Managers and Consultants as Manipulators Reflections on the Suspension of Ethics

1996 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Sejersted

AbstractA businessperson acts, qua businessperson, in two institutional contexts which in principle are completely distinct, and normally entail two different ways of relating to other people; on the one hand as an actor in the market, and on the other as the employees’ manager. We shall assume that different sets of norms govern how to relate to trading partners in the market and how to relate to subordinates in the company. The moral problems which arise in the two different institutions for conducting human relations consequently also differ. The main problem relating to market operations originates in the fact that one achieves the most desirable consequences when the objective as such is difficult to justify on moral grounds. Profit is the target, if necessary at the expense of the person one is dealing with. In this context—i.e. in the market—altruistic considerations, or acting out of consideration for the other party, can produce socially undesirable results. The problems confronting the businessperson as manager are of a different nature. We shall not be considering all aspects of management or consultancy ethics, only what we regard as in principle the fundamental problem, one which in fact applies to all management in modern society.

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (11) ◽  
pp. 11-15
Author(s):  
Gan N.Yu. ◽  
Ponomareva L.I. ◽  
Obukhova K.A.

Today, worldview, spiritual and moral problems that have always been reflected in education and upbringing come to the fore in society. In this situation, there is a demand for philosophical categories. One of the priority goals of education in modern conditions is the formation of a reasonable, reflexive person who is able to analyze their actions and the actions of other people. Modern science is characterized by an understanding of the absolute value and significance of childhood in the development of the individual, which implies the need for its multilateral study. In the conditions of democratization of all spheres of life, the child ceases to be a passive object of education and training, and becomes an active carrier of their own meanings of being and the subject of world creation. One of the realities of childhood is philosophizing, so it is extremely timely to address the identification of its place and role in the world of childhood. Children's philosophizing is extremely poorly studied, although the need for its analysis is becoming more obvious. Children's philosophizing is one of the forms of philosophical reflection, which has its own qualitative specificity, on the one hand, and commonality with all other forms of philosophizing, on the other. The social relevance of the proposed research lies in the fact that children's philosophizing can be considered as an intellectual indicator of a child's socialization, since the process of reflection involves the adoption and development of culture. Modern society, in contrast to the traditional one, is ready to "accept" a philosophizing child, which means that it is necessary to determine the main characteristics and conditions of children's philosophizing.


2018 ◽  
pp. 761-769
Author(s):  
Olga A. Ginatulina ◽  

The article analyzes the phenomenon of document as assessed in the study of value. To begin with, it poses a problem of contradictory axiological status of document in modern society. On the one hand, document is objectively important, as it completes certain practical tasks, and yet, on the other hand, documents and document management are receive a negative assessment in public consciousness. In order to understand this situation, the article analyzes the concept of ‘value’ and concludes that certain objects of the material world receive this status, if they are included in public practice and promote progress of society or human development. Although this abstract step towards a better understanding of values does not provide a comprehensive answer to the question of axiological nature of document, it however indicates a trend in development of thought towards analysis of the development of human nature. The document is an artifact that objectifies and reifies a certain side of human nature. Human nature is a heterogeneous phenomenon and exists on two levels. The first abstract level is represented by the human race and embodies the full range of universal features of humanity. The second level is the specific embodiment of generic universal human nature in specific historical type of individuals. Between these two levels there is a contradiction. On the one hand, man by nature tends toward universality, on the other hand, realization of his nature is limited by the frameworks of historical era and contributes to the development of only one side of the race. Accordingly, document has value only within a certain historical stage and conflicts with the trend of universal development of human nature, and thus receives a negative evaluation. However, emergence of a new type of work (general scientific work) will help to overcome this alienation between generic and limited individual human being, and therefore will make a great impact on the nature of document, making it more ‘human,’ thus increasing its value in the eyes of society.


2014 ◽  
Vol 26 (31) ◽  
pp. 177-189
Author(s):  
Gabija Bankauskaitė-Sereikienė ◽  
Eglė Keturakienė

Advertising appealing to senses is satiated with the dream of immortality. The society striving for an eternal state of mythical youth lives in the reality of theatre and manipulations. On the one hand, advertising offers certain society life models through myth, archetypical symbols. On the other hand, culture of global observation, watching changes life into an illusion and life simulation. The more a person succumbs to abstractedness of life in advertisements, the greater demand for mythical time, eternal moment and harmony arises. Advertising which has categorically prohibited for a society to get older, gives an individual an illusion of eternal contemporaneity through archetypes. Modern man sees himself as a creator of history, hence, he feels great temptation to take part in an imaginary act of creation. The article provides the analysis of archetypac imagery in interwar advertisements on the basis of insights of R. Barthes, G. Debord and M. McLuhan on mythological structures of thinking, advertisements and modern society of a performance as well as thoughts of M. Eliade on repetition of time. For the analysis publication Naujoji Romuva (1931-1940) has been chosen. The expression of archetypes has been discussed after they have been categorized into three groups under character and general context of archetypal structures: archetypes of world creation, prototypes of man and woman, and mythical, folklore. Prototypes of man as a hero and woman as having a mystic role to continue the cycle of life, as well as mythical, folklore symbols (mirror, horseshoe, spruce, flower) also play the said role. Archetypal imagery is often found in advertisements of cosmetics, chemicals and sealants.


