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Despite coming from a world-famous, widely published sociologist and ethicist, Zygmunt Bauman’s thought has not significantly influenced scholarship on public relations. Although Bauman’s works indeed challenge classical theories of public relations, they also offer concepts that can reshape current understandings of how organisations interact with publics. Referring to Bauman’s social and ethical theory, in this article, I argue that amid the transition from solid to liquid modernity, the boundaries between public relations and other communications disciplines also become liquid and ultimately dissolve. As a consequence, experts from traditional disciplines within communications (e.g. public relations, marketing and corporate communications) increasingly compete with data engineers to influence publics, and in the process, their attempts at persuasive communication neglect moral considerations. In light of that dynamic, I contend that the recent data scandal involving Cambridge Analytica does not represent a false start but the dark future of digital communications management., + ID der Publikation: hslu_75851 + Art des Beitrages: Wissenschaftliche Medien + Sprache: Englisch + Letzte Aktualisierung: 2020-06-16 09:28:58

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to contribute to the relaxion on what can be done to develop ethical cultures that may be less permeable and more resilient to changes in leadership from an ethical point of view. The influence of leaders on organisational ethics is recognised, and there are even those who consider that it is not possible to maintain an ethical culture when leaders are not engaged. But, if this theory is true, all business ethics programmes that can be created, and the cultures that can gradually be developed in organisations, will always have their existence and robustness suspended at each leadership change. How to maintain an ethical culture beyond leadership?Design/methodology/approachAs a strategy, we used the case study with a narrative methodology, in which a chief executive officer (CEO) and a chief compliance officer (CCO) narrate in the first person a case of perceived collapse of the ethical culture of a multinational company.FindingsThe findings point to the difficulty in maintaining ethical leadership. Key aspects to protect an organization from leadership changes are as follows: the management of the succession process, the quality of the training on ethics and the mechanisms developed by the organization to foment speak up and take notice of the situations. Moral blindness and the banality of evil that also can be observed in organizations appear as facilitating elements for collapse.Originality/valueEthical leadership is generally presented as a necessary condition for an ethical culture. However, leaders often have unethical or ethically neutral leadership. This case helps to understand the difficulties experienced by leaders in adopting ethical leadership and proposes a set of instruments and procedures that, when included in an ethical programme, can protect the company's ethical culture against unethical leaders. Some characteristics of our case study make it particularly relevant: action occurs in a multinational, a context where, by size and complexity, achieving uniformity in culture becomes particularly relevant, and actions happen in the context of a CEO succession process, something that may occur in any company and which is often a trigger for ethical misconducts. Additionally, our case is narrated by a CEO and a CCO, which makes it rare, as it is especially difficult to have access to these executives.

“New models of care”, “care home vanguards” and “innovation test beds”. These are just a few of the initiatives being pursued in England’s National Health Service (NHS). They reflect wider changes in the organisation of the public sector that encourage short-term, focused projects that frequently de-couple the change process from the wider context. The dominant research interest in such projects has been on questions of implementation and outcome (e.g. how are project aims achieved). Far less attention has been given to questions of process and the kind of work that gets done. In this chapter we adopt an interpretive approach to critically examine the significance of project management for public sector health care, drawing on a case study of PRojects IN Controlled Environments (PRINCE2TM) training to examine how the idea of “project management” is constructed, the discourses and categories in play, and the implications for public sector health care. Our findings focus on three areas. Firstly, the principles underpinning PRINCE2TM draw on standardised and linear views of the world with processes leading directly to outputs. This way of conceptualising change presents the work of project management as neat and tidy and distances those involved from the human elements of managing. Secondly, the models, procedures, and techniques underpinning PRINCE2TM are concerned with efficient and cost-effective delivery of projects. This focus on technical responsibility encourages users to focus on the means rather than the end, to substitute moral and ethical concerns with technical procedures and decontextualises projects from the very communities they are (in theory) intended to serve. Finally, language plays a key role in promoting and sustaining ideas of a “market society”. Repeated use of terms such as “business”, “interests”, and “assurance mechanisms” hold potential to translate concerns over sickness or care into market-oriented language that is focused on business cycles and oriented to creating “value”. This jars with values of citizenship or public duty often associated with public welfare. We conclude by reflecting on the consequences of this project management work for health care and other public sector work, paying particular attention to the potential for “moral blindness”.

