Corporate Governance for Sustainability

The current model of corporate governance needs reform. There is mounting evidence that the practices of shareholder primacy drive company directors and executives to adopt the same short time horizon as financial markets. Pressure to meet the demands of the financial markets drives stock buybacks, excessive dividends and a failure to invest in productive capabilities. The result is a ‘tragedy of the horizon’, with corporations and their shareholders failing to consider environmental, social or even their own, long-term, economic sustainability. With less than a decade left to address the threat of climate change, and with consensus emerging that businesses need to be held accountable for their contribution, it is time to act and reform corporate governance in the EU. The statement puts forward specific recommendations to clarify the obligations of company boards and directors and make corporate governance practice significantly more sustainable and focused on the long term

Culture and Cognition: The Boundaries of Literary and Scientific Inquiry

This groundbreaking book challenges the disciplinary boundaries that have traditionally separated scientific inquiry from literary inquiry. It explores scientific knowledge in three subject areas—the natural history of aging, literary narrative, and psychoanalysis. In the authors' view, the different perspectives on cognition afforded by Anglo-American cognitive science, Greimassian semiotics, and Lacanian psychoanalysis help us to redefine our very notion of culture. Part I historically situates the concepts of meaning and truth in twentieth-century semiotic theory and cognitive science. Part II contrasts the modes of Freudian case history to the general instance of Einstein's relativity theory and then sets forth a rhetoric of narrative based on the discourse of the aged. Part III examines in the context of literary studies an interdisciplinary concept of cultural cognition. Culture and Cognition will be essential reading for literary theorists, historians and philosophers of science; semioticians; and scholars and students of cultural studies, the sociology of literature, and science and literature