2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 103-107
Author(s):  
NATALYA S. RESHETNIKOVA ◽  
◽  
EKATERINA V. GORLOVA ◽  

The article discusses the main approaches to understanding the designated terms in scientific thought in the second half of the XX - early XXI centuries. Within the framework of modern sociocultural research, on the one hand, national traditions are developing in defining the concepts of "culture" and "civilization", on the other, new connotations are being created. According to the authors of the article, the considered approaches to determining the meanings of the phenomena of culture and civilization are the most significant, revealing the essence of modern society. Culture appears as: an anthropological category, reflecting the creative activity of a person, as an ontological category, suggesting that outside of culture there is no meaningful and meaningful human being; as an axiological category representing a system for storing and transmitting spiritual experience, values and ideals. Civilization acts as a praxeological category that characterizes the level of social and technological development of society, which is characterized by alienation from natural life, the priority of social values over environmental ones, and the transformative-deforming nature of activity.


Author(s):  
Marinos Diamantides ◽  
Anton Schütz

While early 20th century Social Darwinism has been discredited, post-WW2 theories have re-emphasized Darwin's notion of the environment. On this basis, and substituting social systems for natural species, society has been analyzed as a system-in-evolution, a machinery that, reflexively or self-referentially, produces itself at every moment anew. Modern society, according to social systems theory, continuously makes itself, thanks to countless simultaneous communications taking place at once. There are two equally disquieting lessons here. On the one hand, modern law, understood as the communicative system that applies the distinction lawful/unlawful to everything that gets in its way, is placed within an environment constituted by other communicative social systems (the economy, politics, religion, art etc) and the conditions created by those. On the other hand, social systems at large are separated from the realm of human consciousness, i.e. of collective or individual identity (the ‘psychic systems’). While ‘social' and ‘psychic’ systems never meet, they rely on absolute indifference with respect to their other side, as only this indifference enables especially social systems to assure their (superior) fact-creating potential. Our own project consists in spelling out the implications of this scissile sense of ‘meaning’, at once understood as a shorthand for what is actually happening (fragmented communications) and as consciousness-as-identity (imaginary unity).


1997 ◽  
Vol 06 (01) ◽  
pp. 27-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bertrand Mazure ◽  
Lakhdar Saïs ◽  
Éric Grégoire

In this paper, we address a fundamental problem in the formalization and implementation of cooperative knowledge bases: the difficulty of preserving consistency while interacting or combining them. Indeed, knowledge bases that are individually consistent can exhibit global inconsistency. This stumbling-block problem is an even more serious drawback when knowledge and reasoning are expressed using logical terms. Indeed, on the one hand, two contradictory pieces of information lead to global inconsistency under complete standard rules of deduction: every assertion and its contrary can be deduced. On the other hand, checking the logical consistency of a propositional knowledge base is an NP-complete problem and is often out of reach for large real-life applications. In this paper, a new practical technique to locate inconsistent interacting pieces of information is presented in the context of cooperative logical knowledge bases. Based on a recently discovered heuristic about the work performed by local search techniques, it can be applied in the context of large interacting knowledge bases.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-108
Author(s):  
Borjanka Trajković ◽  
◽  
Dragana Litričin Dunić ◽  

For centuries the role of the library was defined as a warehouse of books. Now, in the 21st century, the library is facing perhaps the biggest challenge – its physical survival. The role of librarians is re-branded to reflect their expertise as curators of content and reliable navigators in an evergrowing ocean of information - in any format they might exist. The future libraries shall be open to all the new ideas on how to work better and accept the new technologies. On the one hand, they must recognize the need to change their methods, but on the other hand - to preserve the continuity of their objectives and mission. The new era requires modern models of learning and the attractiveness of the curricula, that is, a modern education system that shall adapt the curricula to the needs of modern society and reconcile centuries of man's need for knowledge, reading books and education in general with the new technologies.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 56-65
Author(s):  
N.V. Zhukova ◽  
B.B. Aismontas

The article analyses the results of scientific information retrieval, aimed at identifying the relationship between certain parameters of archetypes and social behaviors of modern adolescents: on the one hand — development of personality, identity, socialization, on the other hand — the use of social networks as a communication space. The search was conducted within the complex of modern neurosciences at the systematic level and interdisciplinary research.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 393-402 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Mölders

Is steering still a viable concept? The article answers this question with a conditional yes. On the one hand, its conceptual core remains intact. Getting others—who are considered to be idiosyncratic—to solve rather than pose societal problems is no less relevant for recent governance analyses. On the other, steering as a concept needs some updates in terms of subjects, objects, and ways of steering. Beyond merely extending the list of possible subjects and objects of steering, the concept of irritation design is proposed. It stresses that making communication hard to ignore can be a matter of design. Modern society seems to be crowded with steering entities, many of which displaying smart irritation designs. This leads to complex constellations. Yet it remains valuable to analyze strategies of influence because despite all dynamics and happenstance, different chances of impact correlate with different irritation design. Still, we have to account for two aspects: 1) Capacities (beyond money or power) needed for designing irritations are unequally distributed; 2) material effects and empirical boundaries have their share in a decreased ignorability.


2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 159-164
Author(s):  
NATALYA YURCHENKO

Currently, extremism as a very aggressive form of behavior is not an ideologically homogeneous political trend. In this sense we can speak of a heterogeneous content of this phenomenon, including the so-called “social products” of the modern andpostmodern society, on the one hand, and sociocultural traditionalist elements - on the other.


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