Incompatible Ideas Research Articles

How Does Any One Film Explore Moral Problems Associated with Choice?

The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008) focuses on Batman Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale): the dark knight, and Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart): the white knight as Gotham’s prosecutor, who work together to fight the criminal Joker (Heath Ledger). Harvey Dent was a prosecutor who defended the law, upheld justice, and put many criminal organizations in prison in Gotham. But in the process of confronting the Joker, Harvey Dent gradually became “Two-Face” who committed multiple murders. This ultimately left Batman with a difficult choice: whether to reveal the crimes committed by Harvey Dent and therefore release all the prisoners that led to Harvey’s arrest, or to take all the crimes upon Batman himself and disappear from Gotham, leaving the legal system established by Harvey Dent to continue to work in Gotham. Although Batman ultimately chose to take the blame for Harvey’s crimes, perpetuating the legal system established by Harvey Dent, and making Batman’s identity disappear as a result. However, Batman’s choice still raises many moral problems. Moral problems are related to the rights and wrongs of our actions, and how to distinguish morally right and morally wrong is “the primary question posed within ethics” (Karofsky & Litch, 1963, p. 145), in other words, moral philosophy is ethics. According to Downing and Saxton, “Ethics [ …] is a process of questioning” and “designates a way of responding to the encounter between the self and others” (Downing & Saxton, 2010, p. 3), this illustrates that a question about ethics is approached from different people or different perspectives. This also dictates that when it comes to an action as morally right or wrong, it must be approached from a different perspective. At the same time, “Film as a medium of “ethical experience: through which conflicting, clashing, or incompatible ideas, commitments, or beliefs can be revealed” (Sinnerbrink, 2016, p. 6). This explains that film, as a medium for the display of behaviour, can reveal the different characteristics present in the act, providing a space for the viewer to make a moral judgement. Therefore, this essay will base on Amy Karofsky and Mary M. Litch’s categorical discussion of ethics, specifically analysing the moral problems associated with Bruce Wayne’s choices at the end of The Dark Knight.

Guest Editorial: How a Healthy Work Environment Drives a Healthy P&L

_ People who are passionate about running businesses often talk about money or people—but not both. Imagine, a chief operating officer at an oil company who doesn’t listen to any ideas that won’t result in more barrels or more money, right now. Many of us in the oil and gas industry know what it feels like to work in that organization. Or the human resources leader that puts together an offsite meeting with personality tests, teambuilding exercises, and some “feel-good” work that has nothing to do with the actual work of the company. Both examples have their place and their value, but they never work well together. It’s one or the other. This is because of a widespread belief that what is right for a business and what is right for the people that work within one are inherently in conflict with each other. At best, people view them as opposing forces to balance. At worst, they’re seen as incompatible ideas and there’s no town big enough for the both of them. I call nonsense. What’s Good for People? Elimination of Frustration Whether it’s the fabled “TPS Reports,” jammed printers, or (multiple) inept bosses, we all have things at work that make our days worse. Some of them are minor annoyances like an extra copy/paste step, but many of them cause damage to our focus, ability to make decisions, and overall efficacy at our jobs. What is one of the worst? Poor communication. Usually, small teams are not too bad at communication. But cross-department collaboration (or the lack thereof) is almost always an area where companies of all sizes can find room for improvement. Give Them a Reason To Care Obviously pay and benefits are a good reason to care about your work. But there is a big difference in your attitude if you are simply “here so I don’t get fired” vs. truly caring about your work, your company, and the people you work with. This is what people mean when they talk about “employee engagement.” What makes someone care about their work beyond a paycheck? It varies, but here are a few high-probability ideas: - Ensuring they understand the impact of their work on the big picture. - Supporting their personal growth goals, i.e., leadership growth, skill development, new challenges. - Fostering a fair work environment. Involve employees in decisions for the company. What’s Good for Business? A Smooth Process A process that is effective, efficient, and integrated and one that is “not too bad” are worlds apart. Everyone knows that process problems cause wasted time and resources. But many people underestimate the real cost—the missed upside. That time spent dealing with bad process is time that should have been spent driving better decisions or improving the business. If you make good people do both by working more than they want to, they will leave. And here’s a hint to the punchline: improving a process looks a lot like eliminating frustrations.

