Ethical Constructivism

Ethical constructivism holds that truths about the relation between rationality, morality, and agency are best understood as constructed by correct reasoning, rather than discovered or invented. Unlike other metaphors used in metaethics, construction brings to light the generative and dynamic dimension of practical reason. On the resultant picture, practical reasoning is not only productive but also self-transforming, and socially empowering. The main task of this volume is to illustrate how constructivism has substantially modified and expanded the agenda of metaethics by refocusing on rational agency and its constitutive principles. In particular, this volume identifies, compares and discusses the prospects and failures of the main strands of constructivism regarding the powers of reason in responding to the challenges of contingency. While Kantian, Humean, Aristotelian, and Hegelian theories sharply differ in their constructivist strategies, they provide compelling accounts of the rational articulation required for an inclusive and unified ethical community.

When the Chinese guy becomes the female IT specialist Liu – a conceptualization of reputational shifts in international assignments

PurposeInternational assignments rely on interactions between host country nationals (HCNs) and an international assignee (IA). These interactions are significantly determined by the reputation that the IA holds among HCNs. However, reputation has only scarcely been addressed in extant mobility research, and there is a lack of understanding about how the reputation of an IA shifts among HCNs during the course of an assignment. The purpose of this paper is to understand the development of an individual's reputation as well as the interactions between an IA and HCNs in the context of international assignments.Design/methodology/approachThis is a conceptual paper that builds upon the central idea in extant research of individual reputation as a social construction and draws on sensemaking theory to develop its conceptual model.FindingsAs extant research argues for both a temporal and dynamic dimension of reputation, the authors introduce time and reputational richness as central model elements. Furthermore, the conceptual model proposes reputational events as the principal triggers for reputational shifts. Reputational events reveal quantitatively and qualitatively new informational cues about the IA to HCNs, who then use these cues to incrementally construct the IA's reputation in sensemaking processes. In addition, contextual factors of reputational shifts, namely accelerators and amplifiers, are discussed. The authors argue that these contextual factors may affect both the timing and the strength of reputational shifts.Originality/valueThe study introduces a novel conceptual model and contributes to the understanding of individual reputation development as well as the interactions between an IA and HCNs in international assignments.

Social and ethical practices and firm value: the moderating effect of green innovation: evidence from international ESG data

Purpose This study aims to examine the potential effect of integrating social and ethical practices into strategy on the market valuation of environmental, social and governance (ESG) businesses using the moderating effect of green innovation. Design/methodology/approach The sample used consisted of 523 international firms listed on the ESG index and headquartered in North America and Western Europe, forming an unbalanced panel of 7,845 observations spanning the period 2005–2019. The authors run a fixed-effects panel regression model using the Thomson Reuters ASSET4 to test the relationship between societal and ethical practices and the stock market value creation. Similarly, as an extension of the research, this paper exploits two robustness analyzes. The authors tested the dynamic dimension of the data set through the generalized moment method and the effect of the legal system. Findings Evidence reveals a significant positive relationship between societal and ethical practices and businesses’ market valuation. The empirical results indicate that societal and ethical strengths increase firm value with the moderating effect of green innovation and weaknesses reduce it. The results found with the dynamic dimension of the data set indicate the existence of continuity between firm values over time. Research limitations/implications Given the long study period, many firms with missing data were eliminated. To avoid the small sample size, countries with few observations were included, which led to an uneven distribution between observations per country. Practical implications Findings from this paper can help ESG firms to consider their future growth opportunities in a context where the approach of business ethics occupies a central position in business valuation. Originality/value This study is the only study that provides ESG companies with seven different nationalities with evidence for the effect of social and ethical practices regarding market valuation. This paper is also relevant as it addresses the relationship between social effectiveness and financial efficiency, as well as the dynamic effect of this relationship.

