Do Creators of New Markets Meet SDGs? Analysis of Platform Companies

The platform economy is the embodiment of the activities carried out by its influential players, which by their very nature are new markets, facilitating the matching of suppliers and customers. A new market entails access to or even joint use of underused assets, provision of new working places, and simplification of human life with online transactions and services, which serves the assumption that the platform economy is able to undertake sustainable development and may meet a number of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) introduced in 2015. First, this paper aims to study whether the platform business model entails sustainability as its integral core concept. Second, it attempts to assess if platform companies from two selected industries—ride-sharing services and EdTech—meet SDGs comparably better than their predecessor linear companies in transportation and education. The study carries out an empirical analysis of eight companies. The results indicate that platform companies demonstrate a relatively lower commitment to SDGs compared to linear transnational firms, which can be explained by the level of maturity of platform companies and their still mostly non-public nature.

Conceptualising fairness: three pillars for medical algorithms and health equity

ObjectivesFairness is a core concept meant to grapple with different forms of discrimination and bias that emerge with advances in Artificial Intelligence (eg, machine learning, ML). Yet, claims to fairness in ML discourses are often vague and contradictory. The response to these issues within the scientific community has been technocratic. Studies either measure (mathematically) competing definitions of fairness, and/or recommend a range of governance tools (eg, fairness checklists or guiding principles). To advance efforts to operationalise fairness in medicine, we synthesised a broad range of literature.MethodsWe conducted an environmental scan of English language literature on fairness from 1960-July 31, 2021. Electronic databases Medline, PubMed and Google Scholar were searched, supplemented by additional hand searches. Data from 213 selected publications were analysed using rapid framework analysis. Search and analysis were completed in two rounds: to explore previously identified issues (a priori), as well as those emerging from the analysis (de novo).ResultsOur synthesis identified ‘Three Pillars for Fairness’: transparency, impartiality and inclusion. We draw on these insights to propose a multidimensional conceptual framework to guide empirical research on the operationalisation of fairness in healthcare.DiscussionWe apply the conceptual framework generated by our synthesis to risk assessment in psychiatry as a case study. We argue that any claim to fairness must reflect critical assessment and ongoing social and political deliberation around these three pillars with a range of stakeholders, including patients.ConclusionWe conclude by outlining areas for further research that would bolster ongoing commitments to fairness and health equity in healthcare.

Salutogenesis as a Theory, as an Orientation and as the Sense of Coherence

In this chapter, the authors convey some of the main ways the term ‘salutogenesis’ is used today. Antonovsky introduced the term salutogenesis in his 1979 and 1987 books on the Salutogenic Model of Health, but salutogenesis subsequently has come to refer to a core concept in the model in particular; the sense of coherence. This usage has advanced to the point that some writers have coined the term ‘sense of coherence theory’. The term salutogenesis is also frequently used to refer, more generally, to an approach to health theory, research and practice emphasising resources that people may call on to improve health.

Do Religion and Spirituality in the Workplace Matter?

Although spirituality in the workplace has recently received extensive attention from many researchers in the field of management, it has often been interchanged with the term religion. Yet religion is neglected. According to Vitell, religion contributes to setting a framework for moral and ethical behavior in a business context, creating a spiritual workplace that is aligned with organizational goals and has a positive impact on productivity and profitability. Therefore, there is a need to conduct more investigations not only to explain the core concept of each, but also to evaluate the effectiveness of each and their integration in the workplace. This chapter addresses the increased demand to better conceptualize, define, and contrast the concepts of religion and spirituality in the workplace. In addition, the impact of leaders' life standards and personal values on behavior in the workplace are examined, with attention on the discussion of the impact of religion and spirituality.

A Study on Robert Keohane’s Idea of “Power”

Robert Keohane is a leading contemporary international relations scholar. His ideas and doctrines are important parts of neoliberal institutionalism. In his books Power and Interdependence, and After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy, he has a unique perspective on power, a core concept of international relations, that differs from realism and constructivism. This paper uses documentary analysis to distill and summarize the discussion of power in Robert Keohane’s work, which helps to systematically study the neoliberal institutionalist view of power and to make the classic theory show its charm beyond its time.

Paramārtha’s Ultimate Truth and the Development of Chinese Buddhism’s Ultimate Truth

This paper discusses the development of ideas of the ultimate in the thought of Chinese Buddhism in the Northern and Southern Dynasties. The concept of ultimate truth is, along with that of conventional truth, a core concept in Mahāyāna Buddhism. During the Sui Dynasty, Chinese Buddhism developed the unique perspective of the Three Truths, the foundation for which was formed during the Southern and Northern Dynasties. This begins with Jie jie Jing 解節經 (in full, Foshuo Jiejie Jing 佛說解節經) by Paramārtha (499–569), which is a partial translation of Saṃdhinirmocanasūtra and presents the theory of ultimate truth (paramārtha) to Chinese Buddhists. Through a comparison of Jiejie Jing with other Chinese and Tibetan translations of Saṃdhinirmocana-sūtra, we establish Paramārtha’s thoughts on the ultimate. The relationship between Paramārtha’s thought on the ultimate and the development of the Three Truths is evaluated in a comparison of Paramārtha’s thoughts on ultimate truth with the thinking of nearly contemporary Chinese monks.

Lesia Ukrainka and Qiu Jin: The Confluence of Their Poetic Worlds via Translation

This article deals with the poetry of two prominent writers: Ukrainian poetess Lesia Ukrainka (1871–1913) and Chinese poetess Qiu Jin (1875–1907). The diversity of wide fields of self-expression of both poetesses created the grounds for a broad and comprehensive comparison in terms of poetic, thematic, and literary similarities. The article provides a background to the translations of Lesia Ukrainka in China and accounts for the perception of Lesia Ukrainka’s poetry in China in the light of the poetic world of Qiu Jin. The main aspects of the poetic discourses of Lesia Ukrainka and Qiu Jin are outlined and studied within the core concept of the national heroine in China, formed by Qiu Jin, consisting of key elements important for the perception of Lesia Ukrainka’s works – revolution, nationalism, and feminism.

A Study on Robert Keohane’s Idea of “Power”

Robert Keohane is a leading contemporary international relations scholar. His ideas and doctrines are important parts of neoliberal institutionalism. In his books Power and Interdependence, and After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy, he has a unique perspective on power, a core concept of international relations, that differs from realism and constructivism. This paper uses documentary analysis to distill and summarize the discussion of power in Robert Keohane’s work, which helps to systematically study the neoliberal institutionalist view of power and to make the classic theory show its charm beyond its time.

Essential Features in a Theory of Context for Enabling Artificial General Intelligence

Despite recent Artificial Intelligence (AI) advances in narrow task areas such as face recognition and natural language processing, the emergence of general machine intelligence continues to be elusive. Such an AI must overcome several challenges, one of which is the ability to be aware of, and appropriately handle, context. In this article, we argue that context needs to be rigorously treated as a first-class citizen in AI research and discourse for achieving true general machine intelligence. Unfortunately, context is only loosely defined, if at all, within AI research. This article aims to synthesize the myriad pragmatic ways in which context has been used, or implicitly assumed, as a core concept in multiple AI sub-areas, such as representation learning and commonsense reasoning. While not all definitions are equivalent, we systematically identify a set of seven features associated with context in these sub-areas. We argue that such features are necessary for a sufficiently rich theory of context, as applicable to practical domains and applications in AI.