including prosopographic work (the identification of particular actual ancient Christian women); the reconstruction of the activities and beliefs of Christian women; an analysis of those activities and beliefs from the perspective of the study of religions more broadly and theoretically; and a consideration of specifically Christian constructions of gender within the broader discourses of gender in the ancient world.
Apologetics
Authors: Edwards Mark
Published: September 2009

In Greek forensic usage, an ‘apology’ (apologia) is a formal speech on behalf of the defendant. The first surviving works to bear this title professed to be records of the speech delivered by Socrates in reply to a capital charge in 399 BCE. The autobiographical element dominates the apologies of Lucian, Apuleius, and Libanius, all conceived in imitation of Plato's Socrates, though none of these erudite sophists seems to have shared his desire to convert the audience to philosophy. Christians, on the other hand, being ambassadors for Christ in court, as elsewhere, could not fulfil the injunction to ‘give an apology for the hope that is in you’ without pronouncing judgement on their own judges. No distinction between polemic, protreptic, and apologetic appears to have been observed by the early Christians, least of all by those who consciously aped the rhetoric of the schools.
Martyr Passions and Hagiography
Authors: Harvey Susan Ashbrook
Published: September 2009

A large body of literature survives from the early Christian period, devoted first to accounts of martyrdom suffered on behalf of the emerging religion and then to lives of exemplary Christian witness. They appeared in every language of the early Christian period, establishing literary traditions that flourished throughout the medieval and Byzantine periods, and even today. These texts have an importance for early Christian studies separate from their role in the cult of saints, and their study has its own scholarly issues. This article addresses these literary concerns, rather than those related to the cult of saints. ‘Hagiography’ is an umbrella term covering writings about holy persons. By the Middle Ages, it was a particular literary form: the ‘Life’, or vita, of a saint, distinct from the martyr's ‘passion’, the account of a martyr's suffering death.
Poetry and Hymnography (2): The Greek World
Authors: McGuckin J. A.
Published: September 2009

Greek Christian hymns are a massive part of the surviving literary record of the early church, but have rarely attracted the level of scholarly attention that they deserve. This article discusses Greek hymnody; the classical origins of the Greek Christian hymns; the Bible and the ancient liturgy; stages of Syrian influence on Byzantine hymnography; hymns of the heterodox–orthodox Struggles; littérateur poets in Greek late antiquity; and the flowering of Byzantine hymnography in the sixth to eleventh Centuries. In Greek hymnody, one can see creed, antiphon, poem, prayer, song, and sacrament welded to form a seamless unity: here Byzantine theology, mysticism, and liturgical chant merge into a profound symbiosis in a programme that already consciously understood itself to be a theology of beauty and of culture. The ancient hymn is thus a potent symbol, still awaiting its full articulation.
Poetry and Hymnography (3): Syriac
Authors: Brock Sebastian P.
Published: September 2009

Poetry has always played a very important role in the history of Syriac literature, and even today, collections of poems by contemporary authors continue to appear. Verse can often also serve as the vehicle for instruction, the most notable example of which is the thirteenth-century polymath Bar 'Ebroyo's verse Grammar. But, it is above all in the writings of some of the great authors of the fourth to sixth centuries, and in the liturgical tradition, that Syriac poetry has found its finest expression. This article discusses Ephrem' s madrashe, metres, the narrative memre, dialogue poems, the later liturgical traditions, and translation into and out of Greek.
Christian Initiation
Authors: Johnson Maxwell E.
Published: September 2009

To study the rites of Christian initiation in the early church is to encounter not one but several liturgical traditions in development. This article seeks to provide an introductory overview of the sources, issues, and problems encountered in the development and interpretation of the rites of Christian initiation within early Christianity. It proceeds in two parts: from the first century to the Council of Nicaea; and from the Council of Nicaea to Augustine of Hippo. Augustine of Hippo serves as a fitting conclusion to this focus since, as a result of his controversies with both Donatism and Pelagianism, a new article in Christian initiation begins and continues throughout the medieval and even Reformation periods of church history.
Eucharistic Liturgy
Authors: Sheerin Daniel
Published: September 2009

