An approach for comparing agricultural development to societal visions

There is broad agreement that agriculture has to become more sustainable in order to provide enough affordable, healthy food at minimal environmental and social costs. But what is “more sustainable”? More often than not, different stakeholders have opposing opinions on what a more sustainable future should look like. This normative dimension is rarely explicitly addressed in sustainability assessments. In this study, we present an approach to assess the sustainability of agricultural development that explicitly accounts for the normative dimension by comparing observed development with various societal visions. We illustrate the approach by analyzing farm- and landscape-scale development as well as sustainability outcomes in a Swiss case study landscape. Observed changes were juxtaposed with desired changes by Avenir Suisse, a liberal think tank representing free-market interests; the Swiss Farmers Association, representing a conservative force; and Landwirtschaft mit Zukunft, an exponent of the Swiss agroecological movement. Overall, the observed developments aligned most closely with desired developments of the liberal think-tank (72%). Farmer interviews revealed that in the case study area farms increased in size (+ 57%) and became more specialized and more productive (+ 223%) over the past 20 years. In addition, interpretation of aerial photographs indicated that farming became more rationalized at the landscape level, with increasing field sizes (+ 34%) and removal of solitary field trees (− 18%). The case study example highlights the varying degrees to which current developments in agriculture align with societal visions. By using societal visions as benchmarks to track the progress of agricultural development, while explicitly addressing their narratives and respective systems of values and norms, this approach offers opportunities to inform also the wider public on the extent to which current developments are consistent with different visions. This could help identify mismatches between desired and actual development and pave the way for designing new policies.

THE ETHICAL DIMENSION OF JOURNALISTIC PROFESSIONALISM: VIEWS OF LITHUANIAN JOURNALISTS

When evaluating the normative dimension of journalistic professionalism, researchers note that it is related to the core values of professional journalism, manifested in the recognition and application of common professional ethical principles in journalistic activities. This allows us to identify the existence of the ethical dimension of journalistic professionalism. This study examines the ethical dimension of journalistic professionalism by analysing the attitudes of Lithuanian journalists towards the importance of ethical aspects, codified in the Code of Ethics in Providing Information to the Public of Lithuania (2016) for journalistic professionalism.

Filozofia polityczna a racja stanu. Część 2

Reason of state understood as the reason for its existence and expressed by a synthesis of the normative as well as the political, including its normative and empirical, universal and particular, abstract and concrete dimensions requires a justification by political philosophy. Yet, in the output of the main body of Western political philosophy, including the Aristotelian, Marxist, and liberal traditions, the reason of state lacks any validation. In those traditions, there is no distinction between the elements to be found in all states and those present only in some of them. In fact, both in Aristotle and Marx, the normative in the conduct of all states sets the limits of the empirical which expresses their real behavior. The normative of general principles outlines the political of concrete states. The normative supervises the political and the political is to confirm the normative. Thus, in Aristotle and Marx, the political is to indicate the necessity of the normative, its power of influence and complex character. In turn, the modern as well as contemporary liberals, especially contractarians, completely deprive their normative argument of any empirical confirmation. Thus, they consciously and purposefully give it exclusively a normative dimension. Accordingly, the normative fully replaces the empirical which leads to the elimination of the political. In his concept of public reason, Rawls goes even further and considers the empirical identical with the normative, and consequently the political with the normative. For some of his followers, the irrevocable character of the connection between the normative and the empirical in the notion of public reason is to be guaranteed by elimination of the political. This is to be achieved by the abolition of the state itself and thus the deprivation of the idea of reason of state of any conceptual foundation. However, both in Montesquieu and Burke, there is a strong distinction between what characterizes all states and what distinguishes each of them. Such a distinction results from the difference between what is common to their subjects or citizens and the societies they create, and what distinguishes them from themselves and their societies. At the same time, Montesquieu’s liberalism and Burke’s conservatism offer an equilibrium of the normative and the political which in turn constitutes a doctrinal support for the concept of reason of state beyond the main traditions of western political philosophy.

Predictive Path Modelling of Indicators of Secondary School Instructors’ Affective, Continuance and Normative Job Commitment

There is a growing body of literature investigating the impact of retraining and motivation on employee work efficiency. However, little seems to be understood about the effects of employee placement on the commitment of teachers to their jobs. To the best of the researcher's awareness, the partial and composite impact of staff placement, retraining, and motivation on the three aspects of job commitment (affective, continuance and normative) among secondary educators have scarcely been examined. This research was intended to fill this vacuum by using a predictive path modelling approach to analyse the association between these endogenous and exogenous variables. A random sample of 500 secondary school principals was surveyed using two forms of questionnaires. Collected data were analysed and formulated hypotheses tested using Path and multiple linear regression analyses, with the aid of Amos and SPSS packages. Findings indicated that staff placement and motivation were highly predictive of instructors' commitment (at the affective and continuance dimension), but not at the normative dimension; Employee dedication in the three dimensions was not predicted by personnel retraining, but it did result in employee attrition; workers retraining only increased teachers' work commitment when it was augmented with placement and motivation. The combined effect of staff placement, retraining, and motivation was statistically significant in two dimensions of teachers’ job commitment (affective and continuance), but not on the normative dimension. Based on these findings, policy and theoretical ramifications for effective instructional management, assessment, classroom practice, and future study are discussed. Received: 30 March 2021 / Accepted: 27 July 2021 / Published: 5 November 2021

