Antecedents of Online Impulse Buying: An Analysis of Gender and Centennials’ and Millennials’ Perspectives

Impulse buying continues to be a relevant topic for retail management, yet few studies have examined the role of online impulse buying. This study analyzes the effect of impulse buying tendency on online impulse buying behavior through the mediation of normative evaluation and the urge to buy impulsively on the Internet. As a secondary objective, we aim to identify whether gender and generation influence the model. The research was conducted in Mexico with millennials and centennials who had previously bought products on the Internet. We used quantitative, explanatory, non-experimental, cross-sectional research. We applied an electronic survey, and, for the statistical technique, we used PLS. According to the results, impulse buying tendency both directly and indirectly influences online impulse buying behavior through the mediating roles of normative evaluation and the urge to buy impulsively on the Internet. Moreover, we found that gender does not have an effect on the model. Regarding generation, two significant differences were found between centennials and millennials.

In Praise of Snapshots

The conventional justification for moving from income distribution to intergenerational mobility analysis is that the movie encompasses the snapshot and is normatively superior as the basis for assessing policy. Such a perspective underpins many an argument for shifting the focus from income redistribution, which is said to equalize outcomes, to equalizing opportunity by increasing mobility through education policy such as equal provision of public education. This chapter argues that this perspective can be misleading. It shows that normative evaluation of income mobility in any event often falls back on a snapshot perspective. Further, the snapshot itself often contains the seeds of the movie, as posited in the Great Gatsby Curve. Income redistribution can itself improve mobility even if that is the only objective. The chapter thus speaks in praise of snapshots.

The Iterative Process of Legitimacy-Building in Hybrid Organizations

Hybrid organizations face the fundamental challenge of building legitimacy. To deal with this challenge in administrative theory and practice, we apply an analytical framework following an organizational logic of legitimacy building to an exemplary case of hybridity—the Swiss Institute for Translational and Entrepreneurial Medicine. Our framework application illustrates that pragmatic legitimacy (i.e., establishing instrumental value) must be built before moral legitimacy (i.e., fostering normative evaluation) and cognitive legitimacy (i.e., creating comprehensibility), followed by an iterative process of mutual influence between the legitimacy forms. Originating in the management literature, the framework promises new insights for public administration research on hybrids.

How “is” shapes “ought” for folk-biological concepts

Knowing which features are frequent among a biological kind (e.g., that most zebras have stripes) shapes people’s representations of what category members are like (e.g., that typical zebras have stripes) and normative judgments about what they ought to be like (e.g., that zebras should have stripes). In the current work, we ask if people’s inclination to explain why features are frequent is a key mechanism through which what “is” shapes beliefs about what “ought” to be. Across four studies (N = 591), we find that frequent features are often explained by appeal to feature function (e.g., that stripes are for camouflage), that functional explanations in turn shape judgments of typicality, and that functional explanations and typicality both predict normative judgments that category members ought to have functional features. We also identify the causal assumptions that license inferences from feature frequency and function, as well as the nature of the normative inferences that are drawn: by specifying an instrumental goal (e.g., camouflage), functional explanations establish a basis for normative evaluation. These findings shed light on how and why our representations of how the natural world is shape our judgments of how it ought to be.

Financial Power and Democratic Legitimacy: How To Think Realistically About Public Debt

To what extent are questions of sovereign debt a matter for political rather than scientific or moral adjudication? We answer that question by defending three claims. We argue that (i) moral and technocratic takes on sovereign debt tend to be ideological in a pejorative sense of the term, and that therefore (ii) sovereign debt should be politicised all the way down. We then show that this sort of politicisation need not boil down to the crude Realpolitik of debtor-creditor power relations—a conclusion that would leave no room for normative theory, among other problems. Rather, we argue that (iii) in a democratic context, a realist approach to politics centred on what Bernard Williams calls ‘The Basic Legitimation Demand’ affords a deliberative approach to the normative evaluation of public debt policy options.

A Smart Ethics is an Ethics Committed to Close-Listening

"A ‘smart’ bioethics is an ethics that is able to recognize and address the real-life and context-embedded moral concerns of the people it intends to serve, whether those people are patients, relatives, healthcare professionals, researchers or policy-makers. Therefore, close-listening to what those people have to say, should be at the start of each bioethics-undertaking. In this presentation, I will explore how narrative approaches taken from the humanities and social sciences could help bioethicists in the 21st century to attune to and examine both the stories of others and the stories we create ourselves in medicine and bioethics. I will discuss why this is an essential first step before we embark on the normative task of bioethics, and how it entails a scrutinization of epistemological and meta-ethical positions. Following, I will use my own research project –an empirical-ethical exploration of physician-assisted dying in Dutch general practice– as an example of how narrative approaches used in empirical research, training of researchers and normative evaluation may change one’s perspective on a highly contested bioethical issue. Last, I will discuss the question whether concepts such as narrative humility and epistemic (in)justice could and should receive more attention in bioethics-training and-research. "

Ethical machine decisions and the input-selection problem

This article is about the role of factual uncertainty for moral decision-making as it concerns the ethics of machine decision-making (i.e., decisions by AI systems, such as autonomous vehicles, autonomous robots, or decision support systems). The view that is defended here is that factual uncertainties require a normative evaluation and that ethics of machine decision faces a triple-edged problem, which concerns what a machine ought to do, given its technical constraints, what decisional uncertainty is acceptable, and what trade-offs are acceptable to decrease the decisional uncertainty.

Civil Disobedience in Times of Pandemic: Clarifying Rights and Duties

This paper seeks to investigate and assess a particular form of relationship between the State and its citizens in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, namely that of obedience to the law and its related right of protest through civil disobedience. We do so by conducting an analysis and normative evaluation of two cases of disobedience to the law: (1) healthcare professionals refusing to attend work as a protest against unsafe working conditions, and (2) citizens who use public demonstration and deliberately ignore measures of social distancing as a way of protesting against lockdown. While different in many aspects, both are substantially similar with respect to one element: their respective protesters both rely on unlawful actions in order to bring change to a policy they consider unjust. We question the extent to which healthcare professionals may participate in civil disobedience with respect to the duty of care intrinsic to the medical profession, and the extent to which opponents of lockdown and confinement measures may reasonably engage in protests without endangering the lives and basic rights of non-dissenting citizens. Drawing on a contractualist normative framework, our analysis leads us to conclude that while both cases qualify as civil disobedience in the descriptive sense, only the case of healthcare professionals qualifies as morally justified civil disobedience.

Majority and popularity effects on norm formation in adolescence

Personal norms consist of individuals’ attitudes about the appropriateness of behaviour. These norms guide adolescents’ behaviour in countless domains that are fundamental for their social functioning and well-being. Peers are known to have a marked influence on adolescent risk-taking and prosocial behaviour, but little is known about how peers shape personal norms underlying those behaviours. Here we show that adolescents’ personal norms are decisively moulded by the norms of the majority and popular peers in their social network. Our experiment indicates that observing peer norms substantially impacts adolescents’ normative evaluation of risk-taking and prosocial behaviours. The majority norm had a stronger impact than the norm of a single popular peer, and norm adjustments were largest when adolescents observed strong disapproval of risk-taking or strong approval of prosocial behaviour. Our study suggests that learning about peer norms likely promotes adolescents to hold views and values supporting socially desirable behaviour.