Egalitarian Ethos Research Articles

Exploring the impact of egalitarianism on employee proactivity: unpacking the mediating role of relational social capital

PurposeThis study examines how the resource of egalitarianism, at both individual and organizational levels, affects employee proactivity. Specifically, we propose relational social capital is an effective mechanism through which an individual's egalitarian mindset and the organization's egalitarian HR practice facilitate employee proactivity.Design/methodology/approachThis study surveys a sample of 511 knowledge workers employed in small to medium-sized enterprises in Australia and New Zealand.FindingsResults of partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) demonstrate that relational social capital partially mediates the relationship between an egalitarian mindset and employee proactivity and fully mediates the effects of egalitarian HR practice on employee proactivity.Practical implicationsGlobally, a social transformation, particularly around the notions of social responsibility and sustainability, is occurring, and this means increasing numbers of employees support egalitarian ideals. HR practitioners therefore need to be aware of how their human resource management (HRM) system supports this value orientation.Originality/valueThis study illuminates a new performance pathway by highlighting egalitarianism's contribution, as a valuable resource, to organizational and employee innovation. This focus on egalitarianism is both timely and important. This is because the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, through their support of diversity, inclusiveness and equality, reflect an egalitarian ethos, and managers are becoming increasingly cognizant of the need to embed these values into organizational structures and operational processes.

Is G.A. Cohen’s Egalitarian Ethos Consistent with Unconditional Basic Income?

Abstract The egalitarian ethos, as formulated by G.A. Cohen, and the unconditional basic income are two proposals that a priori may seem incompatible. The reason is that Cohen’s ethos – aimed at reducing inequality without sacrificing efficiency or freedom- requires that individuals work hard in socially useful occupations without asking for any inequality-generating incentives. On the contrary, the UBI, as conceived by Van Parijs and van der Veen, consists of an income paid by the government to every full member of society regardless of their willingness to contribute to society in the form of work. In short, the ethos includes a productive requirement while the UBI has an unconditional character. However, if we introduce an absolute level of affluence above what occupational autonomy takes precedence over efficiency and if we broaden the range of socially useful contributions beyond formal employment, the tension between the egalitarian ethos and UBI will be alleviated.

Animals as Intentional Political Agents and God’s Warriors in Sign-Themed Qurʾānic Narratives

Abstract Taking its cue from the Islamic Ecological Paradigm, deeply rooted in Islamic religious traditions, which emerged more than 1400 years ago, this paper reimagines the human-nonhuman relationship against the backdrop of the arguably assumed superiority of mankind in (Islamic) theological discourses. Using Qurʾānic narratives as a key point of divergence in the natural superiority of man within the idea of vicegerency, we argue that the Qurʾān’s egalitarian ethos presents animals as ‘intentional political agents’ (Pepper 2021: 30) independent of human intercession. This agency enables them to be key players in deciding the outcomes of political conundrums; in so doing, it also rebuts and destabilises arrogant anthropocentric presuppositions associated with the idea of vicegerency. We particularly read, in ‘signs themed’ Qurʾānic narratives, a dynamic relationship between humans and animals through the animal’s role as Allah’s warriors and agents against human oppressors and transgressors. Drawing on the Islamic Ecological Paradigm, Angie Pepper’s idea of intentional political agency and Sarra Tlili’s de-anthropocentric reading of the Qurʾān, we suggest that the Qurʾān robustly invites humans to reflect on the animal world by foregrounding animals as political agents while epitomising human accountability and responsibility towards them instead of establishing a relationship of dominance.

Access to Non‐reimbursed Expensive Cancer Treatments: A Justice Perspective

ABSTRACTWhen the cost‐effectiveness of newly approved cancer treatments is insufficient or unclear, they may not (immediately) be eligible for reimbursement through basic health insurance in publicly funded healthcare systems. Patients may seek access to non‐reimbursed treatment through other channels, including individual funding requests made to hospitals, health insurers, or pharmaceutical companies. Alternatively, they may try to pay out of pocket for non‐reimbursed treatments. While currently little is known of these practices, they run counter to a deeply held egalitarian ethos that is prevalent in many publicly funded healthcare systems. In this article, we investigate to what extent this ethos can be grounded in theories of justice, notably egalitarianism and prioritarianism. We argue that allowing out‐of‐pocket payments by patients themselves, in principle, is not unjust from the perspective of either of these theories, provided that it does not raise in‐practice justice‐based concerns, for instance by displacing more cost‐effective care, to the detriment of other patients, or by failing to treat patients equally. In contrast, we conclude that the practice of making exceptions for individual patients by health insurers or healthcare providers does run counter to the justice‐based requirements of equal treatment.