Thinking the Transformative

Editorial Summary Steffen Bösenberg’s contribution »Thinking the Transformative« reflects the dynamic momentum of reflexive design and research. In reference to the working process of his doctoral thesis, he highlights the procedural circularity of reflexive, concept-driven research approaches, tracing the »circular motion of constant reflection and rethinking«. Hereby a transdisciplinary concept of »plasticity« is explored as a productive tool in the analysis of design methods in adaptive reuse. Decision-making, reconsideration, comparison or evaluation thereby become considerable as reciprocally interlinked processes, which equally depend upon and shape each other. Most interestingly, the transformation and plasticity of the process mirrors the dynamic dimension of the investigated case studies. [Katharina Voigt]

UP School: Motion, Perception, Learning

The design strategy common to the educational spaces for the “Up School” based in the metropolitan area of Cagliari aims to frame a flexible learning space open to experimentation and the active exploration of places. Indeed, learning does not merely mean collecting and memorizing information; it also requires the ability to select, connect, understand and integrate, first by acquiring self-awareness and by developing perceptual abilities. Space—as experienced in its dynamic dimension—plays a crucial role in this process. The principles of the dynamic perception of space established by the most important investigations in neuroscience of recent years, were declared by the experimentations of the Bauhaus workshops, ahead of their time, as being strongly related to space, body and mind. Beginning with this premise, the “Up School” project—nursery, preschool and primary school—integrates an innovative educational program with the spatial layout of its environments. These spaces are conceived as a fluid sequence of “affordances” where, from an early age, children can shape their world within a perspective guided by good sustainability practices, enabling technologies and psychomotor equilibrium. Thus, the school system changes by being more conscious of its fulcrum: namely, the psychosomatic dimension of the individual.

The Image of the East in Systems of Thinking and in the Structure of Social Action

The images of geographical space and historical time, born in the practices of poetic experience and philosophical reflection, subsequently migrated to the subject-matter domains of sociology, political science, economics, and other social sciences, under­going a long conceptual as well as analytical evolution. In fact, they turned into ef­fective tools for scientific analysis of social, political and economic processes with the scope of application ranging from theoretical constructs and expert assessments to managerial decision-making and futurological forecasts. Moreover, cultural and historical images, arriving into the sphere of theoretical as well as expert-and-analyti­cal knowledge from pre-scientific practices, came back to the sphere of everyday life and began to play an increasingly important role in self-identification, as well as in individual and collective searches for identity. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that the newly formed concepts of the East and the West, the Modern and the Ar­chaic, in their dynamic dimension, gave birth to the “procedural” derivatives thereof, the most well-known and the most broadly applied among which is the concept of modernization, which manifested itself, inter alia, in the emergence of a theory or even many theories of the same name. At the same time, the concepts of westerniza­tion and archaization have been less fortunate: in fact, they have turned into the terms used in the conceptual space of the same theory of modernization. The rarest to be used is the fourth of the concepts in question – the concept of orientalization. This article deals with the very few instances of the use of this term found by the author in modern scientific literature.

The Theory of Forms Without Substance a Romanian Legal Transplant Theory Ahead of its Time

Comparative law and legal history show us that law is dynamic, always in continuous development, change, or mutation. This dynamic dimension has become a central concern for the comparative law scholars. The circulation of legal models in the world (e.g. legal transplant, legal transfer, legal borrowing, legal migration) is an evergreen issue. This phenomenon has provoked numerous doctrinal disputes, which have been encapsulated in complex theories on its possibilities and impossibilities. In the present article, we will not explore the many modern theories regarding legal transplantation (or under other metaphors). Instead, we will go back in time, in the second half of the nineteenth century, to explore an interesting Romanian theory that seems to have anticipated a series of modern ideas regarding the purpose, possibilities, and impossibilities of the circulation of legal models in the world. Following this approach, the main conclusion will be resumed to the idea that the Romanian theory of forms without substance can be integrated within the modern theories of legal transplant.

Recommending Tasks in Online Judges using Autoencoder Neural Networks

Programming contests such as International Olympiads in Informatics (IOI) and ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) are becoming increasingly popular in recent years. To train for these contests, there are several Online Judges available, in which users can test their skills against a usually large set of programming tasks. In the literature, so far few papers have addressed the problem of recommending tasks in online judges. Most notably, as opposed with traditional Recommender Systems, since the learners improve their skills as they solve more problems, there is an intrinsic dynamic dimension that has to be considered: when recommending movies or books, it is likely that the preferences of the users are more or less stable, whilst in recommending tasks this does not hold true. In order to help the learners, it is crucial to recommend them tasks that are challenging but not unsolvable compared with their current set of skills. In this paper we present a Recommender System (RS) for Online Judges based on an Autoencoder (Artificial) Neural Network (ANN). We also discuss the results of an experimental evaluation of our approach in both the scenarios in which we consider, or not, the intrinsic dynamic dimension of the problem. The ANNs are trained with the dataset of all the submissions in the Italian National Online Judge, used to train students for the Italian Olympiads in Informatics.