This chapter explores the role of the modern university, focusing on the usually neglected areas of the arts and humanities, both as hubs of creativity and innovation and as crucial platforms for questioning societal norms and rules. The point of departure is Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of the university as a public space which promotes the culture of human rights and social justice against the moral blindness of utilitarian sciences. How is the contemporary university, under increasing market demands and pressure from the ‘culture of management’ maintaining this ethos? What does it mean to be a critically engaged university in the era of performance benchmarks and league tables, as universities increasingly opt for a pragmatic curricular approach to meet the expectations of big corporate employers? To what extent are innovative transdisciplinary courses and programmes, focusing on learning-as-process, rather than product, able to act as platforms for critical thinking and debate? How do these learning processes become modes of ‘remixing’ culture and knowledge through performances, public actions, workshops, conferences and seminars to activate different social agents?

In the last decade the public health movement has bolstered efforts to prevent interpersonal violence through bringing social policy attention and needed dollars to prevention initiatives. Features in a public health approach to prevention include an evidence-based conception of the risks and so-called ‘protective’ factors associated with the unwanted problem and the use of sophisticated evaluation tools to monitor prevention efforts. This article critically reviews public health prevention methodology as applied to interpersonal violence prevention at the primary level through drawing on findings from a qualitative inquiry into the moral dimensions of violence prevention education. It examines the premise that an empirical evidence base can determine what is desirable in relationships, together with the assumption that expert violence prevention educators can use this evidence to teach others about relationship desirability. In relying on a scientific and empirical evidence base, it is argued that the pu...

Popularized in Spain through the work of the Italian satirist Traiano Boccalini, the motif of the occhiali politici, or political lenses, is one of the most understudied conceits in early modern Spanish satire. This essay examines four early modern Spanish texts where anteojos de larga vista (“eyeglasses” or “telescopes”) become central elements as the eye is given the ability to perceive the reality beyond deceptive appearances. But a capacity to see beyond reveals two parallel concerns: the adoption of spectacles as a mark of social distinction by a society suffering from the moral blindness these novels denounce and the increasing tensions between astronomy and religion stemming from the use of lenses as stargazing tools. Contextualizing these anxieties in the contemporary polemics regarding the divulgation of Galileo's Copernican theses, I illustrate how a simple corrective instrument triggered a fierce debate at the center of Spain's uneven modernity.

Laws to, at a minimum, redress artificial gender inequities are made by the state, but MacKinnon believes the state is male in a gendered sense, and the law sees and treats women the way men see and treat women. The state coercively and authoritatively constitutes the social order in the interests of men as a gender, through its legitimating norms, forms, relation to society, and substantive policies (MacKinnon 1989: 11).

The years of 1955 and 1956 are generally considered a watershed in twentieth-century English drama. In 1955, Waiting for Godot was performed at the Arts, directed by Peter Hall, and 1956 saw the visit of Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble to London and John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court. In their different ways, these productions seemed to offer ways of escape from the stifling routines of the well-made play. While Osborne’s play, considered revolutionary at its time, is now considered “fairly orthodox,”1 the impact of absurd drama and epic theatre was more profound and enduring. Waiting for Godot was a liberating experience for playwrights because it broke all the rules: there is no specified place or time, the characters do not seem to have a history or any psychological “depth” and, perhaps most importantly, the plot does not follow the traditional formula of “rising action — climax — falling action,” but after some time starts to repeat itself. Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble, by contrast, served as a model for a pronouncedly political, radical theatre, and on the level of theatrical style, suggested an escape from the confines of the well-made play by smashing the “fourth wall.”

1) Risk Management and Risk Taking Christoph Luetge: Risk Taking and the Ethics of Entrepreneurship.- 2) Risk Management on Financial Markets.- Elena Esposito: The Present Use of the Future: Management and Production of Risk on Financial Markets.- Boudewijn de Bruin: Epistemically Virtuous Risk Management: Financial Due Diligence and Uncovering the Madoff Fraud.- 3) Risk Management in Organizations.- Jacob Dahl Rendtorff: Risk Management, Banality of Evil and Moral Blindness in Organizations and Corporations.- Cristina Besio: Transforming Risks into Moral Issues in Organizations.- Matthias Gronemeyer: Decision-Making as Navigational Art: A Pragmatic Approach to Risk Management.- 4) Philosophical Issues of Risk Management.- Thomas Beschorner: Beyond Risk Management, Toward Ethics - Institutional und Evolutionary Perspectives.- Nikil Mukerji: Consequentialism, Deontology and the Morality of Promising.- 5) Risk Management in Specific Systems.- Julie Jebeile: The Nuclear Power Plant: Our New "Tower of Babel"?.- Nguyen Hoang Anh: The Global Economic Crisis as a Risk for the International Trade in Hanoi.

