Clash Of Values Research Articles

The Quest for a Sustainable Future and the Dawn of a New Journal at Michigan Law

When I joined the faculty of the University of Michigan Law School in 2007, the first assignment I gave students in my Environmental Law and Policy class was John McPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid. It must have seemed like a curious choice to them, particularly coming from a professor who just three months earlier had been the Chief of the Environmental Crimes Section at the U.S. Department of Justice. The book was not a dramatic tale of courtroom battles. In fact, the book was not even about the law, and the clash of environmental values it depicted pre-dated the environmental statutes that were the focus of the course. Encounters with the Archdruid chronicles outings McPhee organized during the 1960s with David Brower, the first Executive Director of the Sierra Club and one of the most influential environmental activists of his generation. Brower was an unapologetic advocate for conservation at a time when we still believed that anything was possible in the United States and that America had an endless bounty of natural resources to support economic growth. McPhee paired Brower with three antagonists who had very different ideas about our relationship with the environment: Charles Park, the former Dean of Stanford University's School of Earth Sciences and a proponent of mining in the Cascade mountains; Charles Fraser, the developer of Hilton Head Island in South Carolina, who had similar plans to develop Cumberland Island off the Georgia coast; and Floyd Dominy, the indomitable Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, who wanted to dam the Colorado River near the Grand Canyon. The stories in Encounters with the Archdruid occurred more than forty years ago, but I assigned the book to my students both for historical context and because the disagreements it describes about our environmental values remain potent today. As they hiked in the Cascades, Brower and Park argued about whether copper mining should be allowed in protected wilderness near Glacier Peak. Brower observed that the Cascades are "one of the few remaining great wildernesses in the lower forty-eight" and asked, "Would America have to go without much to leave its finest wilderness unspoiled?" Park countered that "[m]inerals are where you find them. The quantities are finite. It's criminal to waste minerals when the standard of living of your people depends upon them." For anyone who has followed the debate over proposals to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), the conflict and the language are familiar (only now the argument is about oil rather than copper, and the wilderness is in Alaska instead of Washington).

'Any body is better than nobody?' Ethical questions around recruiting and/or retaining health professionals in rural areas

The literature on recruiting and/or retaining health professionals in rural areas focuses primarily on the development of recruitment and retention strategies and assessing whether such strategies are effective. The objective of this article is to argue that it is important for all stakeholders involved in rural recruitment and/or retention processes to consider their decisions and actions from an ethics perspective. Recruitment and/or retention processes are not value neutral and it is important to understand their ethical dimensions. From the literature, elements of the recruitment and/or retention strategies that have been employed were identified and organised in respect of levels of governance (namely, the levels of health system/government, community, and individual health professionals). The elements identified in these levels were subjected to analysis to identify their ethical dimensions and to determine whether a clash or complement of values arose at each level of governance or between governance levels. There is very little literature in this area that considers the ethical dimensions of rural recruitment and/or retention processes. However, all policies and practices have ethical dimensions that need to be identified and understood as they may have significant implications for recruitment and/or retention processes. This article recommends the application of an ethics perspective when reflecting on rural recruitment and/or retention strategies. The collective decisions of all involved in rural recruitment and/or retention processes may fundamentally influence the 'health' (broadly understood) of rural communities.

A site for the empowerment of women? The clash of patriarchal values and development norms in a family-based NGO

Patriarchal norms of the Indian family and normative development goals of gender equity and women's empowerment make uncomfortable bedfellows. This article examines the processes of institutional bricolage that occur with the overlap of these two institutional spaces using ethnographic evidence from two family-based NGOs. It finds that although there is evidence of decoupling between formal structures and actual practices, this does not discount the potential for the transformation of gender norms. I identify three factors that influence this potential: the distance between NGOs and donors; the basis upon which NGOs claim legitimacy with their clientele; and the use of other coercive forms of power. Further, I argue that organizations do not consist of a single institutional space, and that the possibilities for uneven ‘bricolage’ need consideration. These findings are theoretically relevant for understanding processes of institutional bricolage, as well as practically for feminist projects to transform gender norms in, and through, NGOs.

Ontology and the Products of Spirit: A Classroom Conversation

i Among the casualties of the rush to relativism is a central tenet of classical thought: that great works of literature are great in and of themselves and not because of the needs and values of their time. This “canon-based view,” supply taken for granted by Johnson, Arnold, Pope, and Eliot, has long since been shown the door by views ranging from Marxism to today’s cultural studies. These views hold that the great works become great because of the values and concerns of their own times, and they remain effectual, if they do, because of the ways they speak to their times’ concerns. There are no transhistorical values and concerns, though of course there is a past to culture and its works continue their indirect influence on “later generations.” Teaching a class of nineteen year olds at Deep Springs College,1 I find myself stumbling on texts in which the above clash of critical values explodes, in which no issue is more pertinent than whether a text belongs to its own time or to “the ages.” Who would have thought that the Monadology would spark the debate?

