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The purpose of this paper is to revisit philosopher Hannah Arendt's classic study of the banality of evil in light of posthumously published works bearing on moral psychology and philosophy.

Largely expository and interpretive, this conceptual paper articulates Arendt's approach to morally responsible thinking, with an emphasis on managerial decision making. Arendt's practical ethics draws, in part, on Kantian aesthetic theory, providing an original but unfinished account of “the life of the mind” and personal responsibility in community.

Arendt contends that humans can, and are morally obliged to, use conscience, imagination and reason to avoid evil‐doing; that self‐critical introspection, active imagination and representative judgment are essential for moral decision making, especially in times of moral crisis; and that neither profit nor pressure can justify breaching fundamental responsibilities to humanity.

This paper discusses, but does not critique, Arendt's oeuvre. It interprets, connects and applies ideas from disparate works relating to responsible moral psychology.

Confronting a “modern crisis” in values, Arendt acknowledged pressures on leaders to fulfill organizational objectives, even those effecting harm which violate deeply‐held personal ethics. Warning against temptations to divide selves into a “personal” moral self and a compartmentalized “organisational self,” she prescribed ways of thinking and judging to counteract thoughtless evil‐doing.

The paper connects Arendt's privative analysis of evil‐doing in Eichmann in Jerusalem with later works which delineate shared human mental capacities and processes which facilitate morally responsible leadership, independent of culture or context.

Models can be a beneficial planning tool to evaluate real alternatives. However, the user must avoid some common traps, including the temptation to have the model validate management's preconceived notions and the allure of overly elaborate and complex models.

The purpose of the project was to intervene in a deficit reading of communities. This article engages public pedagogy in a way that suggests a new approach to the field. To this end, both the terms public and pedagogy are interrogated.

The approach in this paper is an analysis of a qualitative research project: the knowledge project and pop-up school. The theoretical framework used to undertake the analysis of this project is Hannah Arendt's conceptualisation of the public realm and Michele Foucault's use of parrhesia (the truth teller), alongside Foucault's work on power.

This article offers a whole new subject position that of the educative agent. Further, this article suggests that the educative agent takes a carriage of knowledge and therefore enacts authority.

This article is an original theoretical engagement with knowledge, authority and power.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the significant role of accounting in the expropriation of Jewish real estate after the enforcement of race laws under Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime in Italy.

Hannah Arendt’s understanding of government bureaucracy in the twentieth century totalitarian regimes informs the research which draws upon a wide range of primary sources.

Implementation of the program of expropriation was the responsibility of a government body, EGELI, which was created specifically for this purpose. The language of accounting provided the means to disguise the nature and brutality of the process and allow bureaucrats to be removed from the consequences of their actions. Accounting reports from EGELI to the Ministry of Finance confirmed each year that those who worked in EGELI were devoted to its mission as an agency of the Fascist State.

The findings of this study recognize the need for further research on the role played by servicemen, bureaucrats and accounting as a technology of government in the deportation of Italian Jews to Germany. The study also provides impetus to examine how other countries managed the properties confiscated or expropriated from the Jews in the earlier stages of the Final Solution.

The study is the first to identify the significant role played by accounting and accountants in the persecution of Italian Jews under the Fascism.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how four styles of “morally ambiguous” leadership could have a philosophical basis, while relatively contributing to efficiently prevent bribery and extortion in the organizational life.

The paper identifies four styles of morally ambiguous leadership in taking philosophically based representations of “sociopolitical saviors” into account: “occasionally cruel saviors” (Niccolò Machiavelli); “occasionally compassionate saviors” (Adam Smith),; “socially conformist and compassionate” saviors (David Hume); and “revolutionary and implicitly compassionate” saviors (Hannah Arendt). Morally ambiguous leaders choose paradoxical ways to assume their moral responsibility. They use paradoxical strategies to prevent bribery and extortion in the organizational life.

The philosophical basis of those styles of morally ambiguous leadership unveils two basic antagonisms: the antagonism between cruelty and compassion; and the antagonism between social conformism and revolutionary spirit. The axis of power (Machiavelli) does not allow any connection between both antagonisms. The axis of self-interest (Smith) shows an intermediary positioning in both antagonisms (relatively compassionate, implicitly revolutionary). The axis of social conformism/compassion (Hume) and the axis of revolutionary spirit/compassion (Arendt) make leaders deepen their paradoxical positionings about moral issues.

The four styles of morally ambiguous leadership have not been empirically assessed. Moreover, the analysis of Eastern and Western philosophies could allow decision-makers to identity other philosophically based and morally ambiguous positionings about moral issues. Other philosophies could also unveil further kinds of antagonisms that could be applied to prevention strategies against bribery and extortion schemes.

