Related Dilemmas Research Articles

Almajid Limited: the tumultuous journey of a multigenerational enterprise in Saudi Arabia. Case study: Parts A, B, C and D

Learning outcomes Reflect on the influence of different lifecycle stages on the strategy of a family business; evaluate the impact of family, industry and company dynamics on the evolution of a family firm; assess the impact of ownership, governance and succession considerations on the sustainability of a family firm; and develop decision-making skills to overcome specific dilemmas and secure the family business longevity. Case overview/synopsis Five industries, three generations and one family business. What started off as an entrepreneur’s ambition, Almajid Limited has proven itself to a sustainable source of revenue and a diverse portfolio of businesses for multiple generations of a Saudi Arabian family. This case study offers an exclusive opportunity to follow the tumultuous journey of a Saudi family business and analyze the different phases of its evolution over seven decades and three generations. In particular, the case aims to highlight the complexities surrounding the management of a family firm and illustrate how various lifecycle stages stemming from a number of areas (e.g. family, company, industry, ownership and governance) simultaneously influence the family business strategy. Being deeply embedded in the context of Saudi Arabia, the case unveils the unique challenges of managing a family business in a conservative cultural setting. The case study is divided into four parts, with each of them putting the emphasis on a different lifecycle area of significance for the evolution of the family business. Each part culminates with the identification of an area-relevant dilemma that needs to be addressed for the family firm to be able to move into the next stage of its development. Part A focuses on the family area or axis, the Part B on the industry axis, Part C on the company axis, while Part D is based on the sustainability axis, which embraces as many as three dilemmas in relation to the ownership, governance and succession in the family firm. Moreover, each part incorporates a timeline of critical events that contributed to the emergence of a specific dilemma and a culturally-rooted anime that helps the readers visualize the story, picture somebody else’s reality, and empathize with the key protagonists of the case to achieve optimal decision-making. Complexity academic level Graduate audience: Master of Business Administration or Master of Global Entrepreneurial Management. Supplementary materials Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Subject code CSS 11: Strategy.

Code of Ethics as a professional tool in the work of personal assistants

In their almost daily routine, personal assistants face particular ethical questions. Their awareness, search for answers and consideration of the questions in general require due diligence and time. The main purpose of the text is to investigate the extent familiarity with a code of ethics influences social service workers, especially personal assistants. What is the applicability of a code of ethics when dealing with ethical dilemmas in relation to doing this job? Furthermore, we will investigate these assistants’ familiarity with a code of ethics.

The Dilemma of Sino-Myanmar Relations: The Case of Myitsone Hydropower Dam Project

In 2011, President Thein Sein declared prospects for the Myitsone Dam General Project suspension during his tenure without any discussion with the Chinese government. This article explores the outcomes from the Myitsone Dam general project in the context of the Sino-Myanmar relations. The factors specific to the electricity production in the context of the geopolitical significance of the Ayeyarwaddy river are explored. The article also focuses on possible solutions if two governments decided to resume the Myitsone Project in the future. Therefore, to investigate the hidden potential of the Myitsone Dam project is a timely and relevant exercise.

Leleplezett prosopopeia, megrekedt szinekdoché

György Dragomán’s second novel, The White King, while being extremely popular with literary audiences, also gained considerable critical acclaim. The story of Djata, the young boy who has to grow up without his father in an unnamed Eastern European dictatorship has been translated to thirty languages due to its powerful images and complex, yet easily readable language, which works well with adolescents as well. Using close reading, the present paper focuses on the genre related dilemmas of the novel. The paper uses Paul de Man’s understanding of prosopopeia and the concept of dysfunctional synecdoche to argue that the genres of “father novel”, bildungsroman and dystopia are each other’s logical consequences and as such are intermingled in The White King.