Previous Contract? Precario and the Suitability of the Promise Agreement as a Defense

Despite its modest appearance, paragraph 2 of article 2195 of the Civil Code has been an infallible source of conflict. What interests us in this study is the existence of a promise agreement as a defense of the occupant in the face of a “precario” action. The problem is the existence of two incompatible ideas or theories in the case law. Our objective is to show these ideas and propose a solution.

Spitting at Jim Crow

Spitting at Jim Crow

Human rights, television popular culture and the telenovela

The application of human rights to mass communication television pro gramming gives rise to a search for entertainment that is empowering. One genre that has managed to es cape the restrictions of commercial Ism and resulted in a genuine form of popular culture is the Brazilian telenovela. Any attempt to relate human rights In communication to popular televi sion culture might seem to be a fu tlle endeavour. Such an attempt ap pears to involve two incompatible Ideas: highmindedness and Ideallsm on the one hand, and free choice and commerciallam on the other. However, there could be a way out. Somewhere there might be a way that popular culture as expressed through television might also be em powering, instead of mainly com mercially exploitative and cynically manipulative. The one example that springs to mind is the telenovela of Brazil. This paper proposes to deal with the concept of human rights and broadcasting, especially as it affects the present SABC, then to look briefly at some concepts of popular culture and then to end off by discussing the Brazilian tele novella as a possible reconciliation of the two opposing Ideas, of human rights and entertainment. This article is based on a paper that was read at a RAU Seminar "Com munication Interactions in popular culture", that was held in Johannes burg on October 22, 1993,

‘For lack of a better word…’ M. Isakovsky’s two letters on A. Prasolov’s poetry

Letters of the poet Mikhail Isakovsky to the literary historian Anatoly Abramov (1917–2005) published in this article constitute a portion of the poet’s extensive epistolary legacy. The two selected letters dated 1968 are mainly concerned with the poet Aleksey Prasolov (1930–1972), whose literary career Abramov actively supported. Having approached Isakovsky for an opinion about the Voronezh-based poet’s verses, Abramov received very harsh feedback. There can be a number of reasons why the poems, some later recognised as Prasolov’s best, were dismissed by Isakovsky: the fact that the two poets belonged to very different poetic generations and traditions and adhered to disparate aesthetic principles may have played a key role here. A poet of a traditional folk-poetic formation, Isakovsky rejected Prasolov’s verses, whose poetics is directly influenced by Blok’s modernist experimentations. Isakovsky expected Prasolov, an author of challenging complexity, to write about subjects easily recognisable and clear to the reader. Thus, incompatible ideas about a poet’s purpose and dissimilarity of poetic languages precluded the two remarkable poets from ever meeting in person.

Logics in play: what ‘rules of the game’ regulate Swedish PE teachers’ decision-making processes?

ABSTRACT Research suggests that physical education (PE) needs to adapt to meet societies’ changing needs and increased diversity amongst pupils. However, despite growing pressure from often competing sectoral interests, educational reforms, and new curricula directed at PE to bring about such changes, research has not seen a more profound impact. Many policy initiatives often impact PE teachers, which means they are responsible for implementing desired changes. Therefore, it is somewhat surprising how research has paid limited attention to PE teachers’ decision-making processes regarding the envisaged change. To address this shortfall of understanding, this study’s aim is to explore PE teachers’ decision-making processes and how they relate to external pressures, interests, and reforms. To meet this aim, this article draws on an institutional logics perspective and uses data collected from semi-structured interviews with 16 PE teachers. Findings show how four institutional logics guide PE teachers’ decision-making processes: (a) a democracy logic, (b) an investment logic, (c) a professional logic, and (d) a bureaucracy logic. The results also show that, beyond the fact that logics legitimise certain decisions, they delegitimise other decisions, which requires PE teachers to navigate between logics in their decision-making processes. This navigating process requires PE teachers to handle multiple and incompatible ideas about what good PE is and how to conduct it. This knowledge, if utilised, can increase alignment between policy content and implementers’ interpretations, which may mitigate resistance to policy reforms and stimulate intended implementation.

