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Economics was closely entwined with ethics up to the 1930s when this weakened subsequently. Amartya Sen first sketched this historical relationship in his book, On Ethics and Economics. This paper is in broad agreement with Sen. It aims to explore the ethical foundations of economics in ancient Greece, focussing on Plato's Republic.

Key aspects of Sen's ethical framework (ethical motivation, human well‐being, and social achievement) are used as a template to re‐investigate Plato's work. A close reading of Plato's Republic is undertaken in order to demonstrate the foundations of economics as an ethical enterprise.

First, Plato argues that there is a range of motivations and behaviors along an ethical scale. For Plato, the goal is to try to establish what constitutes ethical behavior and then seek conditions suitable to bring it about. Second, in the Republic, one sees an outline of Plato's understanding of human well‐being. Human functioning (physical and mental flourishing, including friendship), and gender equality are key parts of his picture. Third, Plato is painting the picture of a utopian society in the Republic. In discussions of the ideal society, the economy, laws, and other policies must be set within an ethical framework. In several respects, Plato anticipates Sen's capabilities approach to economics.

In recent years, great efforts have been devoted to developing and extending Sen's Capability Framework. Part of that work has been devoted to tracing the origins of Sen's approach back to Aristotle. This paper represents the first attempt to trace that framework back further, to Plato's Republic.

This paper aims at identifying critical components of leading change through relations of relevance with platonic philosophy. During this process, well-known aspects of change leadership are detected, but interpreted differently. Based on this relevance, a seven-stage tripartite model is proposed, in order to facilitate change implementation in the business world.

Contemporary trends in leading change are reviewed and enriched with platonic insights. A synthetic analysis is attempted, in which philosopher stochasticity and discernment validates modern synergetic and anthropocentric approaches to the field of change leadership, featuring key behavioral and perceptual characteristics, emerging during change process.

As the process of change is highly dependent on human behavior, Plato grants an enriched approach of its origins and causal causes. Therefore, key change factors are not only discussed in the light of his worldview, but also upgraded through the distillation of applicable ideas, summarized in the proposed three phase model.

The proposed tripartite model of leading change can function as a powerful guide of designing and successfully implement organizational change.

The screening of specific insights from platonic works in leading change conveys an alternative, more “poetic”, yet effectively flexible attitude endorsed and incorporated into a potentially applicable model.

Describes how Plato's philosophy has influenced, and may continue to affect, modern human‐resource management.

Outlines some of Plato's main ideas – including the role of the philosopher king in striving for the ideal – and draws out their relevance for current HR thinking and practice.

Contends that the platonic HR manager would oppose the notion of flatter structures. Policy would encourage progression through education, recognizing that not everyone had the qualities or wisdom to become a top executive. Men would rise faster than women, and emphasis would be placed on age, experience and service. Training and development would be more segmented and orientated towards efficiency.

Argues that, on the basis of Plato's philosophy, educated and enlightened leaders would go the extra mile for the good of the enterprise and senior executives would set an example.

Highlights an anti‐democratic notion at the heart of Plato's philosophy: that truth and reality reside in a universal series of ideals, or forms, that transcend the material world and are understood only by a few members of a privileged class.

Applies 2,500‐year‐old ideas to the modern HR world.

Based on Plato's thinking, connects several aspects of communication and leadership theory to focus on charismatic leadership. Speculates on the application of Plato's ideas to managerial communication and makes recommendations.

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.

Plato's cave, as described in The Republic, is considered as a source of inspiration for a mathematical presentation of the process of perception and decision. The epistemological operator allows for a description of some aspects of a system's epistemological subjectivity. The involvement of inverse transfers of the system's structures is discussed. Consideration of the epistemo‐praxiological cave and the physicist's cave gives further interpretations to Plato's allegory.

The purpose of this paper is to disclose new pathways for research and for understanding the relationship between management, philosophy and history.

Textual exegesis of the key protagonists in terms of a critical explanation or interpretation of text.

In contrast to textbook forms of philosophy developed under conditions of abstraction from practice, it is in the context of practice that managers develop their way of thinking. More particularly, the authors have demonstrated through the exemplars of Semler and Welch, how as managers are disrupted in their workday practices of “living forward”, they are able to become reflexively attuned to the taken-for-granted common sense and ideas that have been implicit guides to them. As they are able to recognise their taken-for-granted background common sense, they are able to critique this, subject it to change and, thus, open-up new possibilities for living forward.

The focus of this paper has tended to be rather piecemeal and limited to the impact of particular philosophers on particular management thinkers. To date, there has been no philosophical contemplation of the practice of management per se nor, concomitantly, the pivotal but basically disregarded role of managers qua philosophers.

Preservation environments such as repositories need scalable and context-aware preservation planning and monitoring capabilities to ensure continued accessibility of content over time. This article identifies a number of gaps in the systems and mechanisms currently available and presents a new, innovative architecture for scalable decision-making and control in such environments.

The paper illustrates the state of the art in preservation planning and monitoring, highlights the key challenges faced by repositories to provide scalable decision-making and monitoring facilities, and presents the contributions of the SCAPE Planning and Watch suite to provide such capabilities.

The presented architecture makes preservation planning and monitoring context-aware through a semantic representation of key organizational factors, and integrates this with a business intelligence system that collects and reasons upon preservation-relevant information.

The architecture has been implemented in the SCAPE Planning and Watch suite. Integration with repositories and external information sources provide powerful preservation capabilities that can be freely integrated with virtually any repository.

The open nature of the software suite enables stewardship organizations to integrate the components with their own preservation environments and to contribute to the ongoing improvement of the systems.

The paper reports on innovative research and development to provide preservation capabilities. The results enable proactive, continuous preservation management through a context-aware planning and monitoring cycle integrated with operational systems.

Considers some of the drivers of national information policies in Australia, indicating that many of the issues and their social implications date back to the time of Plato. They have still to find solutions. The major issue requiring policy action is mediation. The impacts of current policy are discussed – privacy, censorship, intellectual property, security of transactions, archives legislation etc. The challenges are identified: the management of information in a non‐technology‐specific way, and how to get comfortable with thinking about information in a non‐linear and non‐commodity way.