Following in Banting's footsteps or straying from the path? Observations from contemporary diabetes innovation.

While advancements in the treatment of diabetes continue to rapidly evolve, many of the newer technologies have financial barriers to care, opposing the egalitarian ethos of Banting who sold his patent on insulin for a nominal cost to allow it to be made widely available. Inequity in access to new therapies drives disparity in diabetes burden with potential for these gaps to widen in the future. The 2023 International Conference on Advanced Technologies and Treatments of Diabetes (ATTD) presented ground-breaking and current research in diabetes technology. Oral presentations of the ATTD conference 2023 were analyzed to describe what percentage of speakers discussed equity in their talks. Overall, less than a quarter of presenters discussed equity, though there was regional variation. To ensure that diabetes technologies reduce disparity and improve outcomes, we encourage future speakers at diabetes (technology) conferences to consider equity of diabetes care and incorporate this into their presentations.

A reappraisal of global university rankings’ influence in Canada: a senior university leaders’ perspective

ABSTRACT This article contributes to the debate on university organisational actorhood by surveying the drivers of university strategic behaviour and choice. Utilising organisational literature and interviews with senior leaders from three Canadian research-intensive universities, the article elucidates the dynamics underlying universities’ behaviours associated with global university rankings. Contrary to previous studies, the analysis suggests that global rankings exert more influence on Canadian universities than it is commonly assumed. Findings show that (1) global rankings are integral to the case universities’ strategic positioning, legitimacy managing, and revenue-generating efforts in an era where government funding has become a source of constant concern; (2) global rankings are perceived more important than Maclean’s – Canada’s national university ranking – for institutional priorities and promotional strategies; and (3) specialised personnel and units have been created by universities to optimise data flows and improve their ranking positions. The article additionally examines contemporary issues on the academic landscape that create the conditions for institutionalising global rankings, a course of action commonly perceived as irreconcilable with the egalitarian ethos and flatter hierarchical structure of Canada’s postsecondary education. The article offers a new perspective on the determinants of strategic behaviour and organisational change in higher education and outlines directions for future research.

Forum: Religion, Security, and Gender: An Unholy Trinity by Maria Alcidi

Abstract The paper explores the interplay between religion, security, and gender. By employing a broad analytical security framework ranging from warfare violence against women to violence in the domestic sphere, the paper supports the view that countries with heightened rates of gender inequalities and violence are more insecure and prone to conflict. The paper also questions the role played by religions enforcing hierarchical gender constructs in preserving women’s security and protecting them from gender-based violence. Against this background, the paper maintains that deferring the realisation of women’s security until a comprehensive reform has taken place within the religious precinct must not be an option. Such an approach would signify the capitulation of the egalitarian human rights paradigm. Instead, women’s roles as agents of change within religious institutions should be supported, and the proactive engagement of states to encourage religious institutions to reform and embrace an egalitarian ethos should be promoted. Only in this way will the interplay of religion, security, and gender truly benefit the pursuit of women’s security.

Americanizing the Scandinavian Super Underdog in Eighteen Film Remakes

Americanizing the Scandinavian Super Underdog in Eighteen Film Remakes

Addressing the rise of inequalities: How relevant is Rawls's critique of welfare state capitalism?

Addressing the rise of inequalities: How relevant is Rawls's critique of welfare state capitalism?

The Eclipse of Equality in a World of Extremes

Abstract Christianity and democracy have in common the idea of equality before God and the law. But how seriously was this notion taken by the Christian architects of modern representative democracy, and how seriously is it taken in today’s deeply unequal democratic societies? Democracy has long embraced the idea of a formal equality of persons but has generally held substantive equality to be incompatible with the secure possession of private property, which is its overriding priority. This article explores the relationships of Christianity and democracy to property and wealth, and the ever-present tension in both between less and more rigorous forms of each. Christianity and democracy are for many people little more than identity markers, but their survival as robust and relevant approaches to social life depends on a vision – which includes Christ’s teachings on renunciation and democracy’s egalitarian ethos – underlying the forms.

