A Theological Context of Work from the Catholic Social Encyclical Tradition

This article draws upon 100 years of writings which are referred to as the Catholic Social Tradition (CST). Using this tradition as a guide, the nature of work is explored along with the principles and virtues which vitalize the deepest dimension of work — how it affects the dignity of the human person. It develops five operational ethical principles which can be applied to questions of workplace ethics. Organizational policies and programs that seem consistent with CST are also discussed. Michael Naughton is Assistant Professor of Management and Theology at the University of St. Thomas (MN). Dr. Naughton\u27s major research interest involves examining the influence and application of religious values on employees and the workplace environment. Gene R. Laczniak is Professor of Business in the Department of Marketing at Marquette University. His primary research interests focus on the social influence of business activities on society as well as marketing strategy

Thai conceptualizations of forgiveness within a work context : comparison with Western models

Forgiveness research has focused almost exclusively on individualistic Western culture despite acknowledgement of the importance of cultural factors. Conflict at work is common yet studies of forgiveness in work contexts are rare, as are qualitative studies. Addressing these short-comings, this study examines the forgiveness process as experienced by Thai nurses in a hospital within a collectivist culture heavily influenced by Buddhism. Thirty nurses were interviewed about a situation at work where the need for forgiveness arose. Qualitative methods were used to identify participants' cognitions, emotions, and behaviors in relation to the offensive event. Definitions of forgiveness were also elicited. Four continuous stages of the forgiveness process emerged: an experiencing stage, re-attribution stage, forgiveness stage, and behavioral stage. There were similarities with Western individualistic models but also some important differences related to Buddhism and Thai culture. Five dimensions of forgiveness emerged from the Thai definitions: overcoming negative approaches towards the offender, abandonment of negative judgment, fostering of positive approaches and loving-kindness towards the offender, awareness of the benefits of forgiveness, and forgiveness as incorporated within Buddhist beliefs. The results highlight the need to consider cultural influences when examining concepts like forgiveness

Reframing the measurement of women’s work in the sub-Saharan African context

This research note considers how we measure women’s work in the sub-Saharan African (SSA) context. Drawing on qualitative work conducted in Burundi, the note examines how existing measures of women’s work do not accurately capture the intensity and type of work women in SSA undertake. Transcripts from qualitative interviews suggest that women think of work to meet their roles and responsibilities within the household. The women in the interviews do not frame work as a career or a primary activity in a time-use allocation. As a result, researchers need to nest questions regarding women’s work within surveys that ask about roles and responsibilities within the household, and about how women meet these responsibilities with a financial component.Published versionAccepted manuscrip

Making Work Pay: U.S. American models for a German context?

This paper examines efforts to make work pay, concentrating on U.S. American and German policies and experiments. We are specifically interested in fleshing out the relevance of U.S. American models for a German context as well as the special characteristics of the German situation which do not allow a mere „copying“ of the models. There is no established negative income tax in Germany, but current experiments are being conducted, in order to assess how successful incentives could be in lowering the high levels of welfare caseloads and easing the transition from welfare to work. High unemployment rates and guaranteed social assistance (and unemployment insurance) have caused a German version of the poverty trap, where few incentives exist for people to find work. This paper examines the normative, political and economic situation of each country with specific experiments and studies of tax credits. The U.S. American early negative income tax (NIT) experiments in the 1970s, the present day Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and two recent experiments to make work pay are discussed. The historical, political and economic context of Germany is evaluated for a possible earned income tax credit, and fledgling tax credit experiments that are currently being conducted in Germany are discussed. A negative income tax is defined in this paper as a cash payment to individuals and families from respective governments that acts to subsidize personal income up to a predetermined level. There is a minimum benefit level, a marginal tax rate and a break-even point. The higher the benefit level and the break-even point, the more a negative income tax will cost the government (Zimmerman 1995). Before describing specific tax programs, we first outline the country's welfare state developments with respect to financial incentives for work. The following is a closer consideration of the U.S.-American and German public assistance and tax systems. The U.S. and Germany have very different welfare regimes and negative income taxes should inevitably fit into the respective welfare structures in different ways, fulfilling different goals.

Target-Side Context for Discriminative Models in Statistical Machine Translation

Discriminative translation models utilizing source context have been shown to help statistical machine translation performance. We propose a novel extension of this work using target context information. Surprisingly, we show that this model can be efficiently integrated directly in the decoding process. Our approach scales to large training data sizes and results in consistent improvements in translation quality on four language pairs. We also provide an analysis comparing the strengths of the baseline source-context model with our extended source-context and target-context model and we show that our extension allows us to better capture morphological coherence. Our work is freely available as part of Moses.Comment: Accepted as a long paper for ACL 201

INTERCULTURAL WORK TEAMS, A CHALLENGE IN THE NEW CONTEXT OF ROMANIA’S EUROPEAN INTEGRATION

In the context of globalization, organizations proceed to adapt to exploit new opportunities by creating intercultural work teams (IWT). Consequently, their management acquires new dimensions. To be successful, international companies should adapt to cultural norms of the host country, without neglecting their own organizational cultural values that have ensured their success. IWT are the main instrument used currently to achieve this fit. IWT are the basic unit for performance in any global organization. We analyze the situation of IWT in Siemens VDO Romania and Alcatel-Lucent Romania, as promoters of teamwork and intercultural knowledge transfer inside them.work teams, intercultural, globalization, management

Realising context-sensitive mobile messaging

Mobile technologies aim to assist people as they move from place to place going about their daily work and social routines. Established and very popular mobile technologies include short-text messages and multimedia messages with newer growing technologies including Bluetooth mobile data transfer protocols and mobile web access.Here we present new work which combines all of the above technologies to fulfil some of the predictions for future context aware messaging. We present a context sensitive mobile messaging system which derives context in the form of physical locations through location sensing and the co-location of people through Bluetooth familiarity

Avant-garde Welfare Capitalism: Corporate Welfare Work and Enlightened Capitalism in Great Britain, the US, Germany and France (1880-1930)

This research paper deals with welfare work in four industrializing countries, Great Britain, the USA, Germany and France, in the half century of flowering enlightened paternalistic capitalism between 1880 and 1930. Welfare work in this context is defined as, sometimes overly, paternalistic labour policy of enlightened entrepreneurs often encompassing workman’s housing programs, pensions, saving programs, educational programs, sports facilities, medical services, worker participation, generous remuneration forms, and shorter working times. The question is raised if nowadays flex-capitalism in the context of shrinking collective welfare states can learn lessons from past experience with welfare work. By redefining paternalistic welfare work in modernistic terms as well as by reweighting company, personal and state responsibilities a new future-proof trade-off as regards welfare work might be realised