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Book part
Publication date: 20 August 2018

Vilhjálmur Árnason

After the financial collapse, the Icelandic Parliament set up a Special Investigation Commission to explain the causes of the events. A working group on ethics evaluated the…

Abstract

After the financial collapse, the Icelandic Parliament set up a Special Investigation Commission to explain the causes of the events. A working group on ethics evaluated the explanations of the commission from a moral perspective and placed its analyses in the wider social context. This chapter delineates the approach and the main findings of these investigations. The author argues that the main lessons to be learned are about the need to strengthen democratic structures and professional practices in business, politics and administration. The implications of this structural approach for assessing the responsibility for the collapse are discussed in the light of I.M. Young’s social connection model. While the parliamentary reports were well received, three events hindered Icelanders in learning the reports’ main lessons. In addition to a volcanic eruption immediately after the publication of the report, two major political debates led the reconstruction work astray. The first was about the case of the former prime minister and the second was the fierce Icesave dispute about whether Icelanders should share the financial burden with the citizens of the United Kingdom and the Netherlands who lost their savings in the Icesave accounts. This issue dominated Icelandic public discourse for three years and diverted political attention from the message of the parliamentary reports – namely, that the main explanatory factors for the financial collapse were weak governance and flawed practices within Iceland. As a consequence, the political sector has lagged behind other social sectors in efforts to learn lessons from the financial collapse.

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The Return of Trust? Institutions and the Public after the Icelandic Financial Crisis
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78743-348-9

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Book part
Publication date: 20 August 2018

Abstract

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The Return of Trust? Institutions and the Public after the Icelandic Financial Crisis
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78743-348-9

Book part
Publication date: 20 August 2018

Einar Már GuÐmundsson

It seems a commonplace notion that when we talk about trust, we are really talking about the lack of trust. After all, if there were solid trust throughout society, we would not…

Abstract

It seems a commonplace notion that when we talk about trust, we are really talking about the lack of trust. After all, if there were solid trust throughout society, we would not have to talk about it at all. But if we discuss lack of trust, are we to start with institutions or the individuals in the institutions? It would help us if we knew whether we need to fix wayward institutions or educate individuals for more ethical behaviour. Moving from thoughts of the ideal to the practical, we have seen how Icelanders have felt the effect of institutions and individuals gone astray in a two-fold manner: first, through the actions of those parties; second, as they listened to the painful but necessary story of those days in its repeated telling by the Special Investigative Commission. Hope remains, however, because, as natural disasters show us, when stripped of its trappings, human character can still revive our sense of trust.

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The Return of Trust? Institutions and the Public after the Icelandic Financial Crisis
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78743-348-9

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Book part
Publication date: 10 May 2017

Stan Apps and Tova Cooper

This paper argues that Charles Reznikoff’s autobiography, Family Chronicle: An Odyssey from Russia to America, presents Jewish law as an ethical alternative to U.S. law. The…

Abstract

This paper argues that Charles Reznikoff’s autobiography, Family Chronicle: An Odyssey from Russia to America, presents Jewish law as an ethical alternative to U.S. law. The autobiography illustrates how Jewish law refuses to let social and economic hierarchies compromise its emphasis on truth-finding and the speedy resolution of legal troubles. Family Chronicle tragically portrays the Reznikoff family’s inability to exert equal bargaining power with its landlords, something commercial lease law assumes they can do. Reznikoff’s autobiography suggests that the United States can better realize its democratic principles by revising commercial lease law to reflect the tenant-centered approach of residential lease law.

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Studies in Law, Politics, and Society
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78714-344-9

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Book part
Publication date: 2 July 2012

Kwang-Kuo Hwang

Purpose – This chapter aims to construct a scientific microworld to explain the management strategy of yang-ru yin-fa (Confucianism in public and Legalism in private) in Chinese…

Abstract

Purpose – This chapter aims to construct a scientific microworld to explain the management strategy of yang-ru yin-fa (Confucianism in public and Legalism in private) in Chinese organizations by an emic approach of indigenous psychology.

Design/Methodology/Approach – In consideration of the difficulties faced by either an imposed etic approach or a derived etic approach, this chapter advocates for an emic approach that argues that, in order to understand the specific features of organizational dynamics in China, it is necessary for us to construct an objective system of knowledge (epistemology) on the basis of Chinese cultural values (ontology), which can be examined by methods of social sciences (methodology).

Findings – Based on the theoretical model of Face and Favor, a conceptual scheme was proposed to highlight the contrast between Confucianism and Legalism in traditional as well as contemporary Chinese society. Findings of pervious empirical researches on two types of guanxi, along with two types of official and ethical leadership in Chinese organizations were reviewed to demonstrate the usage of yin/yang balance in strategic management.

Originality/Value – Taking the discourse of this chapter as an example, it is expected that the author's approach may initiate a scientific revolution against the Western paradigms of psychology that had been constructed on the presumption of individualism (Evenden & Sandstrom, 2011; Hwang, 2012).