This article discusses the eucharistic nomenclature; the primitive eucharist; the eucharistic liturgy of Rome in c.150; the ‘classic’ eucharist; the frequency of the eucharist; communion apart from the eucharistic liturgy; teaching the eucharist; regulating the eucharist; the eucharist in material culture; and areas for new research. The Didache mentions perennial features of the eucharist that came to stand for the eucharistic liturgy as a whole. But the term ‘eucharist’ designated both the ritual and its object, the consecrated bread and wine. Areas for new research include eucharistic discourse, performance theory, spectacle studies, and the composition of the eucharistic assembly and foci of its attention.
Interpretation of Scripture
Authors: Young Frances
Published: September 2009

Now that ‘reception history’ has become a significant feature of biblical studies, there is renewed interest in the interpretation of scripture in the period of the so-called fathers of the church. Indeed, this shift means that, before embarking on a project in this area, the investigator needs to understand the enormous intellectual change that has occurred over the past generation, not least so as to be able to assess material offered in secondary sources against the date and context of the scholarly contribution. This article begins with a discussion of the most notable studies of the past half-century, in order to plot the shifts in assumptions and models brought to the analysis of exegetical method. It then outlines the significance of scripture in the life of the early church; the range of primary source material; and potential research topics in this area.
Christ and Christologies
Authors: Daley Brian E.
Published: September 2009

It seems a truism to say that Christology – the interpretation of the person of Jesus in the light of the Christian canon of scripture, and of the tradition which receives it – is what early Christianity, at its heart, is all about. It was because of their understanding of who and what Jesus was that the first few generations of Christians gradually came to see themselves as forming a distinct body within the religious tradition of Israel. Christology lies at the heart of the developing worship, life, and thought of the early church, even as its vocabulary and concepts grew and changed. At the same time, the development of new theological perspectives and interests has prompted modern interpreters of the history of Christian faith to ask different questions, and to look for different answers, from those their teachers had proposed in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Instrumenta Studiorum: Tools of the Trade
Authors: Kelly Joseph F. , Saint‐Laurent Jeanne‐Nicole
Published: September 2009

This article introduces scholars and students to the study of early Christianity by acquainting them with some of the more important tools of research. Since the primary reading audience is Anglophone, English-language titles predominate. From the mid-first to the mid-second century, the New Testament books came into being, along with a number of other texts. For centuries, the study of early Christianity actually meant patristics, the study of theologians whose authority earned them the honorific title of ‘fathers of the church’. The discussion notes that early Christianity encompasses anything related to the history of Christianity in the first six centuries. To understand how ‘early’ Christianity earned that title, the scholar must have some sense of how this period fits into the larger history of Christianity. A good one-volume history of Christianity is The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity.
The Origins of Organization Theory
Authors: Starbuck William H.
Published: September 2009

This article argues that contemporary organization theory owes its existence to social and technological changes that occurred during the last half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. These changes created both a basis for theorizing and an audience for theories about organizations. They stimulated an explosion in the numbers of large, formalized organizations, they made organizations relevant to many more people, and they made many more people interested in and capable of understanding theoretical propositions. This article follows a loosely chronological itinerary. It begins by taking note that theoretical writing about management began more than 4,000 years ago, and that some organizations had the essential properties of bureaucracy more than 3,000 years ago. It also reviews the developments that made organization theory possible and interesting.
Meta-theoretical Controversies in Studying Organizational Culture
Authors: Martin Joanne
Published: September 2009