Croatian accentual norm at the beginning of the 21st century (from theory to practice and back)

Croatian accentual norm is in a constant state of flux. Its stability is impeded, first of all, by two mutually intertwined forces: the nature of the accentual norm, which belongs to speech (dynamic dimension, individual realisation), and the disagreement amongst linguists as to what to record and prescribe (in constant interaction between the stress accent and pitch accent systems). The modern accentual norm is obtained from non-orthoepical manuals, i.e. grammar books, dictionaries, handbooks (which further complicates the clarification of the orthoepical reality). We will conduct a comparative analysis of the approach, in modern handbooks, to accent alternations in morphology, falling accent in non-initial syllables in word formation, post-tonic length, uncertainties regarding lexical stress, etc. Grammar books and dictionaries approach the open questions in different ways and this paper gives an overview of the (systematic and non-systematic) solutions offered by linguists today, with the aim of presenting the dynamics of the codified norm (which carries the label of being “conservative” and “hidebound”). The changes in the modern norm are compared then to usus occurrences, illustrated by a narrower speech corpus – the speech of actors. In their orthoepical research, linguists resort to the speech of radio and television presenters, linguists in specialised radio and television programmes, students of the Croatian language or phonetics, Croatian language teachers, etc., and, more recently, to the speech of actors reading audio books (MP3 files are available at www.lektire.skole.hr). Presenters, teachers and actors have always been perceived as quintessential competent speakers of the standard language, so close observation of their speech as one of the steps in the process of describing and prescribing is the basis of every orthoepical research. Since the modern speech/pronunciation (e-lektira, audio versions of school reading list books available online) has still not been analysed and valorised linguistically/orthoepically, and since it is available to those learning and listening to speech values in this type of material, the paper turns to the corpus with the intention of determining the basic features of pronunciation. Prose texts whose pronunciation has been analysed are those written in or translated into the standard language. Special attention has been given to accent (stress placement and stress shift) and to the prosodic word. Specific pronunciation traits (especially those related to the accentual norm) have been compared to those prescribed in handbooks. Finally, the accentual traits acknowledged by the modern conception of accentual norm and codification were clarified as well as those that are systematically ignored in modern prescription.

EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF DUAL - ORIENTED EDUCATION IN THE EDUCATIONAL PROCESS OF THE UNIVERSITY

Currently, dual-oriented learning in the educational process is becoming an urgent issue. The article presents a brief excursion of dual-oriented training of future specialists in the far and near abroad, which is a system of pedagogical education, providing for a combination of theoretical learning in a higher educational institution with periods of production activity at school. Positive experience in the implementation of dual education in the European Union, Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan is highlighted with the goal of developing a Kazakhstan model of professional training of the future teacher based on dual-oriented education. The innovativeness of the Kazakhstan model will consist of: the creation of a “corporate triangle” aimed at training a specialist; in the implementation of the communicative paradigm of dual-centered learning, which is a conceptual model of the “communicative subject” deployed in the activity-dynamic dimension of the educational process. The features of the dual-oriented process, which in turn will provide a high level of professional training for teaching, are revealed. The mechanisms of the formation of a “group communicative subject” have been identified, suggesting the emergence of polyphony of needs and professional interests of future teachers who try, each in his own way, to express his individuality and make his own contribution to the common cause. It is this polyphony of individualities that arises in the triad of the “corporate triangle” (university, college, school) as the core of effective and productive interaction in a communicative educational environment, which is a sign of the effective manifestation of the “group communicative subject”. The presented theoretical models of dual-oriented learning within the framework of a single pedagogical technology will mean the development of conditions of “framework agreement” in the context of which representatives of the pedagogical movement could follow the development of a new didactic toolkit creating an atmosphere of creative search.