The European Composite Administration Facing the Challenges of Migration

In classical theoretical reflections on international reality, one of the leading paradigms is the belief that the Westphalian order based on sovereign states has evolved into a diverse network of interdependent actors. From a legal perspective, a network such as this has the character of multi-level normative linkages. Legislation with varying degrees of impact in terms of its binding force is enacted within a number of parallel consultative bodies. Within the EU this network takes on a concretised, institutional normative dimension, the so-called European Composite Administration which is evident in specific areas such as cyber security, asylum and migration policies, energy, and financial market regulation. In the European Union, decentralised agencies play a leading role in a such compound bureaucracy. They are one of the main instruments in the European system for harmonising regulation and practices in specific areas of EU activity. In a crisis situation there is an increasing tendency to modify their powers. Within the European Composite Administration, bodies such as EASO, the agency responsible for migration and asylum policies, play a key coordinating role between the Member States. The crisis legitimises institutional changes, by expanding the catalogue of regulatory agencies’ competencies. While practitioners, especially in individual offices in the Member States, may find such processes acceptable in relation to the ideal of effi cient and effective administration, these phenomena may be regarded as worrying from the point of view of control over a growing complex integrated administrative apparatus.

Reimagining the cartographic nation: In praise of risk taking

I read Rossetto and Lo Presti's article, ‘Reimagining the National Map’, as an invitation to develop what I call, following Eve Sedgwick, a reparative study of national cartographies. In this commentary, I enthusiastically support their call but also argue for the need to move from an appreciation of maps’ fundamental instability to a more daring engagement with the normative dimension of national mapping. Like many scholars working from a post-representational perspective, Rossetto and Lo Presti associate the fundamental dynamism and contingency of maps with (potential) positive social change and, more specifically, the development of multicultural national imaginaries. I suggest that these associations deserve further scrutiny and argue that change and ‘everydayness’ may offer a starting point, but not a basis for progressive national mappings. Finally, drawing on the thought-provoking examples presented by Rossetto and Lo Presti, I reflect on what principles and practices could guide a progressive national cartography of Italy in 2021.

Monitoring, browsing and being aware – Keeping abreast and staying updated with professional information in Swedish regional libraries

A substantial part of the work conducted by librarians at Swedish regional libraries concerns staying alert and informed in ways that allow for continuous development of the kind of knowledge and abilities that are required for doing a qualified job, but this part of the work is elusive and hard to identify. This paper presents an empirical study that elucidates this specific kind of work of keeping abreast and updated with professional information. Empirical data were produced through interviews and logbooks with 10 members of staff at 4 regional libraries in Sweden. The data were analysed by employing Marcia Bates’ model of different information-seeking modes. The results of the study show that the activity in focus is seamlessly intertwined with other work activities and enacted in a variety of ways that are adapted after other work tasks (than the information seeking in itself) and dependent on individual preferences and routines. Since there is a certain conception of this activity as something that should be carried out in a certain systematic way and since it is something that one as a librarian ought to be good at, it is furthermore often associated with a normative dimension that provokes a sense of guilt among the study participants.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Governance of Global Public Goods

This chapter analyses the relationship between global public goods (GPGs) and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It argues that the Global 2030 Agenda of the United Nations constitutes an example of how the concept of GPGs has been given a normative dimension in international law, as well as of the difficulties that may be encountered in the process of operationalization of GPGs. The normative framework for the implementation of the SDGs relies on the use of indicators to evaluate state performance in achieving the SDGs. The choice of such indicators is crucial for appropriate decision making. However, both the usefulness and the legitimacy of indicators have been put into question. The chapter contends that the indicators are in fact normative – and intrinsically politically-driven – instruments. For this reason, the development of a global indicator framework should be expected to follow a democratic procedure involving all the relevant stakeholders.

False Starts

Despite the fact that there is an obvious normative dimension to the problem of anthropogenic climate change, environmental ethicists have so far not had much influence on policy deliberations. This is primarily because mainstream views in the philosophical literature have policy implications that are implausibly extreme. This chapter begins by considering the case of traditional environmental ethics, and the debate over anthropocentrism that has dominated this literature. Far from generating specific policy recommendations, this perspective has tended rather to generate only pluralism, if not outright skepticism about value. These difficulties led to the emergence of a second wave of environmental philosophers, who have attempted to grapple with the issues raised by climate change using the tools of normative political philosophy. Many of these frameworks have also failed to make a productive contribution because their deontological structure makes them poorly tailored to consideration of the trade-offs involved in different policy options.

Normativität in praxeologischer Professionsforschung

Praxeologische Professionsforschung steht vor der Herausforderung, einen normativen Standpunkt bezüglich empirisch vorgefundener Praktiken zu begründen. Die „praktische Diskursethik“ (Bohnsack 2020) ermöglicht zwar, normative Aussagen zur Angemessenheit von Diskursen zu treffen. Mit Bezug auf eine Studie zu Mentoringgesprächen über Englischunterricht wird argumentiert, dass es neben dieser diskursethischen Dimension eine fachlich-normative Dimension gibt, die bei der Untersuchung des Professionalisierungspotentials dieser Gespräche mitdiskutiert werden muss. Dies wird durch die vergleichende dokumentarische Interpretation zweier Fälle untermauert. In der Diskussion der Ergebnisse wird ein Weg zur Entfaltung einer solchen fachdidaktisch- normativen Perspektive aufgezeigt: Empirisch erweist sich die Frage, wie „die Sache“ (Helsper 2016), hier also Gegenstände und Ziele des Englischunterrichts, in unterschiedlichen Fällen konzeptualisiert wird, als fachdidaktische Kernfrage, anhand derer Aussagen zur fachdidaktischen Angemessenheit der Mentoringgespräche – und damit zu ihrer potentiellen (de)professionalisierenden Wirkung – getroffen werden können. Zugleich wird jedoch auch reflektiert, mit welchen Herausforderungen das Entfalten einer solchen fachdidaktischen Norm verbunden ist.