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A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.

Here Marx's philosophy is dissected from the angle of bourgeois capitalism which he, Marx, sought to overcome. His social, political and economic ideas are criticised. Although it is noted that Marx wanted to ameliorate human suffering, the result turned out to be Utopian, contrary to his own intentions. Contrary to Marx, it is individualism that makes the best sense and capitalism that holds out the best hope for coping with most of the problems he sought to solve. Marx's philosophy is alluring but flawed at a very basic level, namely, where it denies the individuality of each person and treats humanity as “an organic body”. Capitalism, while by no means out to guarantee a perfect society, is the best setting for the realisation of the diverse but often equally noble human goals of its membership.

Role-taking is a basic social process underpinning much of the structural social psychology paradigm – a paradigm built on empirical studies of human interaction. Yet today, our social worlds are occupied by bots, voice assistants, decision aids, and other machinic entities collectively referred to as artificial intelligence (AI). The integration of AI into daily life presents both challenges and opportunities for social psychologists. Through a vignette study, the authors investigate role-taking and gender in human-AI relations.

Participants read a first-person narrative attributed to either a human or AI, with varied gender presentation based on a feminine or masculine first name. Participants then infer the narrator's thoughts and feelings and report on their own emotions, producing indicators of cognitive and affective role-taking. The authors supplement results with qualitative analysis from two open-ended survey questions.

Participants score higher on role-taking measures when the narrator is human versus AI. However, gender dynamics differ between human and AI conditions. When the text is attributed to a human, masculinized narrators elicit stronger role-taking responses than their feminized counterparts, and women participants score higher on role-taking measures than men. This aligns with prior research on gender, status, and role-taking variation. When the text is attributed to an AI, results deviate from established findings and in some cases, reverse.

This first study of human-AI role-taking tests the scope of key theoretical tenets and sets a foundation for addressing group processes in a newly emergent form.

Crisis managers believe in the value of a favorable, pre‐crisis reputation. The prior reputation can create a halo effect that protects an organization during a crisis. The prior reputation/halo might work as a shield that deflects the potential reputational damage from a crisis. Or the prior reputation/halo might encourage stakeholders to give the organization the benefit of the doubt in the crisis (reduce attributions of crisis responsibility). Oddly, researchers have had little luck in producing a halo effect for prior reputation in crisis situations. The purpose of this paper is to present two studies designed to test if the halo effect could occur and which of the two dynamics of the prior reputation halo best serve to explain the benefits of a favorable, pre‐crisis reputation.

The research focuses on a set of studies conducted to illustrate the halo effect and to explore how it serves to protect an organization during a crisis. The implications of the findings for post‐crisis communication are discussed.

The halo effect for prior reputation in crisis was created. The halo operated in a limited range for organizations with very favorable prior reputations. The data also supported the halo as shield dynamic rather than the halo as benefit of the doubt.

The paper provides insight into the area of reputation and crisis management.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the performance and the relationship between competitiveness, real gross domestic product (GDP) growth and human development in 20 countries of the Latin America and Caribbean region during the 2006-2015 period. The main argument to uphold here is that – from the perspective of virtuous circle – countries with better conditions of competitiveness are those with better economic performance and with better conditions for human development.

Time series data were organized at three levels: individual countries, groups of nations and Latin America and Caribbean as a whole. Indicators used were: index of competitiveness, rates of change in real GDP and Human Development Index. Cluster analysis tests were performed: data ranges were determined and quintiles were established. Countries were ranked in five categories and comparative position matrices were determined for each variable. Linear correlations between indexes were calculated. Linear correlation coefficients were determined in terms of groups of countries and considering Latin America and Caribbean as a whole.

Findings revealed that decreasing conditions in competitiveness and economic growth indicators are the representative situation since 2009. The most competitive country in the region is Chile, and the weakest is Venezuela. Nevertheless, all Latin American and Caribbean countries analyzed seem to have made progress in terms of human, economic and social development. Regarding correlations, Dominican Republic showed an inverse relationship between competitiveness and economic growth, while Jamaica and Venezuela showed inverse relationships between competitiveness and human development. At the individual country level, no statistically significant relationship between economic growth and human development was detected.

Findings highlight the necessity of future research that result in a deeper understanding of the transmission mechanisms between economic and social performance in Latin American and Caribbean countries. Particular reasons at the micro level that explain improvements or deteriorations in competitiveness and human development must also be analyzed. Based on the degrees of freedom, time series could have included more years, but a lack of information was found for some countries. It would also be necessary to observe each particular case considering the type of economy, production characteristics and export/import composition.