Smart, friendly, biased liars? Exploring motivated reasoning and ethical decision-making in public relations

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present research on motivated bias and self-deception in ethical decision-making in public relations. Self-deception might explain how professionals evade mental stress in conflicting situations and manage to be persuasive even when they have to act contrary to their own morals or to public interests. Since self-deception impedes moral reasoning, the research purpose is to gain insights on its origins so that effective counter-measures can be developed.Design/methodology/approachFirst, the state of research on moral dilemmas in public relations and on self-deception in psychology is outlined. Second, four professionals are interviewed to explore typical conflicts of interest and to develop a realistic scenario that gives rise to a moral dilemma. Third, a small sample of professionals (n=9) is confronted with the developed scenario in a qualitative online questionnaire to analyze their reasoning.FindingsResults indicate that self-deception in response to moral dilemmas exists in public relations practice. Typical conflicts of interest, boundary conditions for motivated bias and counter-measures are identified. Experienced professionals in leading positions seem to have the confidence to reject mandates they perceive as immoral. Counter-measures against self-deception should therefore address young professionals and practitioners with low advisory influence.Originality/valueWhile public relations research mostly presumes professionals as rational actors, this study sheds light on irrational practices. In contrast to common practice of expert interviews, an indirect and implicit methodological approach is applied to capture unconscious processes of motivated reasoning.

Struggles for maintenance: Patient activism and dialysis dilemmas amidst a global diabetes epidemic

ABSTRACTDiabetes has become a leading cause of death in Belize, making this Central American country emblematic of challenges amplified by a growing global diabetes epidemic. The struggles people face as they seek care for chronic conditions like diabetes (and its complications such as kidney failure) are bringing citizens and institutions alike to revisit longstanding norms about the terms through which healthcare is accessed. Ethnographically tracing Belize’s first patient-driven healthcare protests and activism – an ad hoc movement for public dialysis that began over a decade ago – this paper examines patients’ and caregivers’ struggles to probe and shape a legacy of social justice health activism, drawing on perspectives from an often-overlooked part of Central America where basic healthcare access has not historically been framed as a right of citizens. It considers these dilemmas in relation to much larger chronic struggles ‘to maintain’ and repair bodies, medical technologies, and health systems in the aftermath of colonial legacies – with special attention to the challenges posed for small countries now facing rising issues of diabetes injuries and chronic complications – and the role of civic media and citizen activism in this context.

Being grateful and biased: Felt gratitude as a cause of escalation bias in relational dilemmas

Despite the documented socio-relational benefits of gratitude, this emotion can be a liability in certain social situations. We examine whether experiencing gratitude in a relational dilemma, wherein individual relational concern and personal concern are in conflict with one another, will lead to escalation bias. Across five experiments (N = 1401), we find that, in a relational dilemma, when feeling grateful (vs. neutral) toward a friend, individuals exhibited escalation bias because their high relational concern preceded and trumped their personal concern. This identified psychological mechanism was robust when we controlled for a range of dispositional, relational, motivational, emotional, and situational factors. The implications for the study of gratitude, escalation bias and relational dilemmas are discussed.

The Challenge of Recruiting Underrepresented Groups – Exploring Organizational Recruitment Practices in Sweden

The aim of this article is to explore organisational recruitment practices from human resources (HR) experts’ narratives and discuss the challenges of recruiting underrepresented groups in relation to these practices. From the HR experts’ narratives, we identify four organisational recruitment practices: the informal, the pragmatic, the standardised and the strategic. These practices consist of, for example, ‘subjective’ judgements versus ‘objective’ criteria and are construed in relation to different rationalities, which also give rise to various dilemmas in relation to underrepresented groups. From our analysis, there seems to be a paradox between enhancing diversity and counteracting discrimination. Organisational recruitment practices that are counteracting discrimination do not necessarily enhance diversity and recruitment practices that radically work with enhancing diversity can be seen as discriminatory. We thereby draw the conclusion that there is no effective practice for the recruitment of underrepresented groups in the labour market. This is a dilemma for HR experts and a challenge for the Swedish labour market in general.

