The moral muteness of managers: an Anglo-American phenomenon? German and British managers and their moral reasoning about environmental sustainability in business

Several studies in the Anglo-American context have indicated that managers present themselves as morally neutral employees who act only in the best interest of the company by employing objective skills. The reluctance of managers to use moral arguments in business is further accentuated in the now common argument presented as a neutral fact that the company must always prioritise shareholder value. These and other commercial aims are seen as an objective reality in business, whilst questions about sustainability, environmental problems or fair trade are seen as emotional or moral ones; a phenomenon described as ‘moral muteness’. This research explores whether this ‘moral muteness’ is an Anglo-American phenomenon and/or whether managers in other countries - in this case Germany - might express themselves in a different way. The focus is on moral arguments around environmental sustainability and the implications of this study for cross-cultural management. This article is based on a qualitative, comparative cross-cultural study of British and German managers in the Food Retail and Energy Sectors. In line with the studies mentioned above, British managers placed a strong emphasis on their moral neutrality. In contrast, German managers tended to use moral arguments when discussing corporate greening, often giving such arguments more weight than financial arguments. Overall, the study suggests that the ‘moral muteness’ of managers is a British phenomenon and quite distinct from the German approach. The article ends in a short exploration of how this understanding can help managers better manage people, organisations and change across cultures

What limits supercurrents in high temperature superconductors? A microscopic model of cuprate grain boundaries

The interface properties of high-temperature cuprate superconductors have been of interest for many years, and play an essential role in Josephson junctions, superconducting cables, and microwave electronics. In particular, the maximum critical current achievable in high-Tc wires and tapes is well known to be limited by the presence of grain boundaries, regions of mismatch between crystallites with misoriented crystalline axes. In studies of single, artificially fabricated grain boundaries the striking observation has been made that the critical current Jc of a grain boundary junction depends exponentially on the misorientation angle. Until now microscopic understanding of this apparently universal behavior has been lacking. We present here the results of a microscopic evaluation based on a construction of fully 3D YBCO grain boundaries by molecular dynamics. With these structures, we calculate an effective tight-binding Hamiltonian for the d-wave superconductor with a grain boundary. The critical current is then shown to follow an exponential suppression with grain boundary angle. We identify the buildup of charge inhomogeneities as the dominant mechanism for the suppression of the supercurrent.Comment: 28 pages, 12 figure

The Family Campylobacteraceae

The Campylobacteraceae is the largest and most diverse family in the phylogenetically distinct Epsilonproteobacteria, presently comprising the genera Campylobacter (30 taxa), Arcobacter (17 taxa), and Sulfurospirillum (7 taxa). Individual species may be able to grow in microaerobic, anaerobic, and/or aerobic conditions, in temperatures from 25°C to 42°C; free-living, commensal, or pathogenic; motile or aflagellate; and able to colonize the oral cavity, intestine, stomach, or reproductive tracts of humans, large production animals (such as sheep, cattle, and deer), birds, and reptiles. Some species are known to be among the most frequent causes of human gastroenteritis, others are significant threats to bovine and ovine fertility, and many pose an as-yet unknown, or no, role in human or animal diseases. The taxonomy of the Campylobacteraceae has evolved extensively since its beginnings in 1963. This chapter outlines key events in the family's taxonomic history; reviews general phenotypic traits of each genus, including their isolation; outlines the clinical (including pathogenicity studies and antimicrobial resistance traits) and/or ecological significance of constituent species; and describes current approaches and challenges for species identification and epidemiological subtyping