This paper applies Hannah Arendt’s philosophy of the banality of evil and moral blindness to risk management, business ethics and organization ethics. The paper investigates figures of banality of evil in organizations and corporations on the basis of Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the Eichmann as the stereotype of the obedient administrator that is unable to understand the moral risk implications of his actions. Thus the paper contains the following major parts: (1) The concept of moral blindness as proposed in Arendt’s philosophy of responsibility and judgment (2) Interpretations of moral blindness, power and domination following from the concept of systemic action in Arendt’s philosophy: Zygmunt Bauman (Modernity and the Holocaust), Stanley Milgram (obedience under authority), Philip Zimbardo (The Lucifer effect (3) Discussion of how the concept of moral blindness apply to analyze administrative evil in organizations and corporations in relation to a kind of risk management that is blind to the moral consequences of management decisions (4) Conclusion and perspectives.

Theodor Adorno once famously opined that philosophy continues to exist because the moment for its abolition was missed.1 In an ironic parallel, the same might be said of Marxist literary and cultural theory. It continues because the moment for its abolition was missed, when the old mole of history decided to assert itself instead of subsiding into the hibernation predicted in the famous post-1989 edict of Francis Fukuyama: the end of history.2 Instead of the steady-state, stable capitalist societies envisioned by Fukuyama, we have witnessed the near-collapse of the global capitalist financial infrastructure with resulting social and political turmoil, including the revival of anti-immigrant and anti-Keynesian forces, and the imposition of austerity and no-end-in-sight high unemployment in both Europe and the United States. This is on top of a slightly older resistance to capitalist globalization manifested in the various religious fundamentalisms and other political movements of our time. And even more recently and unexpectedly, something like both 1848 and 1989 seems to have occurred again in the Middle East.

‘Recessional’ and ‘White Man’s Burden’ have been crucial in establishing Rudyard Kipling’s reputation as the de facto poet laureate of the British Empire. ‘Recessional’ celebrates the sacrosanct nature of the civilising mission and chastises those who cheapen it through ‘tumult’ and ’shouting’ (Kipling, 1996a: 266). Written for Queen Victoria’s jubilee, it serves as a reminder of the fate of empires that forget divine providence and indulge in displays of pride and pomp. Kipling intended it as a nuzzur-wattu, ‘an averter of the Evil Eye’ (1977: 120). ‘White Man’s Burden’ operates as a virtual manifesto of empire’s purpose and the racial theories on which it was constructed. The poem upholds the certitude of race even while it covertly acknowledges the nature of conquest by using the imagery of trapping and hunting. Yet other poems and some short stories reveal a subversive side that surfaced only occasionally and was coded in complex ways. Read against such poems and short stories, the works which afford Kipling his reputation as a jingoist would seem to be rehearsing empire. At the very least, Kipling’s oeuvre reveals what Angus Wilson describes as ‘the poetry of tension, not of “give”’ (1977: 117). Nowhere is this more apparent than in his writings about war.

In October 1835 Derwent Coleridge wrote to his brother Hartley in the role of family peacemaker. Hartley had bruised the feelings of their sister Sara in his, perhaps too vigorous, attack on the veracity of her husband, Henry Nelson Coleridge’s edition of ‘specimens’ of their father’s Table Talk. Derwent struck a conciliatory tone, both admitting the merit of Hartley’s view that: ‘It [the volume] is, and could not but have been, fragmentary in respect to the conversation extracted—yet a succession of little wholes in respect of itself’,1 and defending the work on the grounds that it was clearly impossible to capture Coleridge’s conversa­tional brilliance. In this argument, the ‘little wholes’ that Henry pro­duced had their source in Coleridge’s talk, but inevitably failed in their task of accurate representation. The very nature of Coleridge’s speech made it inimitable; Derwent described it thus: ‘the heard gust of a corn-blowing wind, that came from I know not whence, and went you knew not whither—a stream, with an eddying surface, yet with an unchecked progression: the very substances broken and suggestive, rather than expressive and declarative’.

During a typically angst-filled episode in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000), the protagonist (Ethan Hawke) watches a video of a Buddhist monk expounding a philosophy of interrelatedness: We have this word to be. But what 1 propose is … a word to interbe … Because it is not possible to be alone. You need other beings in order to be. Not only do you need father, mother, but also uncle, brother, sister, society … sunshine, river, air, trees, birds, elephants, and … it is impossible to be by yourself, alone. You have to interbe with everyone and everything else. And, therefore, to be means to interbe.