Later life learning from experience: the cross-cultural importance of \u2018life reviews\u2019 in seniors\u2019 lifelong education and learning

Lifelong education for seniors is becoming a significant policy focus because of factors relating to the global aging society phenomenon. Yet the modern ‘educational demoralisation’ that can result from informal experiential learning not being sufficiently valued or encouraged, may also apply to later life learning—typically manifest as a ‘fear of ageing’ as well as ageism. This is especially so in contexts where policymakers tend to just mainly focus on the worrying economic, health and other related challenges of growing numbers of seniors living longer in ageing societies (i.e. without sufficiently linking this to the related qualitative challenges of a meaningful and resilient life course). Conversely however, there is also growing recognition that ‘life reviews’ in later stages of the human lifecycle have an important lifelong education and learning purpose with also important cross-cultural relevance for addressing the related resiliency dilemmas facing many seniors around the world. In other words, if another key function of later life learning is the informal sharing of knowledge, stories and experience through social (and social media) networks, then it might be that developing countries have as much to offer as more developed countries when it comes to emerging models of third age (and fourth age) models of lifelong learning for seniors—if not more. On such a basis for better grounding policy in practice or actual lived human experience, the paper will thus discuss the cross-culturally universal importance of a ‘life review’ function of later life learning as also an integral requirement of the most effective ‘active ageing’ policies and practices.

О нормативных следствиях одной импликации

The paper treats the “ought implies can” principle as a normative dilemma in relation to epistemic and moral obligations. It shoes that the standard interpretation of this principle as a contraposition is not the only possible one or heuristically interesting. The author draws on the examples of obligations and actions of different types to show how it is possible to shift the focus from the modality of possibility to the modality of obligation. It allows to explain a number of actions not adequately described in traditional moral theory. It also helps to understand the links between moral and epistemic imperatives.

Holism, Realism, and Error

Holism in metaphysics can be defended because it can solve a dilemma about error: that the object of one’s wrong judgment is either inside or outside one’s mind and that neither alternative can be the case. Among holists the American philosopher Josiah Royce provides the best account of both the dilemma and its holist answer. The latter consists in steering between the hard and fast difference of being inside and outside the mind that sparks the dilemma. Royce does this by identifying a unity in the difference, which then ceases to be a stark division and becomes instead a unity-in-difference. I then show how a related dilemma is susceptible to this sort of holist solution. Yet the holist answer to these dilemmas invites all the stock objections to holism. These include the obliteration of finite selves and the distinction between such selves and their experiences. Answering these objections calls for an alternative that uses Royce’s ploy of synthesizing the extremes of being inside and being outside the mind. This sort of realism gets between the horns of the dilemmas via the real and intentional modes of forms.

Family Ties, Color Lines, and Fault Lines: Oral Histories of Land Ownership and Dispossession