Le Mariage heureux du féminisme et du néolibéralisme: pistes pour analyser une union récente

By tracing the transformations of gender-based violence policies in France, this article highlights how they reflect neoliberal feminist dynamics. While the notion of ‘neoliberal feminism’ was developed to focus on the cultural and symbolic arena to analyse the changing representations of feminism, as well as the norms and subjectivities that were shaped by both a managerial and an egalitarian ethos, the role of the state in these processes was left aside. Therefore, the article aims at putting the state back into the analysis of neoliberal feminism by showing how state feminism has been driven in part by a neoliberal rationale when designing policies and has progressively excluded a structural perspective on the problem of gender-based violence.

Arai Ōsui and the Transnational Reimagination of Civilization in the Late Nineteenth-Century United States

AbstractCivilization discourse hierarchically ordered nation-states and people of different traits, including race and gender, in the Western modern concept of progress. This civilizational ideology of modern nation-states has underpinned narratives of many historical works, including transnational historical studies. This article showcases the ideas and practices of transnationalism that challenged such civilization discourse and pursued a more egalitarian and mutually interdependent vision of the world at the non-state level. This article does so by focusing on the Brotherhood of the New Life, a mixed-race religious agricultural community in late nineteenth-century rural America, and one of its Japanese members, Arai Ōsui, who joined the community after his defeat in Japan's Boshin Civil War. I argue that this non-state transnational perspective illuminates the Brotherhood members’ endeavour to free gender and race – the key conceptual underpinnings of the ideology of civilization – from this very discourse. This article further reveals, through Ōsui, that the community's egalitarian ethos developed to instigate new, anti-imperialist, and anti-hierarchical thoughts and actions in early twentieth-century Japan, in opposition to the state's imperialist endeavour to progress.

Spiaking Singlish: The politics of ludic English in Singapore

AbstractThis article is a case study on how Singaporean intellectuals articulate resistant language ideologies by enregistering the local vernacular, Singlish. The case in point is Gwee Li Sui's 2018 companion Spiaking Singlish, lauded as the first book to be written in Singlish about Singlish. It is argued that in tactically leveraging Singlish in a folk-lexicographical project, Gwee takes the vernacular to the third indexical order; and in so doing, he performs a ludic and extreme form of Singlish through which an everyday tongue turns into a fetish object. Contextualising Gwee's polemics within his tension with the language establishment in Singapore, the article highlights the ethical dilemma implicit in the celebration of languages speaking to an egalitarian ethos, suggesting that in enunciating a vernacular on the order of reflexive performance, intellectuals may inadvertently fashion it into a more elitist language than that which is spoken on the streets. (Singlish, Singapore, enregisterment, performativity, indexicality)

The “Vexed” Status of Guru Images: Visuality, Circulation and Iconographic Conflicts

ABSTRACT In 2007, the Dera Sacha Sauda (DSS) guru Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh Insan wore an attire similar to calendar image of tenth Sikh guru, Guru Gobind Singh, and performed a ritual baptism, which became controversial. This article will show how this controversy opens up two significant issues: first, questioning the egalitarian ethos of caste equality upheld by the Sikh religion, and second, with regard to authenticity of religious practice – of what is deemed Sikh and non/un-Sikh practices. The controversy became the fulcrum for questions of visuality and material practices around imageries of Sikh gurus in the domain of popular religiosity and visual culture. This historically relates to the much-debated status of images around gurus in contemporary Punjab. The image and ritual become a crucial site of conflict with regard to questions of Sikh identity, religion and caste. Questions of iconoclasm, authenticity and representation have emerged around the images—largely audio-visual in nature--of the Sikh gurus. In this article I will analyse music video/s that engages with the genre of Sikhi (Sikh principles or faith) highlighting crisis in Sikh identity through lyrical and visual references, for instance to the institutions of popular religion, such as Deras. I then mainly argue that the DSS event cannot be grasped without understanding the modes of engagement and ritual practices around images of Sikh gurus. Such an analysis will not only underline contestations around the ‘vexed’ status of images comprising both Sikh and Dera gurus but will also critique the normative understanding of Sikh identity and religion.

Bertso eskola, youth identities and new speakers

ABSTRACT This paper explores the experience and impact of participation in afterschool oral improvisation workshops – bertso workshops – for young Basque speakers. Drawing on participant observation and in-depth interviews among young people in the Northern Basque Country, the researcher, a practicing improviser, bertsolari, herself, argues that the bertso workshop is best understood as a community of practice wherein they create relationships of trust and empathy, take the floor in front of their peers and debate and think together, where individual’s identities are constructed in mutual influence, and where linguistic identity is built in conjunction with youth identities. Hence, for these young people, the community of practice at the bertso workshop is a place in which to develop their youth identities in Basque and their Basque-speaker identities within youth culture. This case study also explores tensions that arise between the egalitarian ethos of the bertso workshop on the one hand, where all speakers are equal, and the entrenched language ideologies that, on the other, attribute greater authenticity to improvisers from Basque-speaking families.

