My mother-in-law does not like it: resources, social norms, and entrepreneurial intentions of women in an emerging economy

This paper provides new evidence at the intersectionality of gender, family status, and culture by focusing on a previously little researched group of middle-class women in an emerging economy. While the existing literature examines both structural and normative constraints for women entrepreneurship, little is known about the gains from relaxing structural constraints for women when compared to men. In addition to examining this new question, the paper sheds light on the binding nature of normative constraints for women entrepreneurship that persist in a patriarchal developing economy even when structural constraints are significantly eased. Using a mixed-methods approach, the empirical results suggest that higher resource availability differentially impacts the entrepreneurial intentions of women when compared to men indicating the strong presence of normative barriers that inhibit their entrepreneurship. These normative barriers emerge through the roles people play within women life spheres inhibiting their entrepreneurial intentions.

Timescales and the Temporal Emergence of Musicking

The aim of this chapter is twofold: to present a new way of mapping timescales of musicking, and to elaborate an explanatory approach that overcomes philosophical reductionism and allows interdisciplinary conversation. It proposes that the emergence of organizational properties in musicking is best understood by looking at the relations between timescales, using the heuristic of inter-scale relationships within temporal ranges. The chapter argues that simpler models of timescales have limited explanatory use and do not naturally capture the experiential richness of musicking. In contrast, the mapping of temporal ranges highlights the relations between many processes that mutually enable and constrain one another across timescales, and across brains, bodies, and environment. The map guides research into the complexity of musicking without sacrificing disciplinary focus. It consists of three domains of organization—sensorimotor, social life, and person/Self—interweaving ecological-enactive concepts of embodiment, self-organization, participatory systems, attunement, normative constraints, habits, and sense-making.

Social, Moral and Legal Rules, Biopolitics and the Covid-19 Crisis

The article relies on the social and legal perspective not only to better understand how norms are created and change through interactions among agents, but also to shed light on how norms are internalized in social practice. The article is organized as follows. Initially the article explores the basic assumption that deontic operators acquire their meaning via social conventions generating “personal rules” having a “mental content” which belongs to a wider “normative mind”, a mind that obviously encompasses all sorts of choices. The article then describes the different types of personal rules, distinguishing social, moral, and legal rules across the normative mind, focusing on social rules within institutions, conceived as sets of rules in equilibrium. The core of this study puts to the test the taxonomy of personal (social, moral, and legal) rules within the normative mind by exploring a situation of “dense normativity” addressed by a 2021 Lancet paper concerning findings about “tight–loose cultures” during the Covid-19 crisis, and, for the sake of explanation, focuses on one of the main normative constraints that epitomizes the challenge of the Covid-19 crisis to “tight–loose” cultures: the “wear-mask rule”. These observations can be extended to other normative constraints of that crisis, but in essence they parse the interplay between the different types of personal rules, which not only are social, but also moral and legal, drawing conclusions that complement the findings of the Lancet paper with some critical observations. The article critically concludes with remarks about the co-existence of different normative systems of personal rules in a context of biopolitics and suggests that individual morality appears to be the core of normativity to address collective threats such as those caused by the Covid-19 crisis.

Binocular rivalry reveals an out-of-equilibrium neural dynamics suited for decision-making

In ambiguous or conflicting sensory situations, perception is often ‘multistable’ in that it perpetually changes at irregular intervals, shifting abruptly between distinct alternatives. The interval statistics of these alternations exhibits quasi-universal characteristics, suggesting a general mechanism. Using binocular rivalry, we show that many aspects of this perceptual dynamics are reproduced by a hierarchical model operating out of equilibrium. The constitutive elements of this model idealize the metastability of cortical networks. Independent elements accumulate visual evidence at one level, while groups of coupled elements compete for dominance at another level. As soon as one group dominates perception, feedback inhibition suppresses supporting evidence. Previously unreported features in the serial dependencies of perceptual alternations compellingly corroborate this mechanism. Moreover, the proposed out-of-equilibrium dynamics satisfies normative constraints of continuous decision-making. Thus, multistable perception may reflect decision-making in a volatile world: integrating evidence over space and time, choosing categorically between hypotheses, while concurrently evaluating alternatives.

