Corporate Social (Ir)Responsibility in Media and Communication Industries

Microsoft is the most socially responsible company in the world, followed by Google on rank 2 and The Walt Disney Company on rank 3 – at least according to the perceptions of 47,000 people from 15 countries that participated in a survey conducted by the consultancy firm Reputation Institute. In this paper I take a critical look at Corporate Social Responsibility in media and communication industries. Within the debate on CSR media are often only discussed in regard to their role of raising awareness and enabling public debate about corporate social responsibility. What is missing are theoretical and empirical studies about the corporate social (ir)responsibility of media and communication companies themselves. This paper contributes to overcoming this blind spot. First I systematically describe four different ways of relating profit goals and social goals of media and communication companies. I argue for a dialectical perspective that considers how profit interests and social responsibilities mutually shape each other. Such a perspective can draw on a critical political economy of media and communication. Based on this approach I take a closer look at Microsoft, Google and The Walt Disney Company and show that their actual practices do not correspond to their reputation. This analysis points at flaws in the concept CSR. I argue that despite these limitations CSR still contains a rational element that can however only be realised by going beyond CSR. I therefore suggest a new concept that turns CSR off its head and places it upon its feet

Philosophical Puzzles Evade Empirical Evidence: Some Thoughts and Clarifications Regarding the Relation Between Brain Sciences and Philosophy of Mind

This chapter analyzes the relation between brain sciences and philosophy of mind, in order to clarify in what ways philosophy can contribute to neuroscience and neuroscience can contribute to philosophy. Especially since the 1980s and the emergence of “neurophilosophy”, more and more philosophers have been bringing home morals from neuroscience to settle philosophical issues. I mention examples from the problem of consciousness, philosophy of perception and the problem of free will, and I argue that such attempts are not successful in trying to settle questions like whether psychology can be reduced to neuroscience, whether we see the external world directly in perception, or whether we have free will. The failure results from an ability of the philosophical questions to evade the data. What makes these questions persisting philosophical questions is precisely that there is no way to settle them through empirical evidence, as they are conceptual questions and their solution lies in conceptual analysis

Structural Prediction of Protein–Protein Interactions by Docking: Application to Biomedical Problems

A huge amount of genetic information is available thanks to the recent advances in sequencing technologies and the larger computational capabilities, but the interpretation of such genetic data at phenotypic level remains elusive. One of the reasons is that proteins are not acting alone, but are specifically interacting with other proteins and biomolecules, forming intricate interaction networks that are essential for the majority of cell processes and pathological conditions. Thus, characterizing such interaction networks is an important step in understanding how information flows from gene to phenotype. Indeed, structural characterization of protein–protein interactions at atomic resolution has many applications in biomedicine, from diagnosis and vaccine design, to drug discovery. However, despite the advances of experimental structural determination, the number of interactions for which there is available structural data is still very small. In this context, a complementary approach is computational modeling of protein interactions by docking, which is usually composed of two major phases: (i) sampling of the possible binding modes between the interacting molecules and (ii) scoring for the identification of the correct orientations. In addition, prediction of interface and hot-spot residues is very useful in order to guide and interpret mutagenesis experiments, as well as to understand functional and mechanistic aspects of the interaction. Computational docking is already being applied to specific biomedical problems within the context of personalized medicine, for instance, helping to interpret pathological mutations involved in protein–protein interactions, or providing modeled structural data for drug discovery targeting protein–protein interactions.Spanish Ministry of Economy grant number BIO2016-79960-R; D.B.B. is supported by a predoctoral fellowship from CONACyT; M.R. is supported by an FPI fellowship from the Severo Ochoa program. We are grateful to the Joint BSC-CRG-IRB Programme in Computational Biology.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Shifting Agendas and Competing Interests within Public Health, Science and Technology, and Medicine in Africa

In lieu of the abstract, here is the review\u27s first paragraph: Until recent times, the conventional history of public health, of science and technology, and of medicine has been presented in the West as a tale of out-migration from the advanced, developed world (principally Europe and the United States) to the less developed (or underdeveloped) world.1 By this account, Africa emerges as a peculiar mix of charity case, experimental laboratory, and lucrative market. The four works considered here mark a significant turn in this curiously one-side and resilient story line. Each text begins from the premise—some more forcefully then others—that Africans have always been, and remain today, active agents in the creation, development, innovation, and adaptation of knowledge and practices across public health, science and technology, and medicine