This paper discusses the moral blindness practiced by Guidant when they withheld important information from doctors and patients who use their defibrillator. It was discovered that Guidant was aware of the failure and flaws of their defibrillator which can cause severe risk to heart patients leading to death. It was only when the defibrillator's shortcomings were to be disclosed in a newspaper that Guidant issued an advisory. Since the malfunctioning defibrillator can cause serious adverse health consequences or death, the FDA classified Guidant's advisory as a Class I recall.

Since 1986, universal access to the National Health Service (NHS) is considered a human right in Spain. Informed by the principle of distributive justice (Boutain 2012), the objective of the NHS is to ensure equal access to health care resources for all citizens and residents. The NHS is one of the most important elements of the Spanish welfare state; however, this model has limitations in protecting the most vulnerable of the population due to structural factors of social inequality (gender, social class, and ethnicity, among others) (Mackenbach 2012) and the organization of the health system (e.g., people with a history of alcoholism have difficulty accessing a liver transplant). The current Spanish government has adopted a powerful neoliberal discourse of austerity with respect to public services as the unique solution to the current economic crisis. This policy has increased the difficulty in accessing the NHS at all levels of the population, with the greatest impact on the most disadvantaged sectors of society (elderly, unemployed, poor, illegal immigrants, etc.) (Bover et al. 2011). The aforementioned rapid and mandated changes are producing enormous moral tensions among Spanish health care professionals. A case such as Mr. Jones as presented by Nivens and Buelow (2013) was inconceivable in Spain a few months ago. The Spanish health system is undergoing a sudden transition from an imperfect model of distributive justice to a model of market justice in which health is considered an economic good regulated by market rules (Boutain 2012). Since then, health professionals have reacted to this new moral problem with diverse, but usual attitudes (Davis, Tschudin, and de Raeve 2006; Guerra 2008). Some of them show moral blindness since they do not recognize the problem; others show moral complacency explained by their inability to change the situation. Finally, some professionals show moral distress when they perceive a clash between their professional values and the values of the institutional/political system. LikeMr. Jones’ nurse, Spanish nurses have had limited success when trying to cope with these unjust situations. Even the most committed and sensitive professionals barely attain an ethical minimum when working within this new reality. The deterioration of Mr. Jones’ health is not only unjust Bioethical Inquiry (2013) 10:421–422 DOI 10.1007/s11673-013-9459-2

“The conquest of the earth,” declares Charlie Marlow, principal narrator of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness , “which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.” “What redeems it,” he continues, “is the idea only.” Thus does Marlow look back on his voyage up the great African river, at the moment when the King of the Belgians was tightening his grip over what he called the “Congo Free State,” at the cost of close to six million African lives. The remark comes at the opening of Marlow’s extended “yarn,” both a bitter memory and the canny opening gambit of a master storyteller. Marlow’s first words represent the closing remarks of a history whose moral climax turns on the evasion of last words. Though he has witnessed the horror that resounds in the life of that “remarkable man,” Mr. Kurtz, Marlow’s “inconclusive experiences” in Africa are – so we are given to understand – not amenable to final judgments. Heart of Darkness is, for better and worse, both a chillingly clear-sighted account of imperial violence and a self-implicating instance of the moral blindness it denounces. Conrad’s story raises the discourse of empire to an excruciating pitch of self-consciousness. Deliberately provocative and self-loathing, the text combines a frank acknowledgment of colonial brutality with an exquisite aversion to moral judgments; and it opts, ultimately, to align itself with what it sees as the corrupting lie of “civilized” morality.

Ben Jonson prided himself on the fidelity of his two Roman tragedies, Sejanus his Fall and Catiline his Conspiracy, to their historical sources. Sejanus was performed in 1603 or 1604 and published in 1605; Catiline was performed and published in 1611. While the sources for the two plays were various, in both of them Jonson followed a principal narrative guide. Tacitus’s Annales was his essential source for Sejanus, Sallust’s Bellum Catilinarium for Catiline.1

The proverb that gives Thomas Heywood’s play its title and the injured husband words to express his mastery at once of his wayward wife and of his own crudely vengeful impulses suspends an obvious contradiction, which metaphorical application tends to mitigate in the direction of paradox. The prominent references to apes in several early variants confirm that, as befits its position within the discourse of folk-wisdom, the saying is grounded in (pseudo-)natural history — that is, in the literal — with ‘kindness’ retaining a strong trace of its root meaning (‘natural affinity’).2 Yet the nature of proverbs is to use language figuratively, and the movement away from the literal is facilitated, in most occurrences of this one, by the absence of the animal analogy. When Shakespeare endows young lovers with an affection that will actually prove fatal, he varies the proverb almost beyond recognition: if Romeo were her pet bird, Juliet would ‘kill’ him, not with ‘kindness’ but with ‘much cherishing’ (Rom., II.ii.183). By contrast, Shakespeare’s wife-tamer, Petruchio, though he is in fact the death of the shrew within Katherina, is certainly not speaking literally when he boasts, ‘[t]his is a way to kill a wife with kindness’ (Shr., IV.i.208).3