DIGITALISATION AND NEW TRENDS IN TRAVEL DISTRIBUTION

This paper seek to understand the role of new technologies on transformation processes of special areas of business of travel intermediaries even emerging new entities that collaborate with both poles of tourism demand. Special attention is payed to results of modification of distribution channels to be competitive in online travel market. Softwer as channel manager is more than a tool, it is emerging as core intelligence that manage time, impacting on benefits from converegence. New technologies allowed new digital platforms (Booking, Airbnb, Expedia) making travel easier. The preferences of the postmodern tourist extend beyond the streamlined and impersonal experiences, services and products. Driven by the ambition of deviating from the beaten track, new generations of travellers are converging on digital platforms to retrieve recommendations and information from fellow travellers and local residents,i.e. sources other than traditional travel intermediaries. The COVID crisis has triggered a number of changes in the world of rental accommodation. Some of these changes are flexible cancellations, new market prices, and shorter booking window. High expections make preassure on attnders in channel of distribution. There is an even greater emphasis on cleanliness, privacy and security. At the end of the research, the results speak in favor of exceptional impact of new technology on business development as well as the role that human potential has in acquiring digital skills through education and training and providing their own tools or products that facilitate business. This paper consider sociological, economic and cultural dimension that impact on behavior of users of digital platforms are formulated to support previously incompatible ideas, like (1) models of economic systems, relationships); cultural and moral perspectives on human coexistence (negotiation, lifestyle, stewardship, prosocial behaviour/altruism, collaborative symbiosis and; ideas of efficiency and enhanced value creation.

Common-Sense Rejected by Physicists:

We propose a new integration of relativity and quantum mechanics (QM). Your cell phone or smart phone is a rich source of empirical information about relativity. It tells time based on a system called Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) which assumes absolute simultaneity: all observers in all inertial frames observe the same sequence of all events. You must choose whether to trust the time on your cell phone, or trust Einstein’s incompatible ideas about a space-time continuum. As concerns QM, the existence of “weirdness” means a mistake was made in QM’s starting assumptions. This article finds and corrects that mistake and presents for the first time, a quantum world free of all weirdness. There is another half to nature, previously unrecognized. It is devoid of energy and matter, namely zero-energy Elementary Waves which move within the medium of aether. We derive the linear wave PDE’s. There is evidence that Elementary Waves are in control of nature, despite their lack of energy. The existence of UFO’s (Unidentified Flying Objects) suggests that someone has learned how to control Elementary Waves. If we could learn from the UFO’s, we might acquire a decisive advantage in our battle against climate change.

WELLBYs, cost-benefit analyses and the Easterlin Discount

The current practise of cost-benefit analysis inWestern countries consists of a collection of various incompatible ideas and methodologies to obtain replicable numbers for the costs and benefits of major public spending plans. This paper describes the main elements of the dominant methodology, which combines consumer and producer surplus, price-taking, government-inputs-as-outputs, hedonic pricing of externalities, and the issue-specific use of partial or general equilibrium thinking. The paper then discusses how that methodology can be augmented and partially replaced by looking at how prospective policies would change the total number of WELLBYs (life satisfaction-adjusted years of life) of the population. The ability of the WELLBY methodology to address complex externalities is illustrated by the Easterlin Discount, which is a proposed reduction factor of 75% on all estimates of private consumption benefits to offset the envy caused in others.

Can we Modify our Pleasures? A New Look at Kant on Pleasure in the Agreeable

AbstractMany of us are all too familiar with the experience of taking pleasure in things we feel we ought not, and of finding it frustratingly hard to bring our pleasures into line with our moral judgements. As a value dualist, Kant draws a sharp contrast between the two sources of practical motivation: pleasure in the agreeable and respect for the moral law. His ethics might thus seem to be an unpromising source for help in thinking about how we can bring our agreeable pleasures into line with our moral values. But I argue that a careful reading of Kant’s texts reveals a helpfully realistic view about the extent to which we can modify our agreeable pleasures. On my interpretation, Kant shows us how to hold together two seemingly incompatible ideas: on the one hand, that pleasure in the agreeable is resistant to rational direction, and on the other hand, that we can cultivate these pleasures with a view to ethical self-transformation.