Governing Morality Issues through Procedural Policies

Abstract: Morality issues such as the death penalty, drug consumption, gambling, and same‐sex‐marriage often constitute intractable policy controversies. Classical “morality politics” scholars predict two types of governmental responses to such public problems: either a substantive policy design if there is a broad consensus among electoral constituencies or a non‐decision if there is a fundamental clash of values. We argue that the adoption of a procedural policy design represents a third option. Providing empirical evidence on the plausibility of this hypothesis, we compare the Swiss regulation of four morality issues in the medical field: reproductive medicine and embryo‐related research; abortion; euthanasia; and organ transplant. In fact, “moral values” frames are not always dominant, as the multi‐dimensionality of each morality issue allows for concurrent policy frames promoted by various policy actors.

Eat, Swim, Pray

Eat, Swim, Pray

From Social Classes to Ethnicities: Ethnocentric Views in History Textbooks in Post-Soviet Russia

The dramatic transformations experienced by Russia in the 1990s were accompanied by the radical changes in views of the past. Whereas social class struggle was emphasized by the Soviet Marxist historiography, ethnicity became the focal point of the post-Soviet one. This replacement was especially sensitive for historical education at school where an image of the class enemy was forced out by that of ethnic enemy. It is in this context that an ideology of national-liberation movement was replaced by an idea of the clash of cultural values as a universal explanation of wars and ethnic conflicts. This new paradigm is analyzed with reference to images of the North Caucasian highlanders in the post-Soviet history textbooks, especially with respect to their participation in the Caucasian war in the early 19th century and their deportation in 1943–1944. I will also discuss how the new North Ossetian and Ingush history textbooks represent ethnic neighbors – the Ingush by the Ossetians and the Ossetians by the Ingush. I will argue that cultural fundamentalism and ethnocentrism, which make up the basis of the post-Soviet historiography, cultivate soil for cultural racism – the most powerful type of racism in the contemporary world.

American Natures: The Shape of Conflict in Environmental Law

There is a firestorm of political and cultural conflict around environmental issues, including but running well beyond climate change. Legal scholarship is in a bad position to make sense of this conflict because the field has concentrated on making sound policy recommendations to an idealized lawmaker, ignoring the deeply held and sharply clashing values that drive, or block, environmental lawmaking. This Article sets out a framework for understanding and engaging the clash of values in environmental law and, by extension, approaching the field more generally. Americans have held, and legislated based upon, four distinct ideas about why the natural world matters and how we should govern it. Each of these conceptions persists in a body of environmental law, a network of interest and advocacy groups, the attitudes and even identities of ordinary citizens, and even the American landscape. The first, Providential Republicanism, treats nature as intended for productive human use, and gives high status to its users: this idea justified the European claim to North America, defined public debates about nature in the Early Republic and persists in important aspects of private and public land-use law. The second conception, Progressive Management, arose in the later nineteenth century as part of a broader legal reform movement, and gave its shape to much of federal lands policy, notably creation of the national forests and national parks. In this idea, nature’s productive use requires extensive management by public-spirited experts, whom reformers imagined as steering the environmental policy of the administrative state. The third conception, Romantic Epiphany, concentrates on the aesthetic and spiritual value of nature, and has defined both national parks policy and the creation of the national wilderness system, and lent essential support to the Endangered Species Act. This idea entered environmental politics at the turn of the last century, with the efforts of the Sierra Club and other innovators. The most recent conception of nature, Ecological Interdependence, arose in the middle of the twentieth century and shaped much of the environmental law of the 1970s and thereafter. This conception treats nature as an intensely inter-permeable web, which humans are unavoidably part of, to our benefit and hazard. Because all these ideas persist today in environmental law and politics, they provide a map of our existing statutes and doctrines and the conflicts around those laws and emerging issues such as climate change.

Teachers' Experiences with School Choice: Clashing Logics in the Swedish Education System

This paper explores the school choice reform in Sweden, a country where a drastic shift in education policy has taken place that includes fast expansion of market solutions and strong state support for competition. Although there are studies examining the school choice reform, few focus on the effects of this reform from a teacher perspective, especially so in the context of Sweden. To this end, this paper examines how Swedish upper secondary teachers in independent (private) and public schools experience their work in relation to school choice reform. This study uses qualitative interviews of 58 teachers from five municipal and three independent upper secondary schools. Its theoretical framework relies on Freidson's distinction between the logic of the profession, the bureaucracy, and the market. The findings indicate that the traditional position of teachers—a position that must negotiate the tension between the logic of the profession and the logic of the bureaucracy—is now in fact challenged by the logic of the market. This study argues that values linked to the logic of the market are imposed on the teachers, and these market values clash with the teachers' values, values based on the logic of the profession.