To understand the contemporary state of organizational culture theory and research, it is necessary to grapple with some of the major intellectual disputes that have swept through the humanities and social sciences in recent years. Some researchers choose to study a single cultural context, in great detail and depth. This article deals with five controversies which include: objectivity and subjectivity; etic (outsider) and emic (insider) research; generalizable and context-specific research; focus and breadth; and level of depth. These issues are introduced in terms relevant to all branches of organizational studies. Their particular application to cultural studies is also discussed here. These disputes are usually framed as struggles between opposing terms — dichotomies, such as ‘objectivity and subjectivity’ or ‘etic and emic’.
Actionable Knowledge
Authors: Argyris Chris
Published: September 2009

The focus of this article is upon producing actionable knowledge. Propositions that are actionable are those that actors can use to implement effectively their intentions. Actionable knowledge requires propositions that make explicit the causal processes required to produce action. Causality is the key in implementation. One of the most powerful inhibitors of effective action is inner contradictions. Inner contradictions exist when the propositions to act are implemented correctly. One cause of inner contradiction is the methodologies used by most normal social scientists to discover problems and to invent solutions. These features cause the degree of seamlessness and the validity of the implementation to be reduced. The focus on describing reality in ways that satisfies the requirements of internal and external validity makes it less likely that attention is paid to the implementable validity of the propositions. This, in turn, leads to propositions that are abstract and disconnected from implementable action.
Managing Organization Futures in a Changing World of Power/Knowledge
Authors: Clegg Stewart
Published: September 2009

All forms of organization are forms of organization of social relations. All social relations involve power relations. Power is evident in these relations as relations not only of ownership and control but also of structuration and design. These relations may take many forms. They may be embodied as financial capital, intellectual capital, or social capital, for instance. Such relations are likely to be both differentially distributed and socially constructed as well as existing in differential demand in differentiated markets. Power is also evident in the various forms of knowledge that constitute, structure, and shape these markets and organizations. It is these power/knowledge relations that this article addresses. The aim of this article is to address analytically the methods of managing and organizing, which members of various organizational bodies and communities find conventional to use.
At Home from Mars to Somalia: Recounting Organization Studies
Authors: Calás Marta B. , Smircich Linda
Published: September 2009

This article makes a long detour by taking multidisciplinary understandings of ‘development’ and ‘technology’ via Ethiopia and Somalia. It discusses several news items that illustrate the current state of organization studies and its prospects. Organization studies might tell postmodernist tales about these news items. For instance, a postmodern story might engage the contemporary discourse about time/space compression to observe that time and space seem to be compressed only on the side of the powerful — for ‘the other’ of this tale appears to inhabit an ever-moving space in which time travels backward. Foucauldian versions might genealogize the discourses and practices of ‘success’ and ‘development’. Or, perhaps, the discourses of globalization could be deconstructed by reading the binaries embedded in ‘Martian microbes waiting to bloom and blow up in our bellies’ through the blooming bellies of African populations whose life expectancy is going backward.
Temporary Inter‐organizational Projects
Authors: Jones Candace , Lichtenstein Benyamin B.
Published: September 2009

Inter-organizational projects (IOPs), in which multiple organizations work jointly on a shared activity for a limited period of time, are increasingly used to coordinate complex products/services in uncertain and competitive environments. For some time, project management researchers have examined the structures and processes within intra-organizational projects that lead to their success, and recently some outlines of a ‘theory’ of organizational projects have been offered. This article begins by defining IOPs. It then describes how temporal embeddedness and social embeddedness provide specific mechanisms for managing uncertainty associated with these projects, and facilitating collaboration amongst project actors. Next, it illustrates the insights by combining these two dimensions and exploring them across four contexts within which IOPs are the dominant form of coordination among organizations, including film, architecture, crisis response, and large-scale engineering infrastructure. Finally, it offers suggestions for future research and conclusions.
The Social Network Perspective
Authors: Kenis Patrick , Oerlemans Leon
Published: September 2009

