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The extent to which Amartya Sen’s capability approach is prefigured in Karl Marx’s views comes into sharper focus when one notes that Marx and Friedrich Engels explicitly argued that the transformation from capitalism to communism would involve the development of “a totality of capacities”. Sen also cites the notion of “false consciousness” in developing his view of objectivity and claims a Marxian pedigree for the notion of “objective illusion”. He suggests that public discussion can make evaluative judgements better informed and less parochial, so that they connect more closely with what people have reason to value. The author argues that this line of argument is also closely related to views John Stuart Mill advanced in his discussion of the “competent judges” and in his defence of liberty of thought and discussion.

The approach used is conceptual analysis and discussion of historical texts.

The chief findings are that Amartya Sen’s works on capability and objectivity have deeper affinities with some of Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’ views than has been hitherto appreciated by scholars. However, some of the claims which Sen makes about objectivity and false consciousness are prefigured in the writings of J.S. Mill.

Because some of these affinities between the works of Sen, Marx and Mill have not previously been recognised, the paper’s elucidation of them is a new contribution to the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a critique of Sen’s utilisation of aspects of Marx’s thought that inform his idea of justice. Marx’s ideas appear in four main areas of discussion: Sen’s positioning of Marx in relation to the other thinkers in his approach to justice; Marx’s fluid notion of identity and its relation to social choice; the problem of going beyond a subjective perspective to consider objective concerns by considering the impact of what Sen calls “objective illusion”; and the issue of just redistribution.

The author utilises a Marxian framework of analysis that engages in immanent critique of Sen’s use of Marx in relation to his theory of justice. This is accomplished through textual analysis and by critical assessment of the analytical Marxist tradition that Sen can be seen as using in his own theories with all their inherent weaknesses.

Sen’s attempt to use Marx’s ideas to inform his theory of justice founder because: he groups Marx with thinkers that would not accept his desire for the abolition of capitalism and a more just society beyond it. He reduces Marx to the analytical tradition with all its inherent weaknesses. He resorts to a methodological individualist approach of choice that Marx rejects. His search for positional objectivity is undermined by the power of capitalist ideology and ruling class interest. His discussion of just redistribution ignores how Marx’s approach can overcome the arbitrariness that Sen thinks is inevitable when making just decisions.

Theoretically, the paper suggests that, based on immanent critique and textual analysis, Sen’s use of Marx’s idea of justice is problematic most notably because Sen keeps his analysis within the framework of capitalism that Marx would reject. The implication for further research is the development of Marx’s own arguments on what constitutes a just society.

Practically, the paper raises questions about the capacity for justice to be achieved within the capitalist system for the reasons discussed in relation to Sen.

Socially, the paper implies that far greater measures to tackle the injustices of the world are necessary than seem to be admitted to by justice theorists such as Sen.

The author shows that the use of Marx’s theories to inform Sen’s notion of justice, while to be welcomed, lose their efficacious power to expose the full injustice of capitalism and the need for its transcendence.

Utilising dialogic meta-narrative analysis, a form of inquiry based on examining the difference between voices in meaningful and relevant dialogue (Wegerif, 2006, p. 347), the purpose of this paper is to present an examination of three relevant works on theories of the global South for identifying educational patterns, themes, and biases from the worldview perspectives of the respective authors.

In comparative and international education “qualitative” research, the acceptance of differing points of view and reference have often resulted in a fragmented and fractitious affirmation of cultural relativity, whereby the pursuit of truth (Veritas) has been replaced by the pursuit and contestation of a plurality of knowledges and truths. Davies defines this as “discursive practice”, which refers to the way discourse and the production of selves produce and reconstitutes one’s social and psychological realities (Davies, 1999, p. 88). The positional and discursive worldviews relative to “other” are not only dependent on locational, contextual, and time (Zeitgeist) dimensions, but also on disciplinary methodological foundations and subjective interpretations of both experience and choice.

