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This is an interpretive study in the sociology of literature that explores Aeschylus’s trilogy of dramatic plays known as the Oresteia. The plays dramatize a normative argument that exemplifies the dialectical struggle between domination and democracy. Social relations are characterized by agon (struggle), domination, and contradictions brought about by learning through suffering. These social realities reflect the primary theoretical claim of radical interactionism (RI) that domination and conflict are profound, pervasive, and perennial. On the interpersonal level, the plays dramatize structure, agency, role-taking, and the Thomas Axiom. As the first drama to interrogate an inchoate polity as an object of the public’s gaze, the Oresteia anticipates the sociological importance of critical consciousness, collective decision-making, political institutions, moral and, ultimately, cultural transformation. Despite a social context of slavery, imperialism, xenophobia, ostracism, misogyny, exclusivity, and constant warfare, the Oresteia foreshadows Western civilization’s ideals of legal-rational domination, citizenship, human rights, persuasion, and justice that have been imperfectly institutionalized to reduce surplus domination. The West still struggles to realize those ideals.

This study aims to draw together what is known regarding the characteristics and context of adult family violence, and to consider what practitioners and organisations in the UK might learn from the literature.

This study reviews literature on adult family violence and parricide and includes illustrative cases from a study of domestic homicide review reports involving older adults.

Adult family violence most often involves mothers killed by their adult sons. Mental health issues, alcohol/substance misuse and criminality are common themes for perpetrators. Caregiving responsibilities is a theme for both victims and perpetrators. Previous research identified two main categories of adult family homicide: perpetrators with major psychotic illness, and victims-perpetrators in complex relational contexts.

This study considers how practitioners respond to situations of adult family violence and learning for policymakers, agencies and practitioners.

This paper summarises what is known, argues that more research is needed and suggests practical ways forward for policymakers, relevant agencies and practitioners.

The purpose of this paper is to review the terminology used to describe family violence involving older adults in order to stimulate a discussion that may assist in the use of a more appropriate and clearer terminology.

Different definitions of terms used to describe violence are considered and the contexts in which they are used. Two cases are described to illustrate the use of overlapping terms, the assumptions that lie behind them and the different actions that they lead to.

The authors argue that legal, relational, health (physical and mental) and social perspectives are all useful and integration contributes to a fuller understanding of violence.

The importance of terminology used to describe family violence involving older adults has been neglected in the past, yet it influences understanding about violent incidents and shapes responses to them.

The figure of the female revenger has haunted the western imagination as far back as some of the earliest extant texts, most starkly in Euripides' tragedies Hecuba and Medea (c. 430–420 bc). She has tended to take on one of three forms: the scorned woman, the vengeful mother or the victim of physical violence, almost always sexual violence.

This chapter presents an interdisciplinary and transhistorical understanding of the troubling figure of the violent female revenger in her shifting incarnations. The investigation traces conceptual strands through a variety of cultural texts, focusing on specific instances that are both situated historically and simultaneously analysed for the ways in which they reflect recurring priorities and cultural anxieties through the centuries.

After considering key ideas such as revenge and justice and gender and revenge, the chapter looks more closely at the so-called rape-revenge genre, moving from the earliest examples such as I Spit on Your Grave (1978) to more recent films which are considered for the ways they intersect with the global feminist protest movement #MeToo, and other key cultural moments such as the Harvey Weinstein case and the very public trial of the USA Gymnastics national team doctor Larry Nassar: Revenge (2017), The Nightingale (2018) and Promising Young Woman (2020). The chapter draws direct lines of connection between imaginative works, cultural types and stereotypes, and lived reality in order to come to a fuller understanding of the female revenger.

Presents the scientific methodology from the enlarged cybernetical perspective that recognizes the anisotropy of time, the probabilistic character of natural laws, and the entry that the incomplete determinism in Nature opens to the occurrence of innovation, growth, organization, teleology communication, control, contest and freedom. The new tier to the methodological edifice that cybernetics provides stands on the earlier tiers, which go back to the Ionians (c. 500 BC). However, the new insights reveal flaws in the earlier tiers, and their removal strengthens the entire edifice. The new concepts of teleological activity and contest allow the clear demarcation of the military sciences as those whose subject matter is teleological activity involving contest. The paramount question “what ought to be done”, outside the empirical realm, is embraced by the scientific methodology. It also embraces the cognitive sciences that ask how the human mind is able to discover, and how the sequence of discoveries might converge to a true description of reality.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Aristotle’s ethics can be applied to the ethics of professional accountants (PAs), in relation to the approach adopted by the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC), and to consider the reasons that justify the Aristotelian approach.

The paper outlines IFAC’s approach and identifies several weaknesses. Three themes of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics are applied to the work of PAs. Reasons why this perspective is more suitable for PAs are then articulated.

Several aspects of Aristotle’s ethics can be fruitfully applied to the ethics of PAs. These include the relationship between function, goals and the good, an awareness of the human goal to achieve eudaimonia, the development of both excellences of character and of intelligence, and the significance of non-rational aspects of morality, including emotions, will, responsibility and choice.

This perspective provides an alternative conceptualisation of the ethics of PAs. Although it does not provide concrete guidance regarding what the ethical approach to specific situations may be, it presents a useful counterpoint to existing approaches that are largely deontological and utilitarian.

This paper provides accountants in practice with a more comprehensive and adequate perspective on what it means for a PA to be ethical, and raises several issues related to how ethics is included in the education and training of accountants.

Investigating the philosophical basis for professional ethics approaches professional codes of ethics in a way that it is not typically considered. The paper also provides a more comprehensive application of Aristotelian ethics than previous work.