The social network perspective refers to a tradition in social science which focuses on the joint activities of, and continual exchanges between, participants in a social system. This perspective is characterized by an interest in the recurrent relationship patterns that connect the actors that make up a system's social structure. This article considers that the social network approach is the relationship among actors, be they individuals or groups such as whole organizations or parts of organizations. Rather than examining actors in isolation, the social network perspective sees actors as embedded within networks of interconnected relationships that provide opportunities for, as well as constraints on, behaviour. This article focuses on the interaction between actors rather than on the attributes of particular actors, their size for example.
Evolutionary Perspectives on Inter‐organizational Relations
Authors: Lomi Alessandro , Negro Giacomo , Fonti Fabio
Published: September 2009

This article briefly discusses the background and the intellectual context in which evolutionary thinking about organizations and institutions has been growing and developing. It emphasizes the mechanisms through which inter-organizational evolution is assumed to operate and provides examples of how they might be working across levels of organizational analysis. Any characterization of inter-organizational evolution is highly dependent on the principles behind the definition of these aggregate entities. For this reason, this article links this general discussion about the origins of evolutionary thinking in the study of organizations to conceptions of organizational environments. Building on the insight of ecological approaches to the study of organizations, this article presents ways in which inter-organizational relations (IORs) have been examined among members of organizational populations and communities. This article examines studies of IORs that have built more explicitly on network representations, models, and imagery, with reference to organizational fields rather than populations and communities.
Transaction Costs Perspectives on Inter‐organizational Relations
Authors: Hennart Jean‐François
Published: September 2009

The goal of transaction cost theory (TCT) is to explain which institution will be chosen to govern a given economic interaction. Such interactions can take place within firms (intra-organizational relations) or between firms (inter-organizational relations, or IORs). The TCT literature has looked at IORs as governance mechanisms, i.e. as institutions charged with generating rents from interdependencies between individuals and between organizations. Generating such rents requires informing parties of their capabilities and needs, reducing bargaining, and enforcing the bargains reached. This article sketches the basic approach and assumptions which are subscribed to by all, or nearly all, TCT theorists. It presents a view on the determinants of the choice between different forms of IORs and contrasts them with those of Williamson. It also provides some examples of how TCT has been used to make sense of real world IORs.
The Social Psychology of Inter‐organizational Relations
Authors: Schruijer Sandra G. L.
Published: September 2009

Social psychology is ‘the scientific investigation of how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviours of individuals are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others’. The social psychology of intergroup relations is concerned with understanding the determinants of conflict between groups and concomitant processes. This article discusses the dynamics of conflict and collaboration between multiple parties from a psychological perspective. First, it provides an overview of how social psychologists have traditionally studied relations between groups and the theories that have been formulated to understand their dynamics. Then it discusses the relevance of these social psychological theories for understanding the dynamics of complex inter-organizational relations and point to their weaknesses. It ends with a call to develop a comprehensive theory of the psychological dynamics of inter-organizational conflict and collaboration and to engage in multidisciplinary research.
Political Perspectives on Inter‐organizational Networks
Authors: Knoke David , Chen Xinxiang
Published: September 2009

This article examines political perspectives on inter-organizational relationships, which refer primarily to the disciplines of political science and political sociology and their diverse approaches to theorizing and empirically investigating relationships among organizations. It reviews recent work in both political science and political sociology on a broad range of topics, including political institutions and governance, voting and social movement participation, social capital formation, public policy-making and implementation, and systems of political opportunity and influence. The common thread weaving together these diverse topics is social network analysis, which explains how the structure of interactions connecting political actors affects perceptions, attitudes, and actions, and in turn, how political behaviours transform network structures. Although one can draw ideas from general theories of social networks and organizational behaviour, the specific objective of this article is to demonstrate how those concepts and propositions help in better understanding and explanation of the political relationships among organizations.
Intervening to Improve Inter‐organizational Partnerships
Authors: Gray Barbara
Published: September 2009