Family Ties, Color Lines, and Fault Lines:Oral Histories of Land Ownership and Dispossession Adrienne Monteith Petty (bio) Sydney Nathans. A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2017. x + 313 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, and index. $29.95. Kendra Taira Field. Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018. xxv + 224 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, and index. $38.00. A few pages into A Mind to Stay: White Plantation, Black Homeland, Sydney Nathans expresses the sense of doubt and trepidation many interviewers feel before approaching a potential narrator. He recalled the time in 1978 when he steeled himself before calling Alice Hargress and others who lived on the same Alabama plantation where their ancestors had been enslaved. Yet he singles out his Euro-American ancestry as the potential sticking point: "[W]ould they share what they knew with me, a white professor, an utter stranger?" (p. 6). To gain the trust of Hargress, the first descendant he telephoned, Nathans revealed the parts of the story he had been able to reconstruct. He mentioned her ancestors' forced migration from North Carolina to Alabama in 1844. He named their owner, Paul Cameron. "That's right. That's right," Hargress responded. "Come on." (p. 7). With this invitation and vote of confidence, Hargress shepherded Nathans through a journey of discovery that would take him forty years to complete. Nathans's book stands as a testament that, whether his interviewees harbored any lingering mistrust about him, it did not interfere with his ability to evoke eloquent and revealing statements from them about the changing meaning of land across multiple generations. Few people would argue that Nathans and other white historians should interview only white narrators, that Native American interviewers dare not interview anyone except another Native American and so on. But the idea that there is something singularly tricky, sensitive, or even risky about interviews across the color line endures despite untold recorded hours of spectacularly revealing interviews across various lines of color, ancestry, and nationality. So [End Page 436] many variables can make or break an interview that it is nearly impossible to single out any one factor—even one as reprehensible as the narrator's racism.1 In doing research for Growing Up With the Country, Kendra Field experienced a different but related dilemma. Despite her shared ancestral and kinship ties with the men and women she interviewed, she describes the challenges she faced in reconstructing the fascinating and heartbreaking story of land acquisition and land loss among her Indian and African American forebears. It is a paradox that Field's kinship ties with many of her narrators did not spare her the uncertainty that Nathans and countless oral historians face, nor did it guarantee her access to insightful, garrulous narrators full of indelible memories that they were ready and willing to share. The works of Field and Nathans remind us that the single most important factor in oral histories has nothing to do with ancestry at all. Curiosity about and respect for other human beings remain the only variable oral historians can control in the interview. Moreover, if oral historians approach interviewing with the tenacity and sense of wonder about other human beings that the task demands, they recognize that they do not have the luxury of interviewing only those people who "look like them," those whom they admire, or those with whom they share an affinity. It requires reaching across color lines and "fault lines," interviewing both victims of and perpetrators of inequality. Nor can oral historians assume that those who share seemingly salient attributes with them will automatically be more forthcoming than those from different backgrounds. At its best, oral history is the idea of pluralistic democracy in action. Although fleeting, oral history interviews represent crucial moments when the interests of interviewers and narrators intersect, when both unite in telling about the past or exploring the present. Now, perhaps more than ever, the oral history interview offers a useful model for treating all people with humility, curiosity, and respect, and actively seeking out a variety of narrators even when...

The dilemma of professional and industry relations for medical education.

The dilemma of professional and industry relations for medical education.

Exploring influences on pharmacists' and students' ethical reasoning in a changing practice landscape in Australia.

Background Practising pharmacists continuously develop their ethical reasoning skills, which evolve with practice experience and exposure to challenging scenarios. Considering the recent expansion of the roles of pharmacists and the paradigm shift in pharmacy practice, it is timely to explore community pharmacists' attitudes regarding the importance of ethics and their ethical reasoning. Objective To explore underlying factors influencing community pharmacists' and pharmacy students' ethical reasoning and attitudes towards pharmacy ethics, ethical reasoning processes and perceived current dilemmas. Setting Practising registered community pharmacists, pharmacists with provisional registration (interns) and final year pharmacy students in Australia. Method Two focus group discussions and two interviews were conducted with 16 Western Australian community pharmacists, interns and students. Participants were purposively selected for gender, background, practice setting, and practice experience. Main outcome measure Emerging themes embracing important influences on community pharmacists', interns' and students' ethical reasoning and perceived current ethical dilemmas and challenges. Results Two major themes embraced participants' ethical reasoning processes and conduct: (1) fundamental underpinning, from personal values and practice exposure, and (2) paradigm influenced, such as the changing healthcare landscape, expansion of roles, management of dilemmas, and competence. Increased frequency and complexity of ethical dilemmas related to role expansion. Rural pharmacists experienced unique ethical dilemmas in relation to practice isolation, privacy and confidentiality. Conclusion Changes in the community pharmacy practice environment has increasingly exposed pharmacists to more complex ethical dilemmas. Pharmacists practising in rural communities experience unique challenges. Structured and sound ethical reasoning skills are essential as pharmacists are faced with contemporary challenges.

Not just bad actions: Affective concern for bad outcomes contributes to moral condemnation of harm in moral dilemmas.

