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This paper aims to explore the evolution of the notion of peremptory norms (Jus Cogens) in international law through the work of the International Law Commission on unilateral acts.

The study depended on analyzing the work of the International Law Commission on two topics: Unilateral Acts 2006 and Reservations to treaties 2011 to reveal the relation between jus cogens and unilateral acts.

Jus cogens restrict unilateral acts like treaties due to the recognition of the importance and necessity of the concept of Jus cogens in protecting the fundamental interests of the international community.

States must be compatible with jus cogens when making any reservation on a treaty and also when taking any unilateral act.

This paper reveals the importance of jus cogens in promoting the values of the international community and the need of such notion to protect the common interest of that community.

The modern social and political order is characterised by a range of disparate moralities which lead to a plethora of interpretations and competing perspectives as to what ought to be the appropriate ethical template for corporate social responsibility. The possibility of uniting these disparate threads into a unified whole is explored by addressing the complex philosophies of Immanuel Kant and his alleged successor, Hans Kelsen; paying particular attention to their contrasting views of the proper foundations of public consensus towards establishing an idealised moral community of corporate actors.

The research is library-based and suggests that philosophy (in this instance, Kant’s moral philosophy and Kelsen’s general theory of law and state, for example) is able to offer an alternative rational and morally grounded ethics of law and governance; pertinent to the effective governance of corporate behaviour and moral management practices.

Central concepts, characteristic of both the Kantian and Kelsenian philosophical methodologies, have the capacity to act as a positive influence on the development of effective CSR mechanisms for assuring greater accountability. In addition, it is suggested that by prescribing ethically appropriate corporate behaviour as a first consideration, such philosophical frameworks are capable of providing a powerful disincentive against corporate crime.

The paper is interdisciplinary and (in an era of mistrust, global financial impropriety and other corporate misdemeanours) explores the utility of a philosophical approach towards articulating the conditions for imposing a moral duty incumbent upon all corporate actors in addressing the practical and conceptual needs of their shareholders and wider society.

The paper emphasises the general relevance of social norms and social associations for cooperative behaviour in less or non‐social economic contexts, focusing in particular on economic laboratory experiments, and to illustrate the underlying psychological driving forces.

The argument focuses on the interplay between social norms, their psychological enforcement mechanism (cognitive dissonance) and context effects. Drawing on findings from both (social) psychology and experimental economics, it emphasises the relevance of social norms for cooperative behaviour also in less or non‐social environments as often created in economic laboratory experiments. Moreover, the conditions for cognitive dissonance effects to occur are summarised and the corresponding behavioural effects are both highlighted and exemplified by means of various examples including the analysis of a specific data set.

The discussion strongly suggests that the influence of common cooperative social norms is difficult to “anonymise away” in laboratory experiments or other less socially focused decision environments. Moreover, it provides a possible explanation for the occurrence of a variety of behavioural patterns often found in such settings, such as initially high but decreasing willingness to cooperate in social dilemmas.

Emphasising the far reach of social aspects in economic decision making, the discussion may help in the design of institutions as it illustrates a widespread source of non‐economic individual incentives.

The argument addresses the idiosyncrasies of individual cooperative behaviour in situations where economic incentives should hinder such behaviour. Adding to earlier arguments which explain such cooperation, for example, by reference to fairness concerns or inequity aversion, the present discussion emphasises in particular the specific psychological driving forces behind such behaviour. In doing so, it establishes a clear link to the research on cognitive dissonance in psychology.

The purpose of this paper is to apply a philosophical framework in order to come to a life‐world oriented understanding of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for evaluating system success. To do so, according to Dooyeweerd's theory of aspects, a multi‐aspectual understanding is derived based on end‐user's everyday experience of the system.

Through a qualitative case study, data are gathered based on 17 semi‐structured interviews. The company within which this study was conducted is an Iranian manufacturer which fully implemented a SAP R/3 system about four years ago. In order to analyze text data, an interpretive text analysis is conducted.

According to the results, among all 15 aspects and from end users’ point of view, the qualifying aspects are analytical, pistic, economic and formative, which means that the other aspects are ignored or repressed throughout the organization. All these qualifying aspects include both positive and negative norms but for three of them (analytical, economic and formative) the positive norms are dominant. Regarding the pistic aspect, even though it includes strong positive norms, they are not dominant compared to negative norms. Synthesizing results show that according to “Meeting objectives”, “User satisfaction” and “Emancipation” as general norms, ERP success, in order to be completely realized, requires each general norm to be considered as a multi‐aspectual criterion.

First, the management team has to concentrate not only on economic and formative objectives but also on the other aspectual objectives which are more qualitative and intangible. Each aspectual objective requires its own specific methods and data to be measured, therefore the management team must provide supportive conditions so that multiple measurement systems are allowed to be implemented. Second, through new long‐term plans, budgets and training courses, already ignored aspects such as psychic, lingual, social, aesthetic, juridical and ethical must be more focused in order to bring to them more visibility and recognition throughout the organization. Third, In order to increase the positive norms for all aspects, holding periodical workshops and training courses is helpful. In addition, implementing reward systems can be a complementary action in order to improve positive norms.

The paper shows that evaluating ERP success according to end users’ point of view brings more visibility to some issues which are usually ignored or missed by quantitative or uni‐aspectual approaches. Furthermore, utilizing Dooyeweerd's framework as a life‐oriented philosophy for evaluating ERP success is a novel work, which may lead to a kind of development and enrichment in the ERP success literature.

Healthcare professionals’ conscious or unconscious norms, values and attitudes have been identified as partial explanations of healthcare inequity. Norm criticism is an approach that questions what is generally accepted as “normal” in society, and it enables professionals to identify norms that might cause prejudice, discrimination and marginalisation. In order to assess norm-critical awareness, a measurement scale is needed. The purpose of this paper is to develop a scale for measuring norm-critical awareness.

