Communities of complicity Steinm, Hans
2013., 20130315, 2013, 2013-04-25, 20130101, Volume:
10
eBook
Everyday life in contemporary rural China is characterized by an increased sense of moral challenge and uncertainty. Ordinary people often find themselves caught between the moral frameworks of ...capitalism, Maoism and the Chinese tradition. This ethnographic study of the village of Zhongba (in Hubei Province, central China) is an attempt to grasp the ethical reflexivity of everyday life in rural China. Drawing on descriptions of village life, interspersed with targeted theoretical analyses, the author examines how ordinary people construct their own senses of their lives and their futures in everyday activities: building houses, working, celebrating marriages and funerals, gambling and dealing with local government. The villagers confront moral uncertainty; they creatively harmonize public discourse and local practice; and sometimes they resolve incoherence and unease through the use of irony. In so doing, they perform everyday ethics and re-create transient moral communities at a time of massive social dislocation.
America's crisis of values Baker, Wayne E; Baker, Wayne E
2013., 20131031, 2013, 2004, 2006-01-01, 20050101
eBook
Is America bitterly divided? Has America lost its traditional values? Many politicians and religious leaders believe so, as do the majority of Americans, based on public opinion polls taken over the ...past several years. But is this crisis of values real?
This book explores the moral terrain of America today, analyzing the widely held perception that the nation is in moral decline. It looks at the question from a variety of angles, examining traditional values, secular values, religious values, family values, economic values, and others. Using unique data from the World Values Surveys, the largest systematic attempt ever made to document attitudes, values, and beliefs around the world, this book systematically evaluates the perceived crisis of values by comparing America's values with those of over 60 other nations.
The results are surprising. The evidence shows overwhelmingly that America has not lost its traditional values, that the nation compares favorably with most other societies, and that the culture war is largely a myth.
The gap between reality and perception does not represent mass ignorance of the facts or an overblown moral panic, Baker contends. Rather, the widespread perception of a crisis of values is a real and legitimate interpretation of life in a society that is in the middle of a fundamental transformation and that contains growing cultural contradictions. Instead of posing a problem, the author argues, this crisis rhetoric serves the valuable social function of reminding us of what it means to be American. As such, it preserves the ideological foundation of the nation.
Campaigns for moral reform were a recurrent and distinctive feature of public life in later Georgian and Victorian England. Anti-slavery, temperance, charity organisation, cruelty prevention, 'social ...purity' advocates, and more, all promoted their causes through mobilisation of citizen volunteer support. This 2004 book sets out to explore the world of these volunteer networks, their foci of concern, their patterns of recruitment, their methods of operation and the responses they aroused. In its exploration of this culture of self-consciously altruistic associational effort, the book provides a systematic survey of moral reform movements as a distinct tradition of citizen action over this period, as well as casting light on the formation of a middle-class culture torn, in this stage of economic and political nation-building, between acceptance of a market-organised society and unease about the cultural consequences of doing so. This is a revelatory book that is both compelling and accessible.
Drawing on social learning and moral identity theories, this research examines antecedents and consequences of ethical leadership. Additionally, this research empirically examines the distinctiveness ...of the ethical leadership construct when compared to related leadership constructs such as idealized influence, interpersonal justice, and informational justice. Consistently with the theoretically derived hypotheses, results from two studies of work units (n's = 115 and 195 units) provide general support for our theoretical model. Study 1 shows positive relationships between ethical leadership and leader "moral identity symbolization" and "moral identity internalization" (approaching significance) and a negative relationship between ethical leadership and unit unethical behavior and relationship conflict. In Study 2, both leader moral identity symbolization and internalization were positively related to ethical leadership and, with idealized influence, interpersonal justice, and informational justice controlled for, ethical leadership was negatively related to unit outcomes. In both studies, ethical leadership partially mediated the effects of leader moral identity.
Islamic scriptural sources offer potentially radical notions of equality. Yet medieval Islamic philosophers chose to establish a hierarchical, male-centered virtue ethics. InGendered Morality, Zahra ...Ayubi rethinks the tradition of Islamic philosophical ethics from a feminist critical perspective. She calls for a philosophical turn in the study of gender in Islam based on resources for gender equality that are unlocked by feminist engagement with the Islamic ethical tradition. Developing a lens for a feminist philosophy of Islam, Ayubi analyzes constructions of masculinity, femininity, and gender relations in classic works of philosophical ethics. In close readings of foundational texts by Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, Nasir-ad Din Tusi, and Jalal ad-Din Davani, she interrogates how these thinkers conceive of the ethical human being as an elite male within a hierarchical cosmology built on the exclusion of women and nonelites. Yet in the course of prescribing ethical behavior, the ethicists speak of complex gendered and human relations that contradict their hierarchies. Their metaphysical premises about the nature of the divine, humanity, and moral responsibility indicate a potential egalitarian core.Gendered Morality offers a vital and disruptive new perspective on patriarchal Islamic ethics and metaphysics, showing the ways in which the philosophical tradition can support the aims of gender justice and human flourishing.
Italy is a country of free political institutions, yet it has become a nation of servile courtesans, with Silvio Berlusconi as their prince. This is the controversial argument that Italian political ...philosopher and noted Machiavelli biographer Maurizio Viroli puts forward in The Liberty of Servants. Drawing upon the classical republican conception of liberty, Viroli shows that a people can be unfree even though they are not oppressed. This condition of unfreedom arises as a consequence of being subject to the arbitrary or enormous power of men like Berlusconi, who presides over Italy with his control of government and the media, immense wealth, and infamous lack of self-restraint.
We develop and test a model linking ethical leadership with unit ethical culture, both across and within organizational levels, examining how both leadership and culture relate to ethical cognitions ...and behaviors of lower-level followers. The data were collected from 2,572 U.S. Army soldiers representing three organizational levels deployed in combat. Findings provide limited support for simple trickle-down mechanisms of ethical leadership but broader support for a multilevel model that takes into account how leaders embed shared understandings through their influence on the ethical culture of units at various levels, which in turn influence followers' ethical cognitions and behavior. The influences of ethical leadership occur not only directly, among immediate followers within a unit, but also indirectly, across hierarchical levels, through the cascading of ethical culture and senior leaders' influences on subordinate leader behavior. We discuss scholarly and practical implications for understanding how leaders transmit ethical influence both down and across large organizations.
Part of understanding the meaning and power of algorithms means asking what new demands they might make of ethical frameworks, and how they might be held accountable to ethical standards. I develop a ...definition of networked information algorithms (NIAs) as assemblages of institutionally situated code, practices, and norms with the power to create, sustain, and signify relationships among people and data through minimally observable, semiautonomous action. Starting from Merrill's prompt to see ethics as the study of "what we ought to do," I examine ethical dimensions of contemporary NIAs. Specifically, in an effort to sketch an empirically grounded, pragmatic ethics of algorithms, I trace an algorithmic assemblage's power to convene constituents, suggest actions based on perceived similarity and probability, and govern the timing and timeframes of ethical action.