Moral dilemmas typically entail directly causing harm (said to violate deontological ethics) to maximize overall outcomes (said to uphold utilitarian ethics). The dual process model suggests harm-rejection judgments derive from affective reactions to harm, whereas harm-acceptance judgments derive from cognitive evaluations of outcomes. Recently, Miller, Hannikainen, and Cushman (2014) argued that harm-rejection judgments primarily reflect self-focused-rather than other-focused-emotional responses, because only action aversion (self-focused reactions to the thought of causing harm), not outcome aversion (other-focused reactions to witnessing suffering), consistently predicted dilemma responses. However, they assessed only conventional relative dilemma judgments that treat harm-rejection and outcome-maximization responses as diametric opposites. Instead, we employed process dissociation to assess these response inclinations independently. In two studies (N = 558), we replicated Miller and colleagues' findings for conventional relative judgments, but process dissociation revealed that outcome aversion positively predicted both deontological and utilitarian inclinations-which canceled out for relative judgments. Additionally, individual differences associated with affective processing-psychopathy and empathic concern-correlated with the deontology but not utilitarian parameter. Together, these findings suggest that genuine other-oriented moralized concern for others' well-being contribute to both utilitarian and deontological response tendencies, but these tendencies nonetheless draw upon different psychological processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

The Dilemma of Human Relations and Access to Land at the Face of Game Conservation Policies in Mara Region, Tanzania, 1920s – 2014

Tanzania is one of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa which has great number of conserved and protected areas, and aspires to protect more areas. However, there is a growing concern among Tanzania’s people who live around conserved areas that their rights to access land and other natural resources around is being impinged. As a result, conflicts emerge between local people and those who call themselves 'conservationists'. Increase of population of both human beings and wild animals continues to aggravate the problem. In light of that thinking, this paper examines game conservation policies and their far-reaching implications on human relations and access to land in Mara region. The main assumption is that changes of land use from human settlement, grazing, cultivation and hunting land to game reserves and controlled areas creates pressure on the meagre remaining land surface. This situation, in turn, affects the pre-existing human relations and the future prospects of the surrounding communities. The paper builds its analysis from both secondary and primary sources such as review of books and journal articles, archival research and oral in-depth interviews conducted in the area. The findings show that conservation practices in Tanzania prioritize animal rights at the expense of human population thereby creating dilemma on human relations and survival. Finally, the paper reveals that there has been an emerging trend for conservation for the interest of the foreign investors; that investors and some government officials benefit more than the local community around.

NARRATIVAS E ASSUNÇÕES COMO CATALISADORES DOS PERCURSOS METODOLÓGICOS DAS RELAÇÕES COM O SABER NA EDUCAÇÃO FÍSICA

Há diferentes perspectivas metodológicas para investigar as trajetórias percorridas na formação docente. As licenciaturas precisam valorizar idiossincrasias e intersubjetividades, porque a complexidade da trajetória formativa requer (auto)crítica. As narrativas (auto)biográficas e assunções possibilitam compreender escolhas e disposições. Analisamos experiências de aprendizagem associadas a processos reflexivos de estagiários(as). Nosso objetivo geral é apresentar indícios da relação com o saber a partir das narrativas elaboradas no estágio, com estratégias que vêm sendo utilizadas por dois docentes. Nosso objetivo específico é fazer emergir assunções, ao identificar temáticas recorrentes nas narrativas. As escolhas metodológicas para a geração dos indícios foram qualitativas. A pesquisa foi desenvolvida de modo exploratório na disciplina “Estágio I - observação da realidade” no curso de licenciatura em educação física da Universidade Federal do Ceará. A narrativa permite aos(às) estudantes explicitar suas emoções, percepções e questões – relacionadas à experiência – para confrontar o mundo vivido. Como resultados, destacamos dois(as) participantes que elaboraram narrativas antes e durante suas experiências com o estágio supervisionado nos diferentes níveis da educação básica. As narrativas foram compartilhadas em ambiente virtual de aprendizagem com os(as) docentes e, posteriormente, sintetizadas e compartilhadas presencialmente nas aulas, implicando releituras sobre o currículo e a relação com o saber de cada um(a). Cada etapa de estágio supervisionado é marcada por tensões e conflitos, que exigem dos(as) estudantes reflexões constantes sobre a complexidade das condições do trabalho com o ensino, contextos escolares, carreira docente e dilemas relacionais. Concluímos que as escolhas e as trajetórias dos(as) estagiários(as) são singulares, bem como sua intencionalidade ao agir no mundo. Tornar-se professor(a) é um processo que precisa ser constantemente investigado para permitir que cada estudante perceba os saberes que elabora a respeito de si mesmo(a) e do(a) outro(a).