The scale-development process comprised a qualitative item-generating phase and a statistical reduction phase. The item pool was generated from key literature on norm criticism and was revised according to an expert panel, pilot studies and one “think aloud” session. To investigate the dimensionality and to reduce the number of items of the scale, confirmatory factor analysis was performed.

The item-generation phase resulted in a 46-item scale comprising five theoretically derived dimensions revolving around function, consequences, identity, resistance and learning related to norms. The item-reduction phase resulted in an instrument consisting of five dimensions and 20 items. The analyses indicated that a summary score on the scale could be used to reflect the broad dimension of norm-critical awareness.

The Norm-critical awareness scale comprises five theoretically derived dimensions and can be used as a summary score to indicate the level of norm-critical awareness in educational contexts. This knowledge is valuable for identifying areas in greater need of attention.

The purpose of this paper is to identify some of the current social norms of pricing that constrain sellers' discriminatory pricing on the internet. Violations of such social norms can lead to perceptions of price unfairness and swift and potentially damaging negative reactions from consumers. This paper seeks to demonstrate a state‐of‐the‐art technique for assessing social norms, to identify current norms using a large representative sample of US consumers and to distinguish between social norms and personal beliefs.

The study involves an online survey of 387 respondents. The survey was designed to measure both the consensus and the strength of consumer reaction to seller behaviors. To establish that a behavior is the norm, the consensus has to be greater than a 65 percent agreement and the strength of the response has to be significantly different from neutral. Both personal beliefs and perceptions of society's beliefs were collected.

The paper finds that some of the social norms constraining discriminatory pricing on the internet are as follows: a seller should charge the same price for a given item to all customers; a seller should not charge a higher price to either more loyal or more frequent customers; a seller should not charge more to new or infrequent customers; and a seller should not charge less to infrequent purchasers. In addition, although it is not established as a norm, a surprising 50 percent of the respondents think that Americans in general believe that all retailers should charge the same price for the same item. The paper also finds that personal beliefs are consistent with social norms but more extreme.

The implications are that e‐tailers need to be careful about price discrimination on the internet – many of the most profitable practices violate current internet pricing norms. For example, consumers do not think that it is fair to give a cheaper price to a new buyer than to a repeat buyer. However, different e‐tailers can offer the same product at a different price. That is not considered price discrimination.

By identifying the social norms of pricing, sellers are provided with the information they need to avoid unwitting violations of those norms. Sellers can thus avoid angering their customers, as Amazon did when they allegedly charged new customers less than established customers.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether controllers are willing to and/or general managers are expecting them to act as business partners and, hence, to analyze the related consequences from a manager’s point of view.

This study is based on a dyadic data set gathered from 112 German head controllers and corresponding general managers in the period of March to May 2009. Drawing on the theory of reasoned action (Fishbein and Ajzen, 1975), the authors examine controllers’ attitude, subjective norm and behavior regarding their participation in managerial decision-making. Further, the authors analyze general managers’ assessment of related outcomes, such as internal efficiency and process improvements and use covariance-based structural equation modeling to test for the theoretical relationships.

Results show that controllers’ behavior is strongly influenced by management’s expectations. Moreover, the results support the notion that business partnering is associated with organizational improvements regarding internal processes, decisions and efficiency, thereby increasing the contribution of the controllers’ department to the competiveness of an organization.

Our study focuses on a limited set of variables and does not incorporate different hierarchy levels, which could be avenues for further research. Still, our findings highlight the importance of management’s expectations as triggers for business-oriented behavior of controllers.

Theory and empirical evidence in the research area of controllers’ business orientation are still underdeveloped and, therefore, knowledge about the micro-processes and determinants on an individual level for becoming a business partner, as well as on the related outcomes of such a behavior is still limited. The results contribute to literature by highlighting the importance of general managers’ expectations as triggers for business orientation of controllers and its related benefits for the organization.

Potentially major shifts in privacy norms are taking place as a result of advances in genetic technologies. This chapter identifies a spillover effect in the form of the inadvertent emergence of new norms and introduces an original typology developed in response to these new norms regarding privacy. It focuses on the emerging practice of compelling access to genetic information of biologically related persons to gain information about a particular individual. This chapter highlights the recent practice in child lead paint poisoning cases in which defendants seek to discover medical and I.Q. records of biologically related non-parties to establish alternate genetic causation of low I.Q. It concludes that greater attention should be given to the spillover effect and the emergence of shadow norms.

The purpose of the current research is to examine the crucial role of employees' perception of an incivility norm in predicting supervisors' incivility behaviors, which in turn, results in employees enacting incivility toward their coworkers and employees' emotional exhaustion.

In Study 1, an experience sampling method (a daily-diary approach) in which 143 male participants from several construction sites completed a total of 1,144 questionnaires was used . In Study 2, cross-sectional data from 156 male employees working in a manufacturing organization was collected. In Study 3, a quasi-experiment was conducted in which 33 and 36 employees were assigned to the intervention and control groups, respectively.

In Studies 1 and 2, it was revealed that employees are likely to experience their supervisor’s incivility behaviors when perceiving such incivility behaviors are more acceptable within the organization (incivility norm). Further, once employees experience incivility from their supervisor, they are more likely to enact incivility toward their coworkers and experience emotional exhaustion. In Study 3, changing organizational policies via implementing grievance procedures was effective in improving the study’s outcome variables.

Incivility norms predict some negative work outcomes such as incivility behaviors as both a victim and instigator, and emotional exhaustion. Further, reducing an adverse organizational norm (i.e. incivility norm) via instituting grievance procedures was effective in reducing incivility behaviors and emotional exhaustion.