Results complement the existing literature by exploring competitiveness and its relationship with economic and social variables in developing countries. The authors also believe that this paper is relevant for macroeconomic and social policy debates involving competitiveness and human well-being in this region of the world.

This paper supports an important argument: human well-being and national development must be the ultimate goal of competitiveness. Traditional literature focuses on levels and determinants of competitiveness in developed countries, but it usually does not take into account social and human aspects of the process in developing countries. Little attention has been paid to analyze the relationship between competitiveness and socioeconomic variables in developing countries. Methods and findings of this paper complement the existing literature by studying the relationships among competitiveness, real GDP growth and human development in Latin American and Caribbean countries, using correlation analysis.

Sustainability has become an important catch‐word in several fields that has stimulated an important body of work on a wide variety of topics ranging from economic development and agricultural production to social equity and biodiversity. Few generalizations can be made about such a diverse body of work. However, one can say with some confidence that this reflection has come about in large part from a sense that certain activities constitute a threat to human well‐being through the destruction of the necessary conditions of human survival. This fact has contributed to a rampant pessimism regarding prospects for the future and a rethinking of the meaning of sustainability in the fields noted above. However, acknowledging that sustainability is a rich concept in current thinking about economy, environment, and ecology does not mean that it is clearly understood. Indeed, the opposite is true. For example, John Pezzey, in a recent World Bank study, identified twenty‐seven definitions of sustainability. Even a summary survey of the work about sustainability shows that the term is a multidimensional concept that comprises of a number of interrelated elements, including ecological, environmental, economic, technological, social, cultural, ethical, and political dimensions.

In August 2007, over 6,000 sociologists gathered in New York to attend the 102nd meeting of the American Sociological Association and discuss the possibility of radical social transformation in post-modern capitalist society.¹ The adoption of the conference theme ‘Is another world possible?’ was theoretically significant, for it seemed to call into question one of the most fundamental assumptions upon which critical sociology depends: that despite the rarity of radical social change, it is possible, desirable and even imperative to imagine and struggle for better alternatives to existing ways of being. From phenomenological insights into the contingency of our subjective interpretations of reality to the imperative of reconciling ‘appearance’ with ‘reality’; from the long history of collective movements to defend human dignity to the ‘politics of small things’ (Goldfarb, 2006), critical theories of society presume that human fates are not determined and futures are not reified, and that the possibility of possibility is a pre-condition for ‘normal’ human existence. This is not to say that progressive alternatives to the status quo are not often and everywhere repressed to some degree and in some form, or that they are equally distributed or attainable. But as Gustavo Gutierrez once remarked, a ‘commitment to the creation of a just society and, ultimately, to a new human being, presupposes confidence in the future’ (2003, p. 197).

How should a multinational corporation (MNC) from a mature democracy deal with the human rights issues in a country with a poor human rights standard? The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors develop a mathematical model to depict MNC's behavior in response to human rights violations in the host country.

The authors show that, first, in a country with a high level of human rights abuses, a firm will have to lower its human rights standards to survive; but, second, a collective effort by all firms is essential to improve the human rights conditions in the host environment; and third, a firm's human rights practices may have a multiplicative effect that can significantly affect the momentum of human rights development in a host country.

This study is one of the first attempts to provide a theoretical framework on the issue of MNCs and human rights in host countries.

The burden social theorists must be willing to accept, respond to, and act upon pertains to the difficulties that predictably accompany all efforts to convey to nontheorists the unwelcome fact of heteronomy – that as actors, we are not as autonomous as we were told and prefer to assume – and to spell out what heteronomy in the form in which it has been shaping the developmental trajectory of modern societies means for professional theorists. I introduce the concept of “vitacide,” designed to capture that termination of life is a potential vanishing point of the heteronomous processes that have been shaping modern societies continuing to accelerate and intensify in ways that prefigure our future, but not on our human or social terms. Heteronomy pointing toward vitacide should compel us as social theorists to consider critically both the constructive and destructive trajectory that social change appears to have been following for more than two centuries, irrespective of whether the resulting prospect is to our liking or not. In this context, the classical critical theorists of the early Frankfurt School, especially Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, pursued what turned out to be an evolving interest in rackets, the authoritarian personality, and the administered society – concepts that served as foils for delineating the kind of theoretical stance that is becoming more and more important as we are moving into an increasingly uncertain future.