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West Meets East: Building Theoretical Bridges
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78190-028-4

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Book part
Publication date: 5 August 2019

Gabrielle E. Clark

Since the late 1970s, US employers have increasingly drawn upon legal temporary labor under the H-2 visa to address their labor needs in low-waged sectors. Ever since, what Clark…

Abstract

Since the late 1970s, US employers have increasingly drawn upon legal temporary labor under the H-2 visa to address their labor needs in low-waged sectors. Ever since, what Clark calls migrant labor activism and conflict in the courts has similarly erupted. However, as she argues in this chapter, making “adversarial legalism” the H-2 way of law has also been a story of comparative state formation. For, the litigation largely reflects the structure of labor migration created after the demise of government-run migration. In this regard, activists wrestle with the problems created by the new role of global labor intermediaries in the recruitment process, absolute employer control over hiring and firing, and the coercion produced in the shadow of a now minimally interventionist state. Drawing upon archival research, interviews with legal professionals, and the entire case law docket in this area, this chapter puts “adversarial legalism” under the H-2 visa in its historical and political context.

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Studies in Law, Politics, and Society
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83867-058-0

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The Emerald Handbook of Public Administration in Latin America
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83982-677-1

Book part
Publication date: 21 November 2011

Charalampos Koutalakis

During the past 30 years environmental policy was never between the top priority areas of public intervention in Greece. Legislative measures related to the protection of human…

Abstract

During the past 30 years environmental policy was never between the top priority areas of public intervention in Greece. Legislative measures related to the protection of human health and nuisance from private economic activities were introduced as early as in the beginning of last century. The post dictatorial constitution of 1975 provided, for the first time, specific provision for the protection of natural environment. However, a comprehensive framework legislation regulating all facets of environmental degradation was adopted only in 1986 but remained, for a long period, practically inactive since the necessary implementing decisions were issued with considerable delay. The country's accession into the EU, in 1981, provided a cognitive and material basis for the modernisation of environmental policy through the incorporation of the environmental acquis into domestic law and building up of domestic administrative capacities through the use of the structural funds. However, low prioritisation of environmental protection in the domestic policy agendas of successive Greek governments continued to affect domestic administrative structures and policy traditions.

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Sustainable Politics and the Crisis of the Peripheries: Ireland and Greece
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-85724-762-9

Book part
Publication date: 1 February 2009

James H. Cassing

A somewhat underappreciated aspect of the burgeoning rush to regional trade agreements (RTAs) is a discrepancy between the dispute settlement procedure (DSP) embodied in the…

Abstract

A somewhat underappreciated aspect of the burgeoning rush to regional trade agreements (RTAs) is a discrepancy between the dispute settlement procedure (DSP) embodied in the original World Trade Organization (WTO) Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU) and that found in the language of many RTAs. This chapter explores the issue in the context of a dynamic repeated game of trade agreements. As is well known, the institutional alternatives available in negotiating multilateral freer trade agreements – regional agreements, side agreements, trade dispute settlement punishments, and so on – can proscribe the limits and shape the nature of self-enforcing trade agreements. Here, we suggest the extent to which deviations from the WTO DSP embodied in RTAs – for example, “private interest access,” “third party procedures,” and “choice of forum” – can not only work against the interests of “weaker parties” but furthermore undermine multilateral agreements closer to free trade.

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Trade Disputes and the Dispute Settlement Understanding of the WTO: An Interdisciplinary Assessment
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-84855-206-7

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Book part
Publication date: 4 October 2014

Daniel E. Wueste

There is more than a bit of ‘ethical neediness’ in society. One good question is what can be done about it. The answer pursued here is that we should promote integrity…

Abstract

There is more than a bit of ‘ethical neediness’ in society. One good question is what can be done about it. The answer pursued here is that we should promote integrity aggressively and integritively. Directing attention to the arena of higher education and problems associated with academic or educational integrity, the chapter (a) discusses honor codes as a device for promoting academic integrity; (b) identifies and explains a key virtue and a vice of honor codes and, in relation to the values an honor code is meant to safeguard, a significant way in which honor codes are like a professional ethic; and (c) argues that success in this project requires abandonment of an attractive but misleading conception of ethics that suggests, wrongly, that acting rightly is simply a matter of rigid adherence to standards. To be sure, some questions about what one should do are straightforwardly and quite legitimately answered by reference to rules. In this, ethics may seem quite like law (adjudication). But one has to be careful here, lest one be seduced by the siren song of what Roscoe Pound called mechanical jurisprudence, for in law and ethics, as in the Greek myth, this does not have a happy ending. There is more to the story. In ethics (adjudication too) one confronts genuine complexity that cannot be dealt with algorithmically. This is something that we have to face head on, if we are committed to promoting integrity integritively.

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Achieving Ethical Excellence
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78441-245-6

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