The representative figure in the history of the literary double in the last two decades of the nineteenth century is Robert Louis Stevenson. A writer of romances par excellence, he was, as Edwin M. Eigner has fascinatingly demonstrated, deeply imbued with the traditions of both the principal lines of Romantic fiction, that of the entertainment and the sensational romance, and that of the visionary or idealistic novel (though these are not, it must be said, always so clearly distinguishable from one another as Eigner seems sometimes to suggest).1 No aspect of Romantic fiction attracted Stevenson so much, or was so germane to the concerns natural to his temperament, as the pervasive duality that was common to both traditions.

Love and Mr Lewisham was published appropriately enough in 1900 since for Wells it meant a new start as a novelist rather than a writer of romances. For many of Wells’s reviewers, however, this first novel did not seem like an adventurous beginning but a falling away from the ‘startling originality’ he had shown in his previous work; it meant the exchange of ‘monsters’ and ‘machine’ for ‘sloughs of monotonous mediocrity’ as one reviewer expressed it.1 Wells was, as always, driven by a strong determination to succeed and the disappointment which greeted his change of direction only intensified his resolve: ‘I want to write novels and before God I will write novels’, he wrote to Bennett in the same year: ‘They are the proper stuff for my everyday work, a methodical, careful distillation of one’s thoughts and sentiments and experience and impressions.’2 ‘Writing novels’ presented itself to Wells as a scaling down of the imagination, exchanging inspiration which had to be waited upon for hard work which could be willed. Even so Wells was as ever eager to assert his individuality. He read Bennett’s first novel, A Man from the North, only after he had published Love and Mr Lewisham and was, as he wrote, ‘struck by the curious parallelism’. But he also perceived an important difference of point of view: Your approach and line of thought are clearly rather more towards Gissing than are mine, and I am reminded by that, that Gissing some years ago when I was telling him the idea of Lewisham told me that he had also contemplated the same story. His title was to have been The Common Lot, and there you have as compactly as possible a certain difference in the point of view.3

No other major Victorian novelist owed so profound and pervasive a debt to Sir Walter Scott as did George Eliot, and few reverenced him as consistently. On New Year’s Day 1860, G. H. Lewes presented her with a set of the Waverley novels inscribed on the fly-leaf of the first volume ‘To Marian Evans Lewes. The best of Novelists, and Wives, These works of her longest-venerated and best-loved Romancist are given by her grateful Husband.’1 Towards the end of her life Lewes was to remark in a letter to Alexander Macmillan that Scott was ‘to her an almost sacred name’. In the year of Middlemarch George Eliot herself described the steady development of her ‘peculiar worship’ to her own worshipper, Alexander Main: I began to read him when I was seven years old, and afterwards when I was grown up and living alone with my Father, I was able to make the evenings cheerful for him … by reading aloud to him Scott’s novels. No other writer would serve as a substitute for Scott, and my life at that time would have been much more difficult without him. It is a personal grief, a heart-wound to me when I hear a depredating or slighting word about Scott.2 This appreciation of the Waverley novels was not simply an extended adolescent sentiment, it was a vital shaping influence on the nature, form and intent of her own fiction.

In 1859, four years before Browning began writing The Ring and the Book, Kirchoff and Bunsen invented a new branch of chemistry. They discovered that a chemical element could be identified by the spectrum it produced. Very quickly the spectroscope became the research chemist’s most important tool. In The Ring and the Book Browning inaugurates the art of moral spectroscopy. The Pope, an old man near death, looks around him, and, as old men do, sees everywhere evidence of moral degeneration. The glare of the world is hopelessly confused with the blaze of the divine sun

‘They were all caught and caged; prisoners; watching a spectacle. Nothing happened. The tick of the machine was maddening.’ So Virginia Woolf describes the members of the audience at the pageant presentation in her last novel: Between the Acts. The spectators represent both the stupefied British public on the eve of war watching the drama of history unfold before them, and playgoers awaiting the transformation of reality into art. Written in 1939–40 and published posthumously in 1941, Between the Acts is one of the finest recreations in literature of that transitional period between the 1930s and the 1940s. It captures a particular mixed mood of nostalgia, stasis, terror, and a slim hope for a future — in life or art.