Proportionality in Investment Treaty Arbitration

Chapter Eight continues Chapter Seven’s examination of regulatory coherence tests in investment treaty arbitration, turning the analysis to the controversial idea of relying on proportionality testing. The principle of proportionality is promising as a concept that could assist in the substantive balancing of international legal interests and the better co-ordination of domestic and international authority. However the difficulty with the adoption of proportionality testing by international courts and tribunals is precisely that it calls, when needed, for a value judgement to be taken as a matter of international law on the relative merits of the legal interests at stake. Proportionality testing does not ultimately accommodate domestic decision-making in the same way as many other regulatory coherence tests like those addressed in Chapter Seven and prior chapters. International courts and tribunals are rightly wary of such a concept. Proportionality is not accepted as a general head of review in common law jurisdictions and does not qualify as a general principle of law. The introduction of proportionality through international adjudicatory process is likely to undermine rather than enhance the procedural justification of international law’s legitimacy claim. The chapter proposes three ways in which proportionality testing should be refocused, if it is to be employed.

The Poetics of Detachment in Medieval Ka-vya: Anthologies and the Path of Literary Sanskrit in the Second Millennium

This essay explores the dialectic of form, content and social life in the new poetry of the medieval Sanskrit anthologies. Did the seeming anarchy of content evinced in unfamiliar tables of contents produce genuine newness of aesthetic effect or affect, new possibilities for social value judgement—a critical and self-critical perspective—in response to changing sociopolitical conditions and the rise of the vernacular? Or else did this poetry simply do what it always did best: to be everything for everyone at the royal court, everywhere and nowhere? This article argues that the anthology may have spawned a contradictory dynamic: crafting a new sociological immediacy for the form, and yet reconciling the courtly ka-vya tradition to a future in which it no longer figured so centrally. Finally, in a methodological annex, the aforementioned case study spawns higher-order reflections on the mutual determination of art and social life in early medieval South Asia, and the materialist analysis of premodern cultural form. Thinking through premodern sociocultural change from the point of view of capitalist modernity fundamentally challenges the historical imagination, revealing self-reflexivity as both its first and last resort.

Exorcising the positivist ghost in the priority-setting machine: NICE and the demise of the ‘social value judgement’

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), the UK's primary health care priority-setting body, has traditionally described its decisions as being informed by ‘social value judgements’ about how resources should be allocated across society. This paper traces the intellectual history of this term and suggests that, in NICE's adoption of the idea of the ‘social value judgement’, we are hearing the echoes of welfare economics at a particular stage of its development, when logical positivism provided the basis for thinking about public policy choice. As such, it is argued that the term offers an overly simplistic conceptualisation of NICE's normative approach and contributes to a situation in which NICE finds itself without the necessary language fully and accurately to articulate its basis for decision-making. It is suggested that the notion of practical public reasoning, based on reflection about coherent principles of action, might provide a better characterisation of the enterprise in which NICE is, or hopes to be, engaged.

Japanese EFL Learners’ Interpretation оf Plural Morphology

This article examines Japanese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ acquisition of meaning of the English plural marker -s. The main goal of the article is to experimentally investigate whether EFL learners are able to assign a plural-only reading to plural -s. The author conducted a Truth Value Judgement experiment with Japanese intermediate learners and found that they understood bare plurals in a different way than native speakers do. In singular scenarios, Japanese EFL learners failed to reject bare plural statements (e.g. Black Bear has cars) while they successfully rejected numeral statements (e.g. Black Bear has four cars). The results suggest that Japanese EFL learners had difficulties giving a ‘more than one’ reading to bare plurals and appeared to understand -s to mean ‘at least one’.

Islamophobia and French academia

The aim of this article is to study the French academic controversy related to Islamophobia. It raises the general question of the autonomy of social sciences in relation to the political-media field and the capacity of researchers to be reflexive and to distance themselves from the mainstream Islamophobic discourse. Drawing on the publications produced by French academics about Islamophobia, the article first analyses the space of controversy, showing that it does not take place in the central social science journals but on their periphery, or even outside the academic field. It then focuses attention on the logic of avoiding the (rare) French accounts on Islamophobia, which not only results in a timid academic disputatio but also in a disqualification of the concept of Islamophobia that mobilizes arguments similar to political-media discourses. The tension between factual judgement and value judgement is also analysed, highlighting how researchers working on Islamophobia are charged with a lack of scientific rigour and the unacknowledged political bias of the deniers. Finally, the article highlights the instrumentalization of the reference to Pierre Bourdieu by the deniers of Islamophobia. Thus, the forms of the French academic controversy on Islamophobia are indicative of the denial of Islamophobia and the influence of the media on the academic field.

Ethnografische Methoden in der Managementforschung

This paper deals with the subject of ethnographic methods and discusses them regarding their relevance in management research. Ethnographic methods describe longitudinal studies of well-defined communities that are based on direct observation and the researcher’s participation in the research context. The paper identifies ethnography as especially capable to study communities in their specific context, temporality, culture and complexity. However, the method is limited concerning generalization and value judgement, and requires time, effort, and willingness to deal with uncertainty. Considering these limitations, the paper concludes that ethnographic methods are of high relevance to management research in order to address inductive and theory-building research questions. Zusammenfassung Dieses Paper befasst sich mit ethnografischen Methoden und diskutiert ihre Relevanz in der Managementforschung. Die Ethnografie beschreibt Langzeitstudien, die auf direkter Beobachtung und Teilhabe der Forschenden am Forschungskontext basieren. Die Ethnografie wird als geeignet identifiziert, um Gemeinschaften in ihrem Kontext und ihrer Temporalität, Kultur und Komplexität zu beforschen. Als Limitationen der Methode lassen sich die erschwerte Generalisiertbarkeit, der hohe Studienaufwand und die Studienunsicherheit und die problematische Wertfreiheit festhalten. Das Paper schließt mit dem Fazit, dass die Ethnografie, unter Berücksichtigung der Limitationen, einen großen Beitrag zur Managementforschung leisten kann und insbesondere für induktive und theoriebildende Fragestellungen geeignet ist. Es lässt sich vermuten, dass die Methode vor Hintergrund der Globalisierung und Digitalisierung weiter an Bedeutsamkeit gewinnen wird, da diese die Komplexität von Forschungskontexten erhöhen.