Reimagining the Brown Body

William Forsythe’s screendanceAlignigung(2016) depicts two male dancers, one fair- and the other brown-skinned, in hyperflexible and intimate configurations that vacillate between object and human.Alignigungengages with an egalitarian ethos along the same lines as contact improvisation but further demonstrates an alternative masculinity through movement qualities by reimagining the stereotypical brown body.

Challenging the colonial legacy of/at Macquarie

AbstractMacquarie University takes its name from a man known simultaneously as the founding father of Australia, its greatest colonial administrator, a key inspiration for Australia’s egalitarian ethos, the military strategist who authorised the Appin Massacre, and committed civiliser of the uncivilised native peoples of Sydney who established the first institutions aimed at educating Aboriginal children by separating from their families, culture, and language. This article explores Macquarie’s ambiguous legacy and considers how it is mobilised to promote the university. It discusses how the university community might engage with the “Macquarie legacy” and take responsibility for its implications for Macquarie University. Decolonising this particular university must involve much more than simple renaming—although even that would be far from simple. Transformation of the institution into a partner with Dharug and other Indigenous groups must involve uncomfortable and ultimately transformational reflection and action on the purposes, processes, and outcomes of education, on the nature and purposes of partnership, and more generally on the nature of decolonising transformations.

Tensions in Piketty’s Participatory Socialism: Reconciling Justice and Democracy

Abstract In the final parts of Piketty’s Capital and Ideology, he presents his vision for a just and more equal society. This vision marks an alternative to contemporary societies, and differs radically both from the planned Soviet economies and from social democratic welfare states. In his sketch of this vision, Piketty provides a principled account of how such a society would look and how it would modify the current status of private property through co-managed enterprises and the creation of temporary ownership models. He also sets out two principles for when inequalities are just. The first principle permits inequalities that are beneficial to the worst-off, while the second permits inequalities that reflect differences in people’s choices and ambitions. This article identifies a tension between Piketty’s two inequality-permitting principles. It also argues that the procedural limits on how decisions are made within the enterprises of participatory socialism might create inequalities not permitted by the guiding distributive principles of participatory socialism. This tension points to the need for either further changes in firm structure and ownership, an even more progressive taxation scheme, or an egalitarian ethos reflected in citizens’ choices in their everyday lives under participatory socialism.

Geen naam voor ons: symbolische grenzen en voornamen

First names are identifiers that can be both arbitrary and highly personal and are therefore often interpreted as stemming from individual choice. Yet, we can discern a clear homology between first names and social groups. In this article, we investigate, on the basis of in-depth interviews with 12 couples who are expecting a child, how people draw symbolic class boundaries by selecting and rejecting first names. The interviews reveal how the egalitarian ethos, characteristic of The Netherlands, is contradicting with overt status display, which pushes people to judge others’ class taste in a concealed but consistent way.

‘The data is gold, and we are the gold-diggers’: whiteness, race and contemporary academic research in eastern DRC

The boom of the humanitarian and development industry in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the demand for qualitative and quantitative research that has accompanied it have created a novel political economy of academic research in the region. An array of research associations and private data collection firms have emerged to respond to the international demand by Western universities and research projects. Like many industries operating on the continent, academic research has a racial dimension, which is rarely reflected upon, in part because it is often invisible to white Western researchers. This paper reflects on the creation and evolution of a non-profit association specialized in the collection of data in conflict-affected areas of eastern DRC. The research association was conceived by its Congolese and European founders as an enclave against the racism that pervades professional relations in the region, an experiment upheld by a collective commitment to academic research and an egalitarian ethos. Written from the perspective of three of its founding members, this paper analyses how racialized discursive repertoires and cognitive biases (re)appeared within the organization. We argue that these repertoires and biases serve to activate a particular mode of production, based on racial and geographic inequalities in working conditions and prospects. We interrogate the relationship between race and the system of production underpinning contemporary research, and show that, far from solely being a remnant of the colonial era, race constitutes a resource that can be tapped into, particularly in a context where empirical data, competition for funding, and ‘value for money’ are increasingly becoming the norm.