A federalist’s dilemma: Trade-offs between social legitimacy and budget responsibility in multi-tiered welfare states

In multi-tiered states, subnational policymakers face a dilemma: on one hand, they must ensure the social legitimacy of their subnational unit by owning relevant policies including their potentially negative consequences; on the other, they have to manage their budget responsibly, which limits the scope of policy development. We study this dilemma in relation to social policies, by examining how the constituent units and municipalities in Germany, Italy, Spain and Switzerland deal with it, taking social assistance as an empirical example. Our analysis suggests that the combination of the federation’s history and a multinational political context affects the incentives and the choices made by the policymakers regarding ownership and disownership of policy competencies in the field of social assistance. By analysing mechanisms that are likely to play out in multi-tiered welfare states, our article contributes to both the social policy and the political science literatures.

A solution for private assessment in indirect reciprocity using solitary observation

Although indirect reciprocity is a fundamental mechanism in the evolution of human cooperation, most studies assume public assessment in which individuals are not permitted to obtain private assessments of others. Existing studies on private assessment have used individual-based simulations because of the analytical difficulty involved. Here, we develop an analytical method using solitary observation to solve private assessment in indirect reciprocity problem without any approximation. In this study, we formulate a model of solitary observation and calculate the replicator dynamics systems of five leading norms of indirect reciprocity. Indirect reciprocity in private assessment provides a different result to that in public assessment. According to the existence proofs of cooperative evolutionarily stable (CES) points in the system, strict norms (stern judging and shunning) have no CES point in private assessment, while they do in public assessment. Image scoring does not change the system regardless of the assessment types because it does not use second-order information. In tolerant norms (simple standing and staying), the CES points move to co-existence of norms and unconditional cooperators. Despite the fact that there is no central coercive assessment system in private assessment, the average cooperation rate at the CES points in private assessment is greater than that in public assessment. This is because private assessment gives unconditional cooperators a role. Our results also show the superiority of the staying norm. Compared with simple standing, staying has three advantages in private assessment: a higher cooperation rate, easiness of invasion into defectors, and robustness to maintain cooperative evolutionarily stable situations. Our results are applicable to general social dilemmas in relation to private information. Under some dilemmas, norms or assessment rules should be carefully chosen to enable cooperation to evolve.

Distrusting Your Moral Compass: The Impact of Distrust Mindsets on Moral Dilemma Processing and Judgments

A growing literature suggests that generalized distrust mindsets encourage carefully considering alternatives—yet it remains unclear whether this pertains to moral decision-making. We propose that distrust simultaneously increases opposing moral response inclinations when moral decisions pit two moral responses against one another, such as classic moral dilemmas where causing harm maximizes outcomes. Such a pattern may be invisible to conventional analytic techniques that treat dilemma response inclinations as diametric opposites. Therefore, we employed process dissociation to independently assess response inclinations underlying moral dilemma responses. Three studies demonstrated that activating generalized distrust (vs. trust and control) mindsets increased both harm avoidance and outcome-maximization response tendencies. These effects canceled out for conventional relative dilemma judgments. Moreover, perceptions of feeling torn between available response options mediated the impact of distrust on both response inclinations. These findings clarify how distrust impacts decision-making processes in the moral domain.