The analysis of the three scholarly works identifies issues of comparative education research from a dialogic and dialectic perspective, suggesting that relativistic notions of research are required and necessary in order to expand horizons and “break out of the box” to broaden one’s imagination.

The questions raised by all three worldviews require further research: Who pays? Who benefits? Should the field contest the positional points-of-reference of comparativists? Should theory and mode of inquiry be made more clear in order to understand and discern the positional authority of the researcher and the researched? Should relevant literature addressing subject material involve greater scrutiny – if not collaboration – between scholars from different worldview perspectives?

Subjectivity, validation and significance of findings contribute to dissemination and advancement of knowledge, and if not robust or rigorous, are simply another point of view.

This is a new paradigmatic approach to problematising comparative and international research from three positional worldviews. The value in problematising the three worldviews helps to delve deeper into the issues at hand regarding the global South.

This paper explored the reliability of self-reported health and the impact of the social position in determining the inconsistent health response (IHR), in late life. Reliability of self-reported health is important to evaluate, as it is the primary step for asking health-care facility. As self-reported health is a subjective measure, elderly people might have a tendency of under-reporting the health problem because of lower socioeconomic status. This incidence can cause inaccurate estimate of the health problem of the aged at the time of formulating health policy or providing health-care infrastructure. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore the sources of inconsistent responses of self-reported health by comparing it with the existence of chronicle ailment and to identify the vulnerable group that health care supports.

The study uses nationally representative unit-level data from the National Sample Survey of India. Using the bi-variate probit model, joint estimation of reported health and IHRs is determined. The study compares perceived and actual health status and explores how individual characteristics and socioeconomic position contributes to IHRs among the elderly population.

Major findings of this study are as follows: firstly, self-reported health has little reliability, as it is compared with the existence of chronicle ailment. Older people in the rural areas have greater tendency to under-estimate the health problem, whereas urban elders tend to over-estimate it; and secondly, the inconsistency in health response is significantly associated with social caste, economic status and attainment of education.

The results of this study from bivariate probit model offer deeper understandings about the reliability of self-reported health and provide further insights to improve policy design formulated to mitigate the health inequality among the elders. This study might be helpful to design an inexpensive and easily available health measure, which is very important for a highly populated aging country with limited health-care resources.

To the best of author’s knowledge, it is the first study that has identified the sources of inconsistent health and direction of inconsistency that is where self-reported health over- or under-estimates the actual health response among the elderly in a developing country like India, where the growth rate of population aging is faster than the world.

Purpose – This capstone chapter introduces Amartya Sen's important and innovative theory of justice to researchers on fairness in groups and organizations. Here, I discuss how Sen's theory can provide grounding for both philosophical and social scientific work on justice and how social science research can inform and be informed by Sen's theory.

Design/methodology/approach – In this chapter, I discuss Sen's new book, A Theory of Justice, and explain the main aspects of Sen's theory of justice. I then draw conceptual linkages between Sen's theory and those introduced in each of the other chapters included in this volume.

Findings – I show that Sen's view of justice goes beyond social contract theories that attempt to identify ideal institutional arrangements to seek practical solutions that increase justice as experienced by actual people in the world. Rather than parallel endeavors, Sen's approach reveals philosophy and social science to be deeply connected to each other and to justice by providing a unifying theme by which various social scientific traditions are shown to study aspects of the same underlying phenomena. Further, I demonstrate how philosophy and social science together can increase justice in the world.

Originality/value – Sen's theory of justice, though influential in economic and policy circles, is largely unfamiliar to social psychologists and organizational scholars. I introduce these fields to Sen's theory of justice and show how it is useful for social psychological approaches to the study of fairness in groups and organizations.

Although India has a number of health issues, the healthcare facilities in India are insufficient due to poor quality of care. The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors affecting the structural quality of healthcare facilities in India.

This study used the medical facility data from the India Human Development Survey-II, 2011–2012 (ICPSR 36151) (n=4,218). Logistic regression was conducted to predict structural quality of healthcare facilities.

