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Are humans at their core seekers of their own pleasure or cooperative members of society? Paradoxically, they are both. Pleasure-seeking can take place only within the context of what works within a defined community, and central to any community are the evolved codes and principles guiding appropriate behavior, or morality. The complex interaction of morality and self-interest is at the heart of Geoffrey M. Hodgson’s approach to evolutionary economics, which is designed to bring about a better understanding of human behavior. In From Pleasure Machines to Moral Communities, Hodgson casts a critical eye on neoclassical individualism, its foundations and flaws, and turns to recent insights from research on the evolutionary bases of human behavior. He focuses his attention on the evolution of morality, its meaning, why it came about, and how it influences human attitudes and behavior. This more nuanced understanding sets the stage for a fascinating investigation of its implications on a range of pressing issues drawn from diverse environments, including the business world and crucial policy realms like health care and ecology. This book provides a valuable complement to Hodgson’s earlier work with Thorbjørn Knudsen on evolutionary economics in Darwin’s Conjecture, extending the evolutionary outlook to include moral and policy-related issues.
This book takes a multi-disciplinary critique of economics’ first principles: the fundamental and inter-related structuring assumptions that underlie the neo-classical paradigm. These assumptions, that economic agents are rational, self-interested individuals, continue to influence the teaching of economics, research agendas and policy analyses. The book argues that both the theoretical understanding of the economy and the actual working of real-world market economies diminish the scope for thinking about the relation between ethics, economics, and the economy. It highlights how market economies may "crowd out" ethical behavior and our evaluation of them elides ethical reflection. The book calls for a more pluralistic and richer approach to economic theory, one that allows ample room for ethical considerations. It provides insight into understanding human motivations and human flourishing and how a good economy requires reflection on the ethical relations between the self, world, and time.
This book introduces in an accessible way how CSR and its reporting are being used to address problems of corruption and tax evasion or tax avoidance. It discusses the efforts, both of organizations and governments to integrate these issues into CSR practices and the developments that have occurred at the levels of national and international legislation. The book analyses governments efforts to compel or try to induce companies to have practices more in line with what is expected of them in terms of combating corruption and paying their fair share. The book is suitable for students of CSR and Business Ethics, practitioners and researchers on CSR and corporate issues.
This book addresses the important but understudied question of how social scientific knowledge is entangled in the process of European integration. More specifically, it provides the first systematic introduction to a sociology of knowledge approach to European integration and demonstrates the value of such an approach through empirical illustrations. Drawing on new research in the intersection of sociology of knowledge and political sociology, the book is the first to analyse the entanglement of social scientific knowledge and the development of the EU. The book provides the first systematic mapping of the relations between social scientific knowledge and particular aspects of European integration such as the Euro and monetary governance, constitution- and treaty-negotiation, education policy, enlargement and external relations. The book imports key ideas from the sociology of knowledge, sociology of science and political sociology to cast new light on the field of EU studies and its relation to the EU. The result is a fresh account of European integration, shaped – in often surprising ways – by relatively small groups of people and their particular ideas about economy, law, culture and politics. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of European Integration.
Seven Moralities of Human Resource Management analyses morality of HRM from the perspective of American psychologist Laurence Kohlberg. This book examines and makes value judgements on whether or not HRM is moral from the viewpoint of Kohlberg's seven stages of morality as a follow-up study of the author's 2012 book, Seven Management Moralities.
The complex economic problems of the 21st century require a pluralist, real-world oriented and innovative discipline of economics that is capable of addressing and teaching these issues to students. This volume is a state-of-the-art compilation of diverse, innovative and international perspectives on the rationales for and pathways towards pluralist economics teaching. It fosters constructive controversy aiming to incite authors and commentators to engage in fruitful debates. This volume addresses a number of key questions: Why is it important for a social science to engage in pluralistic teaching? What issues does pluralist teaching face in different national contexts? Which traditions and practices in economic teaching make pluralist teaching difficult? What makes economics as a canonical textbook science particular and how could the rigid textbook system be innovated in a meaningful way? What can we learn from school education and other social science disciplines? Through examining these issues the editors have created a pluralist but cohesive book on teaching economics in the contemporary classroom drawing from ideas and examples from around the world. Advancing Pluralism in Teaching Economics offers a valuable insight into the methodology and application of pluralist economics teaching. It will be a great resource for those teaching economics at various levels, as well as researchers.
A thousand years ago, someone called Anselm decided that people should not believe things just because the Bible said they were so—and, to his delight, he proved the most important issue of all, the existence of God, as a pure logical theorem. Ever since, people have argued about his proof—the atheist Bertrand Russell found it much easier to say it was fallacious than to identify the fallacy, and others have produced independent God proofs. This book brings these proofs to life in the context of the people who created them. It assumes no technical knowledge, and invites readers to decide how convincing they find the arguments.
The global ecological crisis is the greatest challenge humanity has ever had to confront, and humanity is failing. The triumph of the neo-liberal agenda, together with a debauched ‘scientism’, has reduced nature and people to nothing but raw materials, instruments and consumers to be efficiently managed in a global market dominated by corporate managers, media moguls and technocrats. The arts and the humanities have been devalued, genuine science has been crippled, and the quest for autonomy and democracy undermined. The resultant trajectory towards global ecological destruction appears inexorable, and neither governments nor environmental movements have significantly altered this, or indeed, seem able to. The Philosophical Foundations of Ecological Civilization is a wide-ranging and scholarly analysis of this failure. This book reframes the dynamics of the debate beyond the discourses of economics, politics and techno-science. Reviving natural philosophy to align science with the humanities, it offers the categories required to reform our modes of existence and our institutions so that we augment, rather than undermine, the life of the ecosystems of which we are part. From this philosophical foundation, the author puts forth a manifesto for transforming our culture into one which could provide an effective global environmental movement and provide the foundations for a global ecological civilization.
Regional Studies is inextricably intertwined with history. Cultural and institutional legacies inform choices between different policy options, meaning that the past plays a crucial role in how we think about regional economic development, planning and policy. Through a selection of accessible theoretical, methodological and empirical chapters, this book explores the connections between regional development and history. Drawing on the expertise of scholars in several disciplines, it links history to topics such as behavioural geography, interdependence, divergence and regional and urban policy. This innovative book will be of interest to researchers across regional studies, planning, economic geography and economic history.