Actors who envision gaining collaborative advantage from aligning with others in an inter-organizational partnership face the often-daunting prospect of trying to integrate their diverse perspectives. The complexity and challenges of initiating and maintaining such partnerships have been chronicled extensively. This article reviews a variety of interventions aimed at improving the quality and the likelihood of alliance success. It defines interventions as deliberate actions taken by an alliance partner or a third party to influence the formation, design, or process of interaction among alliance partners. This article refers to five types of partnerships: strategic alliances, joint ventures, policy planning forums, community forums, and multisector collaborations. Interventions can originate from various sources. Additionally, the interventions have been tested and refined through practical application in numerous contexts and thereby reflect the best of theory-to-practice wisdom. This article reviews the underlying theory behind each intervention and assesses its utility for improving inter-organizational partnerships.
The Field of Inter‐organizational Relations
Authors: Cropper Steve , Ebers Mark , Huxham Chris , Ring Peter Smith
Published: September 2009

This article concludes that at this point in its development, and from the vantage point of organization science, inter-organizational relations (IORs) seem to constitute an emerging sub-field of organization science focusing on the inter-organizational level of analysis and beginning to develop its own institutional trappings. The empirical and conceptual basis which draws together scholars interested in IORs can be found in a specific focus on questions about the boundaries or identities of inter-organizational entities, including bilateral and multilateral partnerships and alliances, clusters, groups, and networks, their relational structures, contents, and practices. As IOR's perhaps most important mother discipline, organization science, has successfully demonstrated throughout its history, it can be most fruitful if research endeavours draw on, and learn from, concepts, theories, and methods first developed in other disciplines and fields of scientific enquiry.
Introduction
Authors: LaFollette Hugh
Published: September 2009

Practical ethics has only recently come into its own as a sub-discipline within philosophy. This article briefly describes the nature of practical ethics and its major subfields. It presents the theme of this book: This text discusses key issues in practical ethics. In each case the text not only maps the conceptual territory, but actively explores the landscape. The plan is to provide a book that gives a sense of the main moves and main participants in the relevant debate, while also advancing that debate.
Children
Authors: Archard David
Published: September 2009

No one would dispute that children should not be treated cruelly, but disagreement persists about the proper limits of parental punishment — whether, for instance, a child may be chastised by a slap. Few would dispute that children should have some say in what happens to them, but the idea that children should have the very same rights of choice as adults is defended as self-evident by some whilst dismissed as evidently mistaken by others. Our understanding of the moral status of the child is crucially influenced by our understanding of the nature and character of childhood. This is not simply a matter of setting boundaries of age, though this is important.
Reproductive Technology
Authors: Wachbroit Robert , Wasserman David
Published: September 2009

Reproductive technologies enable a couple to have, or avoid having, a particular kind of child. Couples can learn much about some of the medical problems their offspring might have even before their child is born; and, in some cases, even before conception. These developments have had a profound effect in framing reproductive decisions. This article focuses the discussion on these issues, which arise directly from the convergence of reproductive and genetic technologies. But it also explores some important, and related, implications that convergence has for the other three groups of issues: the moral assessment of risks, the involvement of third parties, and the status and disposition of various reproductive materials. In examining these issues, the article distinguishes concerns about the products, processes, and reasons involved in the use of new reproductive and genetic technologies, an approach which is described here.
Gender and Sexual Discrimination
Authors: Tong Rosemarie
Published: September 2009

Sexdiscrimination is the disadvantaging of a member or members of one sex over a member or members of the other because of their sex. Although either men or women may be the victims of sex discrimination, throughout history and in most societies, women have been the victims. Discrimination against women is usually predicated on the claim that men and women are biologically different, and that these differences justify the lesser status of women. Regarding the sex/gender distinction as a significant advance over the view that one's gender is determined by one's sex, feminists encouraged women and men to become well-integrated androgynous persons; to mix and match within themselves a variety of feminine and masculine personality traits and behaviours, thereby demonstrating that anatomy does not constitute destiny.
Race and Racial Discrimination
Authors: Zack Naomi
Published: September 2009