El campo patrimonial y museístico: un espacio cultural conflictivo

The processes of acceptance as heritage and musealisation do not respond to history or aesthetics-related criteria, but rather to identity-related criteria. They do not concern scientists, specialists and policy-makers alone, but also social groups. The choice of cultural assets is not an objective consequence of their formal characteristics. It is the result of the selection made by social agents so as to represent a group identity. But no social group is homogeneous; on the contrary they are diverse and complex so the identity references, and therefore the cultural assets, do not have to be univocal. Beyond the aseptic discourses, many of these processes are controversial. Differences regarding the identity references and the uses to be made of cultural assets lead to the field of heritage and museums being spaces where interests and values clash. This article presents and analyses the conflicts that arose in the Basque municipality of Legazpi when the process of musealisation and acceptance of iron production as heritage first started.

Do migration lead to the clash of the values?

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A clash of values and approaches: A case study of marine protected area planning in Mozambique

Many developing countries are expanding their network of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) to meet ambitious marine conservation targets set globally and to develop tourism nationally. This study explores the human dimensions of MPA planning in Mozambique by engaging local resource users in a series of structured discussions about marine resource use, pressures on marine resources, ways to address such pressures, and the potential positive and negative impacts of MPAs on the management of marine resources and livelihoods, from a community perspective. Findings show that the groups and communities interviewed are at best ambivalent towards MPAs while at the same time supporting increased government regulation, including conventional fisheries management measures. The study suggests that without significant community involvement in the choice of marine conservation tools, the drive to establish MPAs to achieve biodiversity conservation and tourism development goals may be counterproductive, at least in terms of poverty alleviation and sustainable resource use. It argues that a wider range of marine conservation approaches and tools needs to be considered in addition to MPAs, taking into consideration local views and institutional capacities.

The history, achievement and future of the 1980 OECD guidelines on privacy

Between 1978-80, the author chaired an expert group of the OECD which developed the OECD Privacy Guidelines. His work in this respect has previously been noted in this Journal ((1981) Vol.1 No.1, 1; (1992) Vol.3, No.1, 25; (1996) Vol.7, No.2, 137). This article offers a thirty-year retrospective on the OECD Guidelines, starting with historical descriptions of the clash of values that had to be resolved in the group. The article describes four main achievements by which the OECD Guidelines built on predecessors; added value; envisaged flexible implementation; and secured survival of basic privacy protection. The article closes with suggested lessons for the future from the Guidelines of 1980, given the huge technological changes that have occurred in informatics in the intervening thirty years, some of which are described.

‘This Place Used to be a White British Boys' Club’: Reporting Dynamics and Cultural Clash at an International News Bureau in Nairobi

Africa has long been portrayed by Western media as a dark and conflict-ridden continent. Such reports have traditionally been produced by white journalists in the field, writing for a distant audience ‘back home’. In recent years, significant structural changes in the foreign news industry have seen the near-demise of foreign correspondents and the increasing use of locally hired journalists. This research explores the important role of local correspondents in the production of international news reports, and asks whether their presence may start to change how Africa is depicted in the West. This investigation is framed by a cultural analysis of the Reuters newsroom in Nairobi during the post-election crisis of 2007–08. This newsroom provides a microcosm of the media industry, in which Western and local journalists disagreed and debated the role of the media in a crisis. This clash of values offers a springboard for exploring the potential ability of local national journalists to shape the news: do they have the power to challenge Western reporting modes, or are they simply reproducing the values of this system? This article concludes that the current situation is somewhere between the two: Westerners continue to dominate international reporting, but there are indications that a slow and sometimes uncomfortable synthesis is beginning to emerge.

Confronting the costs and conflicts associated with biodiversity

1 Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, Trondheim, Norway 2 Department of Economics, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada 3 Department of Biology, The University of Mississippi University, MS, USA 4 Marine Mammal Research Unit, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada 5 South African National Biodiversity Institute, Claremont, South Africa 6 Animal Demography, Department of Zoology, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, Cape Town, South Africa 7 American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West at 79th Street, New York, NY, USA 8 Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA 9 Division of Economics, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK 10 University of Lyon I, Villeurbanne, France 11 Department of Biological Sciences, The University of Hull, Hull, UK 12 CSIRO Davies Laboratory, Aitkenvale, Qld, Australia 13 University of Stellenbosch, Bellville, South Africa 14 Aberdeen Centre for Environmental Sustainability (ACES), University of Aberdeen & Macaulay Institute, Aberdeen, UK 15 Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London, London, UK