Does higher education prepare students to bridge divides in today’s democracy?

Recent political events serve as a reminder that American society comprises groups with divergent visions for the future and mutually incompatible ideas of how to achieve those futures. Despite this diversity of policy orientations within the American public, we find that many students in our environmental studies courses have relatively little awareness of, or experience with, that diversity. Without the experience of interacting with people with different policy orientations, it is easy for students to believe policy consensus would emerge if everyone were sufficiently educated on the facts. Factual understanding, however, does not yield consensus on contemporary policy dilemmas such as climate change. We believe that equipping students to be effective agents of change means exposing them to the plurality of cultural commitments and policy orientations latent in current policy disputes. In this paper, we present a preliminary version of a survey tool, the Policy Orientation Survey, to evaluate how the diversity of cultural and policy orientations at a university is distributed across academic units. After describing the tool and its utility, we briefly present pilot results from our own university and discuss implications for higher education.

Computer Games and Organization Studies

Computer games and organizations are becoming increasingly interwoven in the 21st century. Sophisticated computer games connected by networks are turning into spaces for organizing. Therefore, it may not be surprising that conventional organizations are now scrounging these games for novel ways to enhance efficiency. The result is the formation of game/organization hybrids; uneasy recontextualizations of partly incompatible ideas, values and practices. We begin this essay by elucidating what it is socially that makes something a game by exploring the notion’s anthropological foundations. We then introduce two examples of actual game/organization hybrids; raiding in computer games and gamification in formal organizations. We conclude by discussing the implications of such hybridization and suggest venues for how organization and management scholars can benefit from studying computer games and theories of play.

Defining Political Extremism in the Balkans. The Case of Serbia

Political extremism (and particularly right wing political extremism) remains relatively insufficiently explored due to the fact that the phenomenon is controversial and hard to define. Its ambiguity and variability depending on time and spatial point of view further complicates its definition. Its structure is amorphous and eclectic as it often includes elements from different ideologies and connects incompatible ideas. A multidimensional conceptualization and an interdisciplinary approach - sociological, social, psychological and historical, are the Author’s tools in explaining the phenomenon of political extremism in Serbia, hopefully contributing to its clarification and laying a foundation for its further explanatory theoretical studies.

Gender Quotas for Agricultural Boards: Changing Constructions of Gender?

This article explores the processes by which gender is given meaning through social interaction in boardrooms. In Norway, alongside mandatory quotas regulating the composition of Public Limited Company boards, voluntary quotas were designed to increase women's membership on the boards of agricultural co-operatives. This radical step to secure a minimum of 40 per cent women makes these boards an interesting site for investigating the construction of gender in a traditionally male-dominated organization. In the debate, arguments in favour of a quota accentuated diversity and differences between women's and men's competences, opinions and values. The analysis of interview data from the boards of four agricultural co-operatives suggests that equal representation is a muted, taken-for-granted value. Equality and diversity are not understood as incompatible ideas, and gender is produced dynamically through practice rather than constituted as an inherent, fixed attribute. Gender as difference is less pervasive than expected as women tend to be recognized as belonging to the gender-neutral category of a board representative despite any recognized differences. The study demonstrates that voluntary quotas may change the context and both challenge old assumptions and promote new understandings of gender in local situations

Distilling Abstractions: Genre Redefining Essence versus Context

The construction of concepts achieved by the apparently incompatible ideas of essence and context is examined through genre. Essence is defined by essential characteristics: innate, immutable, independent of context. Unlike essences, contexts are fluid, changing with time and location. Genre has the stability of the essential characteristics that define essence and the fluidity of differing circumstances that define context, thus making it effective for the exploration of essence and context. Controlled vocabularies reveal diachronically and synchronically the stable/fluid ambivalence of genre classes. The Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC1, DDC13, DDC23) exhibits stability (and modest fluidity) in the Divisions, the primary reflection of academic disciplines one hierarchical step below the main classes and the development of the standard subdivisions as a slow multi-edition evolution. Genre serves as a lens for us to better understand essences, contexts, and concepts and their manifestations, classes. Rather than being incompatible opposites, essences and contexts complement each other in the definition of concepts. How these abstractions relate to classification is a question both theoretical and practical to our efforts to further knowledge organization.