This article attempts to develop an accessible approach to race and racism in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The second section is about the concept of racism, and, by derivation, racists and racist behavior. Any acceptable definition of racism would seem to presuppose the existence of races and racial difference. Therefore, the third section, ‘Race’, is an examination of those concepts. The fourth section ‘Remedies’, is a discussion of practical correctives to racism in the light of the progress made in second and third sections.
Affirmative Action
Authors: Feinberg Walter
Published: September 2009

Affirmative action is a term used in the USA to depict a set of laws, policies, guidelines, and government-mandated and government-sanctioned administrative practices, including those of private institutions, intended to end and correct the effects of a specific form of discrimination. It seeks to end the effects of discriminatory practices that violate the inherent equality of persons who, because they share certain attributes such as sex or skin colour, have been denied opportunities on the grounds that they are inferior or different. Affirmative action aims to reduce present discrimination against members of targeted groups such as African, Native or Hispanic Americans, women, and the handicapped, and to increase their numbers within certain occupations and professions and at universities and colleges.
Punishment
Authors: Duff R. A.
Published: September 2009

This article's central question is: ‘What can justify a system of criminal punishment?’ That question is familiar, but merits clarification. The article focuses on criminal punishment imposed by criminal courts for criminal offences. So narrow a focus, though typical of penal philosophy, requires justification. First, it ignores other kinds of punishment, formal and informal, imposed by other agencies: by institutions or professions, in the family. What justifies this focus is that criminal punishment is distinctive in involving the state's exercise of its dominant coercive power over its citizens, and thus raises the distinctive question of what penal powers (if any) the state should have, and how they should be exercised. Secondly, it ignores other aspects of criminal justice, and the complex processes from which punishment flows — the investigation of crime, the criminal procedure of trial and conviction.
Intergenerational Justice
Authors: Gosseries Axel
Published: September 2009

The first debate in this article has to do with the very possibility of intergenerational justice beyond our obligations towards members of other generations while they coexist with us. Here, we ask ourselves whether we owe anything to people who either have died already, or are not yet born. Differences in temporal location mean that people may not exist at the same time — be it only during part of their life — which raises special ethical challenges. It is one thing to decide whether we owe anything to the next generation(s). It is another to define what we owe them. Most standard theories of justice have tried to answer this difficult question. This article focuses on a comparison between a reciprocity-based and an egalitarian account of justice between generations. It then turns, on the one hand, to a brief discussion of alternative theories and, on the other hand, to implementation issues.
Corporate Responsibility
Authors: Werhane Patricia H. , Freeman R. Edward
Published: September 2009

Given some examples of what appear to be responsible behaviour, this article explores the dimensions of corporate responsibility. It begins by studying the nature of organizations, such as corporations, to determine whether, or in what ways, corporations, like individuals, are morally responsible. It explores the scope of corporate responsibility — to think about what responsibilities corporations have or should have, and whether one can understand those responsibilities as residing in the corporation or in individuals acting on behalf of the corporation. It investigates what factors contribute to corporate moral decision making and how these play a role in corporate responsibility.
National Autonomy
Authors: Norman Wayne
Published: September 2009

What rights do nations have to govern themselves and to control specific territories and the people living on these territories? What limits are there on these rights and on the activities of national communities and their political leaders? What projects can be justified primarily by appeals to the interests and identities of nations? A well-reasoned answer to these questions could be called a normative theory of national autonomy or national self-determination, which in turn is a central part of a normative theory of nationalism. It would be an understatement to note that political philosophers are far from any consensus about the broad content of a theory of national autonomy. Almost every central concept in, and assumption underlying, the above questions is contested. There are disputes about what nations are, or even if there are such things as nations.
World Hunger
Authors: Dower Nigel
Published: September 2009