The paper presents a philosophically based analysis of morally ambiguous leadership and its potential impact on prevention strategies against bribery and extortion schemes.

The purpose of this paper is to utilize illustrative examples from the industrialisation period in Sweden to analyse the interlace between poor legislation and school legislation.

It deals with how state regulation and societal transformations intervened in the lives of poor children and their parents. In particular, this article examines how collaboration between schools and poor relief resulted in normative judgements about their social inclusion and exclusion.

Overall, the article illuminates a new era in the history of social policy, an epoch when old assumptions were abandoned and fresh links were forged between industrialisation, national economics, education, gender relations, and social welfare. These changes are clarified not only by reference to nineteenth century sources but also to national and international research, and ideas about capital and gender relations associated with, among others, Hannah Arendt and Pierre Bourdieu.

The study illustrates how and why the official public spirit affects children and why understanding of this relationship needs to be broadened as well as deepened.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that information is an important effect of documentation. It is in this way that documentation studies distinguishes between concepts of and practices with “information” and “document”: that is, documentation studies helps illuminate how information is created, stabilized, and materialized such that it can emerge and, in turn, how it can then be controlled, deployed, enforced, entrenched, managed, and used in many different ways, in various settings, and for diverse purposes.

This paper presents a conceptual framework on documentation, drawing upon the work of Bernd Frohmann, Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, Hannah Arendt, @@and Ian Hacking, and applied to a case study of Apartheid South Africa.

Apartheid’s documentation helped achieve apartness at the macro and micro levels of society: on the macro level, the creation and subsequent separation of different racial and ethnic identities were drafted, adopted, and turned into law through legislative documents; on the micro level, these identities were reinforced through routines with personal documents and public signs. This documentation functioned as a documentary apparatus, providing a tangible link between individuals and their official racial and ethnic categories by creating a seamless movement of documents through various institutions; further it helped transform these racial and ethnic identities into lived facts that disciplined and controlled life.

By examining documentation, one can present a fresh and unique perspective to understanding the construction of various things, such as the construction of identities. This conceptual framework contributes to Library and Information Science (LIS) by illuminating the central role of documentation in the creation, stabilization, materialization, and emergence of information. By using Apartheid South Africa as a case study, this paper demonstrates how this framework can be applied to shed new light on different kinds of phenomena in diverse contexts; consequently, it not only contributes to and extends parts of the scholarship on documentation studies within LIS, but also presents new directions for other academic disciplines and multidisciplinary analyses and research.

Sen's notion of capability is often referred to by its standard definition “the various combinations of beings and doings that a person can achieve and value”. But do economists truly understand all what is meant by it? The concepts of agency as well as the notion of capability do not only refer to economics, but also to a rich philosophical tradition of thought. The purpose of this paper is thus to propose a philosophical hermeneutic of the concept of capability.

The notion of capability has been heavily linked first to Aristotle and then to Libertarianism (Nussbaum), but it also have been referred to Marx and recently to Kant (Crocker). It is, in fact, a matter of interpretation, for Sen does not exclusively ground the notion of capability into one or another tradition of thought. The paper proposes to find in Hannah Arendt and Paul Ricoeur some insights to understand the concept of capability.

The paper hints to a shift by not only measuring capabilities but also directly agency, thought of as the inter‐temporal sphere of effective freedom one as reasons to value. The inclusion of time is precisely what compels us to search for the bearer of capabilities; for the person is the only point that gives and achieve continuity into the constant changes occurring both to the context and to the personal valuation of the capability set.

The hermeneutic gives to the concept of capability an ethical coherence through time it usually lacks both in Sen and in Nussbaum. The paper should be of interest for philosophers and social scientists eager to work or apply the capability approach throughout time.

Exploring the need for “neutral” public space located between the private act of voting and formal deliberative democracy, the purpose of this paper is to examine two interfaces between everyday life and democratic politics and considers ways this territory can be a site for generative artistic practises.

Many artists and architects work in the space between the individual and formal collective political processes. Speculating outward from two artworks by the author and drawing on the thought of Hannah Arendt, Rosalyn Deutsche, Chantal Mouffe, Bruno Latour and others, this paper maps theory to the territory and proposes a new framework for reconsidering the work of such practitioners.

Three potentially fruitful avenues for exploration as artistic practice related to democratic interfaces are identified and discussed through examples.

This exploration is part of a broader practice-led research project into models of public collaborative thinking within the context of artistic practice. Many argue that the public realm has been co-opted by neo-liberal political and economic forces, resulting in a sense of hopelessness that limits the ability to imagine anything else. This research reflects on artistic tactics that counter this sense of hopelessness. These practices often suggest alternative social structures, foster ephemeral (local) public spheres or propose spatial configurations that support these. This paper offers a useful framework for reflecting on the work of politically engaged artists and architects as well as structuring new projects.