Brotherhood From a Distance: Americanization and the Internationalism of the Knights of Labor

AbstractThe Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor was the largest American labour organization of the nineteenth century. But while scholars have charted its history in North America they have largely failed to explore the Order's history elsewhere, even though the organization also boasted members in Europe, Australasia, and Africa. This article is designed as part of a wider “transnationalization” of American labour history, and analyses the reasons that drove the Order's leaders towards their international growth. The leaders of the Knights of Labor sent organizers around the world not only because of their attachment to the idea of Universal Brotherhood, but also as a way to limit immigration to the United States. This synthesis of seemingly incompatible ideas reflected their desire to “Americanize” the rest of the world, by protecting living standards at home, raising them elsewhere to American standards, and exporting American-style republican institutions abroad.

Will the real story of collaboration please stand up so we can see it properly?

There are two stories about collaboration in knowledge management. In one, about moving knowledge, information, and data around, collaboration has to do with getting these to the right people at the right time and solving problems efficiently. Management relies heavily on tools to see that this happens. This narrative, the product of a management mindset, is the ‘view from the top’. In the other story, a ‘view from practice’, people get things done by ‘sharing knowledge’. When they collaborate, they make meaning together. Distinguishing between these views, I pry apart narratives that are invariably intertwined but rest on incompatible ideas about knowledge and what you do with it. The view from practice reveals the ‘real’ story of collaboration. Knowledge-work consists mostly of people (self-)organizing. Talking together, engaged in deciding what to do, they come to know (i.e., understand) the issues they are dealing with and, in the same breath, co-create their work.

Reframing the Interwar Peace Movement: The Curious Case of Albert Einstein

The diversity of transnational interrelations within the peace movement has been commonly overlooked in studies on the anti-war struggle in the interwar years. Consequently, these studies have often provided an over-simplified view of the formation of anti-war ideologies, worldviews, and objectives. Contrary to this tendency, this article examines Albert Einstein's engagement with the peace movement in a way that emphasizes its transnational facets. Associating Einstein's worldview with ideas that were prevalent in transnational organizations in the decade preceding the second world war, it explains the scientist's propensity to endorse seemingly incompatible ideas as inherent to the nature of these organizations. Focusing on his relationships with two apparently contradictory organizations – the War Resisters’ International and The New Commonwealth Society – I argue that Einstein's views reflect a set of principles that were held by many supporters of both organizations. Mainly, these principles constituted a revision of nineteenth-century liberal thought which sought to marginalize the impact of nationalist sentiments, redefine the social responsibilities of the state, and restrict its sovereignty. Thus, shifting the emphasis to the transnational aspects of the peace movement would not only make sense of Einstein's ‘confused’ politics, but also shed new light on interwar pacifism, its objectives, popularity, and enduring influence.

Reason and Virtues: The Paradox of R. S. Peters on Moral Education

This article examines the work of R. S. Peters on moral development and moral education, as represented in his papers collected under that name, pointing out that these writings have been relatively neglected. It approaches these writings through the lens of the ‘familiar story’ that philosophical work on this topic switched during, roughly, the 1980s from an emphasis on rational principles to an emphasis on virtues and care. Starting from what Peters called ‘the paradox of moral education’—roughly, that a rational morality must be developed in part through habit—the article discusses not only Peters' rational morality of principles and rules but also elements of his thought concerning virtues and care. Running through the discussion is the question of whether Peters, in drawing for instance on Aristotle as well as Kohlberg, is attempting to combine incompatible ideas. Against this, it is suggested that in reading Peters now we can learn from his explicit claim that we need a pluralistic, not a monolithic, approach to moral development and moral education.