Hunger usually occurs in situations in which food is available. However, the very poor have neither the food themselves nor the resources to purchase it. Nor do they exist in a social environment in which the community or the government provides food. But food may exist all around them. Of course, in rare situations individuals or groups may be without food, and either others do not know this or cannot get food to them. That is, others lack either knowledge or capacity. Examples might be a real lifeboat situation or a community cut off by severe flooding. However, in normal circumstances this is not the case. Most hunger occurs where there is in fact food in the area.
Capital Punishment
Authors: Bedau Hugo Adam
Published: September 2009

Understanding and justifying capital punishment need to proceed from within a larger framework that can be and often is left implicit. That framework consists of one's views about punishment generally; only within that context can one adequately face the narrower issues peculiar to understanding and justifying the death penalty. If punishment as such could not be justified, then a fortiori neither could the death penalty. If punishment generally serves certain purposes or functions, then presumably so does the death penalty. Not so conversely, however. The death penalty might not be justified, but that need not put in doubt the justification of punishment in general. The discussion in this article proceeds on two assumptions. First, the general features defining punishment within a legal system will be taken for granted. Secondly, the function and purposes of the death penalty will be assumed to be those shared by punishments generally.
War
Authors: Shue Henry
Published: September 2009

The three fundamental ethical questions about war concern the justification of the resort to war, the justification of the conduct of war, and the relation between the resort to a war and the limits on its conduct. These three questions are as follows. When, if ever, is one either permitted or obligated to resort to war? If the resort to war is ever justified, what are the limits on how a war may be fought? Are these limits on its conduct a necessary condition of a just war, or might extreme situations arise in which some of these limits may justifiably be ignored? Some of the arguments for the conclusion that war is never permissible, much less obligatory, rest on features of war that are not unique to it.
Normative Methodology
Authors: Hardin Russell
Published: September 2009

This article shows that one should start social science inquiry with individuals, their motivations, and the kinds of transactions they undertake with one another. It specifically discusses four basic schools of social theory: conflict, shared-values, exchange, and coordination theories. Conflict theories almost inherently lead into normative discussions of the justification of coercion in varied political contexts. Religious visions of social order are usually shared-value theories and interest is the chief means used by religions to guide people. Individualism is at the core of an exchange theory. Because the first three theories are generally in conflict in any moderately large society, coercion is a sine qua non for social order. Coordination interactions are especially important for politics and political theory and probably for sociology, although exchange relations might be most of economics, or at least of classical economics. Shared-value theory may possibly turn into the most commonly asserted alternative to rational choice in this time as contractarian reasoning recedes from center stage in the face of challenges to the story of contracting that lies behind it and the difficulty of believing people actually think they have consciously agreed to their political order.
Concepts, Theories, and Numbers: A Checklist for Constructing, Evaluating, and Using Concepts or Quantitative Measures
Authors: Goertz Gary
Published: September 2009

This article presents guidance on how to think about the concepts. It proposes to explore some issues in the assessment of concepts and quantitative measures. It presents the basic problem in its general outlines. It then offers a very short example, typically using published research. The structuring and aggregating concepts and measures indicates that one must first consider the theory embodied in the concept. Then one should survey plausible aggregation and structural relationships that could be applied in a quantitative measure. It is noted that one needs to ask about the existence or not of zero points. The gray zone needs to be explored independently of the two extremes. Homogeneity is another aspect of comparing within and between various concepts and measures of the same phenomenon. This article generally highlights that it is the lack of integration of theory and methodology which proves problematic.
Measurement
Authors: Jackman Simon
Published: September 2009

This article shows that the words ‘behavioural’ and ‘behaviour’ turn out to be better measures as judged by tests of criterion and convergent validity. It specifically discusses measurement problems. Further, it pertains to statistical models that link latent variables and their observed indicators as measurement models. The success of measurement — the quality of the inferences provided by a measurement model — is usually assessed with reference to two key concepts: validity and reliability. The distinct uses of measures of latent variables are reported. The article then deals with the costs of ignoring measurement error. Additionally, a quick introduction to factor analysis, item-response models, and a very general class of latent variable models are briefly given. Moreover, it describes the inference for discrete latent variables and the measurement in a dynamic setting.