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What is the relationship between the descriptive and the normative? The usual answer, in the social sciences, is based on a sharp distinction between facts and values. This chapter reprises and radicalizes long-standing critiques of the fact/value distinction, proposes an alternative theory of ontic webs in its stead, and then uses it to delineate six different forms of public sociology. It argues that facts are value-laden and values fact-laden; that facts and values are entangled in webs of belief and practice; and that attributions of causation and moral responsibility are connected via ontological assumptions. Effective public sociology therefore requires a combination of ontological extension and moral translation.

This study examines the effects of a firm’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative on its employees’ organizational attachment and intent to leave. We propose that employees’ perceived authenticity of their firm’s CSR activity mediates the effects of a firm’s CSR initiative on employees’ attachment to the firm and intent to leave. We also hypothesize that employees understand the authenticity of their firm’s CSR initiative based on internal and external attribution mechanisms. We propose that internal attribution enhances authenticity, while external attribution reduces it.

We surveyed a sample of 450 employees from 38 Korean companies that were included in the 2009 Dow Jones Sustainability Index Korea (DJSI Korea). To test the theoretical model, we employed a linear structural equation modeling which allows the causal estimation of theoretical constructs after taking into account their measurement errors.

As predicted, internal attribution significantly increases employees’ perceptions of their firm’s CSR authenticity, whereas external attribution significantly reduces such perceptions. Employees’ perceptions of authenticity, in turn, increase their affective attachment and decrease their intent to leave. In addition, the effects of the two attribution mechanisms on organizational attachment and intent to leave were mediated by employees’ perceptions on authenticity.

Research on authenticity has been case studies or narrative ones. This is one of the first studies investigating the role of authentic management empirically.

We demonstrate that a firm’s CSR initiative is a double-edged sword. When employees perceive inauthenticity of their firm’s CSR initiative, the CSR initiative could be detrimental to employees’ attachment to the firm. This study calls attention to the importance of authentic management of CSR.

Informational transparency through social network services become the foundational reality to the contemporary management. To maintain competitive edge in this changing world, every stakeholder of a firm including managers, employees, customers, shareholders, government, and communities should collaborate and help each other live the principle of authenticity.

This chapter addresses one of the most crucial areas for critical thinking: the morality of turbulent markets around the world. All of us are overwhelmed by such turbulent markets. Following Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2004, 2010), we distinguish between nonscalable industries (ordinary professions where income grows linearly, piecemeal or by marginal jumps) and scalable industries (extraordinary risk-prone professions where income grows in a nonlinear fashion, and by exponential jumps and fractures). Nonscalable industries generate tame and predictable markets of goods and services, while scalable industries regularly explode into behemoth virulent markets where rewards are disproportionately large compared to effort, and they are the major causes of turbulent financial markets that rock our world causing ever-widening inequities and inequalities. Part I describes both scalable and nonscalable markets in sufficient detail, including propensity of scalable industries to randomness, and the turbulent markets they create. Part II seeks understanding of moral responsibility of turbulent markets and discusses who should appropriate moral responsibility for turbulent markets and under what conditions. Part III synthesizes various theories of necessary and sufficient conditions for accepting or assigning moral responsibility. We also analyze the necessary and sufficient conditions for attribution of moral responsibility such as rationality, intentionality, autonomy or freedom, causality, accountability, and avoidability of various actors as moral agents or as moral persons. By grouping these conditions, we then derive some useful models for assigning moral responsibility to various entities such as individual executives, corporations, or joint bodies. We discuss the challenges and limitations of such models.

Exercising human resource (HR) leadership has always been difficult in challenging times, but the unique stressors facing organizations throughout the world today call for a new approach to HR leadership and its development. We propose a multifaceted model that redefines the role of strategic HR leadership and for understanding connections between authentic HR leadership and sustainable organizational performance. We argue that to build enduring organizations and motivate employees to provide superior customer service and create sustainable value for their organizations, we need HR leaders who know themselves, who lead with integrity and demand conformance to higher ethical values.