The results suggest that it is difficult to have all standard resources available at health care facilities in India. Surprisingly, having a drinking water source inside the health facility appears to be an indicator of poor structural quality of health care facilities. Having a water source inside a health care facility is associated with not having a separate exam room and not having a sink to wash hands. A higher registration fee was associated with good structural quality and with having a separate exam room and having a sink to wash hands.

This study shows the complexity of providing quality health care to the poor, particularly in developing countries. Research on quality of healthcare facilities in India is needed to improve the health of the population. Little research has been done on the factors influencing the structural quality of the healthcare facilities in India. This study is an important contribution to the current knowledge of structural healthcare facility standards and its influences in India.

In this paper the use of classical strain measures in analysis of trusses at finite deformations will be discussed. The results will be compared to the ones acquired using a novel strain measure based on the Hyperbolic Sine function. Through the evaluation of results, algebraic development and graph analysis, the properties of the Hyperbolic Sine strain measure will be examined.

Through graph plotting, comparisons between the novel strain measure and the classic ones will be made. The formulae for the implementation of the Hyperbolic Sine strain measure into a positional finite element method are developed. Four engineering applications are presented and comparisons between results obtained using all strain measures studied are made.

The proposed strain measure, Hyperbolic Sine, has objectivity and symmetry. The linear constitutive model formed by the Hyperbolic Sine strain and its conjugated stress presents an increasing stiffness, both in compression and tension, a behavior that can be useful in the modeling of several materials.

The structural analysis performed on the four examples of trusses in this article did not consider the variation of the cross-sectional area of the elements or the buckling phenomenon, moreover, only elastic behavior is considered.

The present article proposes the use of a novel strain measure family, based on the Hyperbolic Sine function and suitable for structural applications. Mathematical expressions for the use of the Hyperbolic Sine strain measure are established following the energetic concepts of the positional formulation of the finite element method.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how actors subjected to public performance evaluations may “contest commensuration,” i.e. may seek to influence how such ratings and rankings will be construed among important stakeholders.

A qualitative study of press releases, and interviews with department heads, is used as a basis for the analysis.

The empirically derived taxonomy of public responses to a state-initiated performance evaluation of educational programs shows that actors may mobilize an array of commensuration management tactics so as to maintain or improve one’s relative positional status. Such tactics may have at least three different foci, namely, on the comparison object (i.e. on the new grouping of actors), the comparison dimension (i.e. the standardized format for comparison) and the comparison rate (i.e. the rate received), respectively. The authors also find that not only are threats to positional status likely to spur commensuration management tactics, but also the opportunity to exploit a good rate.

The paper augments recent research that has problematized the so-called “reactive conformance thesis” by focusing on how evaluated organizations may directly try to influence external stakeholders through public responses. The study is also one of the first that analytically disentangles how they may skillfully exploit different forms of “plasticity” that are inherent in any type of commensuration.

In this paper, I compare Theodore Schatzki’s practice theory, the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger upon whom Schatzki drew in its formation, and my own theory of institutional logics which I have sought to develop as a religious sociology of institution. I examine how Schatzki and I both differently locate our thinking at the level of practice. In this essay I also explore the possibility of appropriating Heidegger’s religious ontology of worldhood, which Schatzki rejects, in that project. My institutional logical position is an atheological religious one, poly-onto-teleological. Institutional logics are grounded in ultimate goods which are praiseworthy “objects” of striving and practice, signifieds to which elements of an institutional logic have a non-arbitrary relation, sources of and references for practical norms about how one should have, make, do or be that good, and a basis of knowing the world of practice as ordered around such goods. Institutional logics are constellations co-constituted by substances, not fields animated by values, interests or powers.

Because we are speaking against “values,” people are horrified at a philosophy that ostensibly dares to despise humanity’s best qualities. For what is more “logical” than that a thinking that denies values must necessarily pronounce everything valueless? Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” (2008a, p. 249).