Kultura i ekonomia w procesie integracji muzułmanów europejskich

The clash between the West and Islam in Western Europe has a double character: religious and sexual. A new World Value Survey shows that we differ extremely in attitudes toward gender equality and sexual liberalization. The sexual clash of civilizations appears not only inside the societies receiving immigrants but also within the immigrant societies and through immigrants’ children. The West and Islam are not monolithic opposite sides of conflict — Europeans and Muslims express a wide spectrum of attitudes on moral issues. Europeans and Muslims want democracy, but the Muslims want sharia as a source of legislation too. The clash of cultures in Europe is provoked by economic recession. The clash of values between the second and the third immigrant generations, and between man and woman is especially pronounced in French Muslim suburbs. Unemployed fathers have lost their position to “older brothers”, who imposed the specific “macho-culture” oppressive to young women, which are perceived to be too liberal.

Miners' magic: artisanal mining, the albino fetish and murder in Tanzania

ABSTRACTA series of murders of albinos in Tanzania's north-west mining frontier has been shrouded in a discourse of primitivism by the international and national press, sidestepping the significance of the contextual circumstances of an artisanal mining boom firmly embedded in a global commodity chain and local profit maximisation. The murders are connected to gold and diamond miners' efforts to secure lucky charms for finding minerals and protection against danger while mining. Through the concept of fetish creation, this article interrogates the agency of those involved in the murders: the miners who purchase the albino charms, thewagangahealers renowned for their healing, divination and sorcery skills who prescribe and sell the charms, and the albino murder victims. The agrarian background, miners' ambitions and a clash of values comprise our starting point for understanding the victimisation of albinos.

Authenticity and the construct's dimensions in public relations and communication research

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to define the construct authenticity and its dimensions and to propose an index to measure levels of authenticity in organisational messages and actions, as well as perceived authenticity from the stakeholders' perspective.Design/methodology/approachThe paper takes the form of a comprehensive literature review.FindingsThe construct authenticity and its dimensions are defined from a multidisciplinary perspective, including literature from advertising, communication studies, marketing, and public relations.Research limitations/implicationsItems for an authenticity index are proposed. Such a scale could be used to measure the effectiveness of public relations efforts and techniques and, therefore, the perceived authenticity of organisations, including its actions, operations, product, services, and spokespeople in the mind of stakeholders.Practical implicationsThe consistency between authentic claims, offerings, and promises and the management philosophy and behaviour of organisations would determine the effectiveness of public relations efforts assessed by measuring the responses, actions, and behaviours of stakeholders.Social implicationsThe evenness between the genuine nature of organisational offerings and their communication is crucial to overcome the eroding confidence in major social institutions. Authenticity claims must capture the experiences, aspirations, and expectations of the involved segment of society that organisations aim to engage; otherwise, a clash of values may occur.Originality/valueThe paper provides ideas for measuring authenticity in organisational messages and actions as a guide to best ethical practices and support for teaching the value of the studied construct.

Political Opportunity Structures and the Outcomes of Transnational Campaigns: A Comparison of Two Transnational Advocacy Networks

Two of the most prominent transnational advocacy networks that were launched in the 1990s are the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) and the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA). The ICBL was very successful in shaping global policy on landmines, while IANSA has had much less political impact. To explain the substantial difference in the political outcomes of these otherwise quite similar campaigns, this article draws on the concept of the political opportunity structure, a key concept in social movement theory, adapts it to the transnational context, and applies it to a comparison of the ICBL and IANSA. Transnational advocacy networks that are able to seize the opportunities created by international conference diplomacy and by UN initiatives, and whose agenda does not result in value clashes or other types of intractable conflicts, are more likely to shape political outcomes.

Premodern, Modern, and Postmodern Redux And Why It Makes a Difference

In 1995 the differences between the pre-modern, the modem, and the postmodern were presented through contemporary art. Today, however, these differences have been intensified through a clash of cultural values which has resulted in deadly acts of terrorism and a climate of fear in many circles. These differences came together in the address given by Pope Benedict XVI at the University of Regensberg in September of 2006. There were the pre-modern anti-Islamic views of Manuel II Paleologus one of the last emperors of the Byzantine Empire, the modern view of Pope Benedict XVI based upon post-Enlightenment reasoned discourse, and the strong Islamic postmodern response which both questioned the superiority of the West and made use of the digitalized media. Postmodernity and postmodernism mailer today because of the misunderstandings among Muslims due to their fear of the West, and among western Europeans because of their fear of Islam. Both sides are becoming increasingly intolerant and thus are mirror images of the other. It is obvious that theology is important today if the Christian message of love is to be communicated in this climate of intolerance. Korean theologians, being heirs of the Confucian and Neo-Confucian tradition, are in a unique position to mediate between the Islamic East and the post-Enlightenment West in this age of postmodernity.