Although we have improved identification of and access to evidence-based interventions for addressing student problem behavior, teacher use of these practices remains low. In this chapter, we examine teachers’ causal attributions for student problem behavior and their implications for use of effective school-based behavioral interventions and supports. Attribution theory and research suggest that causal attributions strongly influence how individuals (e.g., teachers) perceive and respond to the problem behavior of others (e.g., students). Teacher perception regarding problem behavior and appropriate responses to it can be a significant barrier to the adoption and sustained implementation of empirically supported practices. In light of these factors, causal attribution theory and research can be used as a framework for better understanding and even changing teacher beliefs related to acceptance, implementation, and sustained use of effective behavior management practices. In this chapter, we make the case for cultivating an understanding of teachers’ causal attributions of student problem behavior and considering implications of causal attributions in future research. We explore how such research endeavors can potentially positively impact teacher implementation of effective school-based behavioral interventions and supports.

This article emphasized the singularity of political ethics, in general, and of the ethics of public organizations, in particular, in regard to personal ethics. For the first one, the real problem was not the aim to be achieved, but the means to be used, with the available resources and taking into account the real conditions. There are two aspects that have been emphasized over time: the appeal to the ends (in the classical period) and the invocation of individual responsibility (from modernity onward). The question to be elucidated here was whether in the period in which we are living, responsibility is no longer just an individual factor but it also has to become a responsibility of the public organization as a whole.

One organizational phenomenon in which emotions undoubtedly emerge is that of abusive supervision. To date, however, very little research has examined emotional responses associated with perceptions of abuse by supervisors. If subordinates believe that responsibility for abuse does not fall on the abusive supervisors but on the organization itself, they might think the abuse is uncontrollable or unintentional on the part of the supervisors. This attribution shift may result in feelings of sympathy toward the supervisor. In this chapter, we suggest that such responses are likely to occur when subordinates are under no-escape conditions. This circumstance can lead subordinates to forgive their supervisor and retaliate against their organization.

Purpose – Within the growing field of interactional research on children's interactions, the present study explores how social and moral order are established through embodied practices in a multilingual kindergarten classroom. It explores the interactions of immigrant children (with very limited knowledge of Swedish as a second language) and the systematic formats of teachers’ questions employed during children's disputes and tattling (children's reports of peer group conflicts and accusations of untoward behaviour).

Methodology – The study is based on a video-ethnography (50 hours of recordings) in a multilingual kindergarten class for 6-year-olds in Sweden. The analytical approach combines Conversation Analysis (CA) with analysis of multimodally mobilized actions.

Findings – The analyses highlight how interactional meaning-making in conflict situations is accomplished with very limited linguistic resources. Children's tattle telling cornered teachers into the position of being a neutral authoritative agent who acted on their responsibility to resolve the conflict. Teachers reorganized tattle telling into a multiparty interrogation. Different interrogative formats were employed to establish a ‘factually correct’ description of the event. Teachers used open questions (‘what happened?’), ‘why’ and ‘yes/no’ interrogative formats. ‘Why’ questions were lexically designed to implicitly confirm the culpability of the accused child. ‘Yes/no’ questions invited the child's ratification of the teacher's version of the event.

Research implications – It is argued that research on children's social order will gain from understanding that conflict resolution in educational settings is a multilayered social practice that both presents a locus where the institutional order is (re)established and a locus where children's peer group concerns are played out.

Discussions about the dignity of human beings often focus on violations of a person’s dignity that are performed by other persons. However, human beings can also violate their own dignity or at least they can expose it to a violation by others thoughtlessly or intentionally. In his Metaphysics of Morals, Kant states that ‘[o]ne who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him’. Kant presupposes that persons can infringe or even forfeit their own dignity – for instance through servile behaviour – and that violating one’s own dignity is a violation of a duty towards oneself. Starting from the tension between dignity in terms of honour and worth in current debates and in Kant’s own thinking, as well as between understanding dignity as absolute or relational, I develop a comprehensive account of dignity as a duty to oneself. The author argues for a twofold obligation towards oneself to respect one’s own dignity: (i) a duty (as the necessity of an action done out of respect for the moral law) to respect one’s authority as an autonomous person in the Kantian sense; and (ii) beyond the Kantian framework – an obligation arising from the practical necessity that follows from one’s self-understanding as a self-determined, self-expressive individual personality in a socio-cultural context. Finally, the author outlines the consequences of the idea of ‘making oneself a worm’ for the concept of dignity in the realm of rights by discussing why, even though persons can behave like worms, others ought not to step on them.