Transnational Private Regulatory Governance: Ambiguities of Public Authority and Private Power

The continuing proliferation of transnational private regulatory governance challenges conceptions of legal authority, legitimacy and public regulation of economic activity. The transnational law merchant or, lex mercatoria, is a case in point in this context, as it represents a laboratory for the exploration of “private” contractual governance in a context, in which the assertion of public or private authority has itself become contentious. The ambiguity surrounding many forms of today’s contractual governance in the transnational arena echoes that of the far-reaching transformation of public regulatory governance, which has been characteristic of Western welfare states over the last few decades. What is particularly remarkable, however, is the way in which the depictions of “private instruments” and “public interests” in the post-welfare state regulatory environment have given rise to a rise in importance of social norms, self-regulation and a general anti-state affect in the assessment of judicial enforcement or administration of contractual arrangements. The paper suggests the need to short-circuit and to read in parallel the justifications offered for a contractual governance model, which prioritizes and seeks to insulate “private” arrangements from their embeddedness in regulated market contexts, on both the national and transnational level

Beyond Desartes and Newton: Recovering life and humanity

Attempts to ‘naturalize’ phenomenology challenge both traditional phenomenology and traditional approaches to cognitive science. They challenge Edmund Husserl’s rejection of naturalism and his attempt to establish phenomenology as a foundational transcendental discipline, and they challenge efforts to explain cognition through mainstream science. While appearing to be a retreat from the bold claims made for phenomenology, it is really its triumph. Naturalized phenomenology is spearheading a successful challenge to the heritage of Cartesian dualism. This converges with the reaction against Cartesian thought within science itself. Descartes divided the universe between res cogitans, thinking substances, and res extensa, the mechanical world. The latter won with Newton and we have, in most of objective science since, literally lost our mind, hence our humanity. Despite Darwin, biologists remain children of Newton, and dream of a grand theory that is epistemologically complete and would allow lawful entailment of the evolution of the biosphere. This dream is no longer tenable. We now have to recognize that science and scientists are within and part of the world we are striving to comprehend, as proponents of endophysics have argued, and that physics, biology and mathematics have to be reconceived accordingly. Interpreting quantum mechanics from this perspective is shown to both illuminate conscious experience and reveal new paths for its further development. In biology we must now justify the use of the word “function”. As we shall see, we cannot prestate the ever new biological functions that arise and constitute the very phase space of evolution. Hence, we cannot mathematize the detailed becoming of the biosphere, nor write differential equations for functional variables we do not know ahead of time, nor integrate those equations, so no laws “entail” evolution. The dream of a grand theory fails. In place of entailing laws, a post-entailing law explanatory framework is proposed in which Actuals arise in evolution that constitute new boundary conditions that are enabling constraints that create new, typically unprestatable, Adjacent Possible opportunities for further evolution, in which new Actuals arise, in a persistent becoming. Evolution flows into a typically unprestatable succession of Adjacent Possibles. Given the concept of function, the concept of functional closure of an organism making a living in its world, becomes central. Implications for patterns in evolution include historical reconstruction, and statistical laws such as the distribution of extinction events, or species per genus, and the use of formal cause, not efficient cause, laws

Exploring rail futures using scenarios: experience and potential

In 1995 the author of this paper undertook a scenario exercise for British Rail to identify priorities for rail science and technology developments under the new privatised regime. Four marketbased 2010 scenarios were developed for UK rail transport: 1) cost driven; 2) quality driven, 3)technology driven and 4) environmentally driven. These helped to identify areas of strategic R&D that were needed to improve rail’s competitiveness. It is now over a decade since this scenario exercise took place. This paper, updating an earlier review (Potter and Roy, 2000), revisits the 1995 scenarios and compares them to what actual market strategies emerged within the privatised railway industry. It explores whether the four scenarios did succeed in capturing the range of market responses that emerged from rail privatisation and what lessons this contains for the use of scenarios transport research