Consideration of selflessness and self-interest in outsourcing decisions

Purpose – The paper aims to discuss the need to balance selflessness and self-interest issues in outsourcing decisions. This discussion is timely given the tensions that currently exist between those who want off-shore outsourcing to continue as a means for increasing international trade, and those who only want to conduct business on-shore.

Design/methodology/approach – A conceptual approach has been taken in this paper in order to highlight key considerations for ethical decision-making with respect to off-shore outsourcing.

Findings – Considerations of selflessness and self-interest are embedded in outsourcing decisions. It is recommended that a balance between making profits and fulfilling social responsibilities is required, ideally, at each stage of decision-making. Hence, managers should think critically about the reasons behind off-shore outsourcing decisions, the process of arriving at decisions, and the impact of their decisions on stakeholders.

Research limitations/implications – This is a conceptual paper and further empirical data to validate the stages of decision-making framework are required.

Practical implications – Failure to take into account the selflessness and self-interest outcomes of off-shore outsourcing could potentially off-set strategic gains by leading to negative media publicity for a company.

Social implications – Ethical considerations as part of outsourcing decisions should result in a transparent, fair and more humane working environment for both the host and the home country representatives involved in the process.

Originality/value – This paper presents an original framework of selflessness and self-interest considerations when making off-shore outsourcing decisions. Both Eastern and Western business perspectives have been incorporated as part of the decision-making framework.

Tradition as a topic of philosophic interest in Britain in the 1940s

Between 1945 and 1948, Michael Polanyi, Michael Oakeshott, and Karl Popper respectively discussed the nature of tradition, and the part that traditions play in free societies. This article analyzes these thinkers’ ideas of tradition. Polanyi depicted tradition as knowledge that is embodied in skilled practice, and tradition for Oakeshott consists in activities that are suffused with practical knowledge and technique. Popper emphasized rational criticizability, whereas Polanyi and Oakeshott emphasized the tacit dimension of traditions.

Understanding equity as an asset to national interest: developing a social contract analysis of policy

Alongside the influence of market-based reforms in education policy has been the growth of policy that has largely been overlooked – those that outline social contracts. This paper draws on policies that connect with equity as a way of illustrating this social contract turn in policy and develops a conceptualisation of social contracts as they apply to education policy. The argument provides three principles that underpin social contracts, including informed consent, negotiation and accountability. This paper applies these principles to three levels of social contract. At the first level are broad social contracts, which are associated with debates about the kinds of things that states should expect from its citizens, and the things that citizens could expect from governments and the state. The second level of social contract is an institutional or field-based social contract, which spells out the obligations and connections between a specific field and other fields. This level names a kind of social contract that is often exemplified in policies or statements by specific institutions. The third level of social contract deals with contract-like mechanisms embedded in fields that make tangible the obligations and expectations of citizens in fulfilling the expectations of fields.

The Nubians of Kenya and the emancipatory potential of collective recognition

The Nubians in Kenya, a community who have in the past been considered stateless, have recently begun to emerge from their marginal status in the country. Over the past two years, as individuals Nubians have had improved access to ID cards and as a group they received a code in the 2009 census. However these political gains are only part of a greater struggle on the part of the community to be fully recognized as a tribe of Kenya. Identity politics and claims for recognition dominate social politics in many African countries, however the normative underpinnings of these complex and often challenging claims are yet to be fully explored in the African context. Drawing on seven months of qualitative fieldwork, this article explores the emancipatory potential of collective recognition. By articulating a positive vision of the moral and political value of ethnic community, the article makes a critical contribution to theory of the politics of recognition in the African context.

Kierkegaard's mirrors: Interest, self, and moral vision

What is it to see the world, other people, and imagined situations not just as morally compelling, but as making personal demands of us? What is it to experience stories as speaking to us individually and directly? Kierkegaard's Mirrors explores Kierkegaard's unique and challenging answers to these questions. Beginning with the structural account of consciousness offered in Johannes Climacus, this book develops a new phenomenological interpretation of what Kierkegaard calls 'interest': a self-reflexive mode of thought, vision and imagination that plays a central role in moral experience. Tracing this concept across Kierkegaard's work takes us through topics such as consciousness, the ontology of selfhood, ethical imagination, admiration and imitation, seeing the other, metaphors of self-recognition and mirroring, our need for transcendent meaning, and the relationship between scholarship and subjective knowledge. 'Interest' equips us with a new understanding of Kierkegaard's highly original normative, teleological account of moral vision.

‘Interest’ in Kierkegaard’s structure of consciousness

Kierkegaard’s identification of “consciousness” with “interest” (interesse) in his unfinished work Johannes Climacus adds a distinctive dimension to his phenomenology of subjectivity. Commentators, however, have largely identified interesse with lidenskab (“passion”), a conflation I argue to be mistaken, or have otherwise failed to note the structural implications of interesse for Kierkegaard’s account of cognition. I draw out these implications and argue that the Climacan account of interest as the experience of finding ourselves in-between ideality and reality implies, in the context of Kierkegaard’s trichotomous ontology of consciousness, a form of non-thetic self-referentiality built into cognition itself. This self-referentiality also has the intriguing implication of making consciousness itself inherently teleological.

Conflict of interest in Victorian rural and regional legal practice

This research report was based on 163 survey responses and 29 interviews with Victorian rural and regional legal practitioners, as well as 8 human service organisation representatives. Peak law profession organisations including the Legal Services Board, Law Institute of Victoria, the Federation of Community Legal Centres and Victoria Legal Aid were also interviewed for the research. The principal objective of the research was to examine how conflict of interested is manifested in rural and regional settings and how effectively the current conflict of interest rules are applied within those settings. The report includes a number of recommendations for better responding to issues of conflict of interest within a rural and regional context.