Anyone and Everyone, Potentially: For a Political Philosophy for All Humans, Without Limits

A complex normative political theory for liberalism; an ethnography of a life; reflections on the ontological nature of human being as consciousness, body and being in the world; a defence of the ideology of science as a norm of reason; a critique of identity politics, an opposition to all fundamentalisms; an account of the importance of manners for the civilising process and a reflexive account of being Jewish these are the concerns of this book. Clearly, it ranges far and wide, something that hardly makes it an easy book to review. I shall begin this review with an overview of the themes of the book before entering into a more detailed discussion

Dna and the politics of truth in socially organized life

We apply a representation of the double helix to explain how truth is managed in the social organization of life. One chain, representing context, is made up of the three materialities through which we move - discourses, time and space. The other chain, representing agency, comprises identity, distinct capitals and practices. The chains are fused by horizontal rods, which represent capillaries of power relating the elemental chains by binding, winding and tangling them together in various ways. The model offers an innovative tool for theorization of socially organized truth relations. © The Author(s) 2010

SME resource acquisition in transition economies: Power dependence and induced bribery

© Copyright V.K. Aggarwal 2017 and published under exclusive license to Cambridge University Press. Researchers have extensively studied how large firms and SMEs use business and political ties to obtain tangible and intangible resources in transition economies. However, how SMEs establish these ties in the context of power-imbalanced dependence by using unethical and illegal strategic practice such as bribery remains underexplored. Furthermore, how SMEs deploy strategies to mitigate such risky actions in the process of resource acquisition is also given limited attention in the literature. Lack of exploration of these issues leaves significant gaps in our understanding of how SMEs are able to initiate and operate their ties for survival and growth despite enormous institutional constraints. We analyze the negative and positive effects of power dependence on business resource acquisition via regression analysis using survey data drawn from 232 Chinese SMEs. The findings indicate that power-imbalanced dependence among SMEs is associated with their use of bribery to establish political ties with officials for access to resources. The moderating effect of power-mutual dependence on this relationship is also examined. Theoretical significance and managerial implications of these findings for SMEs in transition economies are discussed