Time-Based Corporate-Social-Responsibility Evaluation Model Taking Chinese Listed Forestry Companies as an Example

With the rapid development of the economy, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is receiving increasing attention from companies themselves, but also increasing attention from society as a whole. How to reasonably evaluate the performance of CSR is a current research hotspot. Existing corporate-social-responsibility evaluation methods mostly focus on the static evaluation of enterprises in the industry, and do not take the time factor into account, which cannot reflect the performance of long-term CSR. On this basis, this article proposes a time-based entropy method that can evaluate long-term changes in CSR. Studies have shown that the completion of CSR in a static state does not necessarily reflect the dynamic and increasing trend of CSR in the long term. Therefore, the assessment of CSR should consider both the static and dynamic aspects of a company. In addition, the research provides the focus of different types of forestry enterprises in fulfilling CSR in the long term, and provides a clearer information path for the standard identification and normative constraints of different types of forestry enterprises CSR.

Accounting for groups: the dynamics of intragroup deliberation

In a highly influential work, List and Pettit (Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents, Oxford University Press, 2011) draw upon the theory of judgement aggregation to offer an argument for the existence of nonreductive group agents; they also suggest that nonreductive group agency is a widespread phenomenon. In this paper, we argue for the following two claims. First, that the axioms they consider cannot naturally be interpreted as either descriptive characterisations or normative constraints upon group judgements, in general. This makes it unclear how the List and Pettit argument is to apply to real world group behaviour. Second, by examining empirical data about how group judgements are made by a powerful international regulatory board, we show how each of the List and Pettit axioms can be violated in ways which are straightforwardly explicable at the level of the individual. This suggests that group agency may best be understood as a pluralistic phenomenon, where close inspection of the dynamics of intragroup deliberation can reveal that what prima facie appears to be a nonreductive group agent is, in fact, reducible.

No Special Treatment for the Epistemic Normativity of Telling

While recent years have featured a vast amount of literature concerned with the epistemic norm for assertion, comparatively little attention has been paid to the corresponding norm governing acts of telling. One plausible explanation of this is that people have generally taken assertion and telling to fall under the same normative constraints. Recent work, however, ventures to show (i) that this assumption is false and (ii) that the epistemic propriety of instances of telling partly depends on what’s at stake for the hearer. This chapter argues that the case against normative commonality for assertion and telling fails due to speech act-theoretic and value-theoretic inaccuracies. In a nutshell, the chapter argues that there’s nothing special about the epistemic normativity of telling.

The Context Shiftiness Dilemma Generalized

Most actors in the debate assume that the intuitive variability of proper assertion with practical stakes (the Shiftiness Intuition) motivates the following dilemma: either 1) we embrace a knowledge norm of assertion, and are forced into a view that takes knowledge, or ‘knowledge’, to be sensitive to practical stakes, or 2) we stick to our Classical Invariantist guns, but then the knowledge norm goes out the window and we get practical sensitivity in the normativity of assertion (the Shiftiness Dilemma). This chapter brings this dilemma to centre stage and argues that it threatens to generalize in three ways: to all context-invariant norms of proper assertoric speech, to all constative speech acts, and to all epistemic normative constraints. If this is right, we should be more worried about this dilemma than we’ve been so far.

Settlement Achievement

This chapter focuses on the first of two principal rationales supporting the use of peace referendums, namely settlement achievement. The chapter starts by locating the argument of the book in the public reason tradition, and specifically in the work of John Rawls. The chapter identifies how public values often feature in crucial, if generally under-appreciated, ways in peace agreements—not just as lofty aspirations but as powerful normative constraints on the content of particular constitutional clauses. The chapter then defends the claim that non-elites may be as, or even more, adept than some classes of elites (such as governmental, ethnic, or secessionist leaders) at deliberating about those values. We accept that constitutional settlements often contain a great deal of institutional detail; and we also accept that elites are usually better placed to deliberate about that detail. Yet we explain why the comparative advantage may rest with non-elites when it comes to deliberating about general public values. All of this is contingent on robust deliberative institutional supports being in place, both through the course of the referendum campaign and at the final vote.

4 General Principles of International Humanitarian Law

This chapter explains the general principles of international humanitarian law—i.e. the prohibition of unnecessary suffering; the prohibition of indiscriminate warfare; and the principle of humanity—in their application and interaction. The prohibition against maux superflus—that is, against weapons and materials causing excessive suffering—is an old principle. It is characterized by an intricate mixture of very definite prohibitions on certain specific categories of arms, on one hand, and a rather abstract prohibition on means of warfare which cause unnecessary suffering, on the other. The utmost protection of the civilian population is also an old concept. By the nineteenth century, legal practice had established the prohibition against indiscriminate warfare as a customary rule. The principle of humanity has not always played the definitive role in moderating belligerent conduct. Nevertheless, humanity was clearly a source of normative constraints on the waging of war.