Perceptions of Workplace Spirituality among Professionals and Executives

As a new century begins, it is becoming increasingly clear that workers are experiencing a fundamental change of business world values, a change of paradigms as radical as the Age of Information. Corporate America and its employees are responding to a call for a deeper sense of purpose, a more significant sense of faith, and a renewed commitment to spirituality. This paper reports research that focuses on the relationship among the 3 key stakeholders in this new emphasis on spirituality: individual, organization, and work unit. Significant correlations were found to exist among 3 factors of spirituality and among 11 variables that were submeasures of the factors.     

The ‘Neighbourhood Effect’: A multidisciplinary assessment of the case for farmer co-ordination in agri-environmental programmes

In this paper we present a multi-disciplinary analysis of the potential impacts of undertaking similar environmental actions on multiple farms in a small geographic area, using organic farming as a proxy for a co-ordinated approach. Recent papers have called for more co-ordinated efforts between farmers in terms of their environmental actions, but there has been limited applied research demonstrating the environmental benefits or the economic and social implications to farmers of this approach. Comparative analysis of biodiversity, soil and water, and farm profitability were undertaken in England on 32 matched farms in areas of low and high organic farming concentration; qualitative interviews were also conducted with 48 farmers living in two of the eight areas. Findings demonstrate higher overall levels of biodiversity on organic farms (particularly in “hotspot” areas) but this was not universal across the species groups investigated. Higher water infiltration rates were found in organic grasslands, which could prove to be a useful measure to combat flooding. In terms of the technical efficiency of producing these environmental gains, conventional and organic farms in hotspot areas demonstrated equivalent efficiency from a financial perspective. Socio-cultural research identified the different amounts of trust farmers have in their neighbours, based in part on their performance as ‘good farmers’. We discuss the neighbourhood effect with a multi-disciplinary approach and conclude that encouraging local farmer co-ordination can have clear environmental benefits without high economic cost, but must be undertaken with caution - specifically regarding the trade-offs between benefits, local geophysical and social characteristics, and assumptions made about inter-farmer trust.     

Solvency II: stability problems with the SCR aggregation formula

One of the central issues in the Solvency II process will be an appropriate calculation of the Solvency Capital Requirement (SCR). This is the economic capital that an insurance company must hold in order to guarantee a one-year ruin probability of at most 0.5%. In the so-called standard formula, the overall SCR is calculated from individual SCRs in a particular way that imitates the calculation of the standard deviation for a sum of normally distributed risks (SCR aggregation formula). However, in order to cope with skewness in the individual risk distributions, this formula must be calibrated accordingly in order to maintain the prescribed level of confidence. In this paper, we want to show that the methods proposed and discussed thus far still show stability problems within the general setup.     

Ein Reservierungsverfahren für die Rechtsschutzversicherung nach Art der Lebensversicherung

In this paper we introduce a new approach to the calculation of claims reserves (known and IBNR cases) which is particularly adapted to the business model of legal expense insurance. An essential aspect here is the split into two model components: case numbers and average claim costs. In contrast to other reserving methods for case numbers and claims cash flows which are frequently used in practice without checking the validity for application we introduce a model in which the time until case settlement is described by a lifetime distribution according to the principles of life insurance. The split of model components also allows for a simple implementation of cost inflation effects which is required by German law. Finally, the approach proposed here can readily be transferred to the calculation of IBNR reserves.     

The Third Eye: Exploring Guanxi and Relational Morality in the Workplace

We examine the use of Confucian relational morality as an alternative reference point to that of modernist morality in judging workplace ethical conduct. A semi-structured interview based study involving 46 ethnic Chinese managers and 30 non-Chinese expatriate managers in Singapore, provided evidence of the use of traditional guanxi-linked morality as a moral resource by some of the former group in judging workplace ethical dilemmas. While such morality played only a minor role in moral reasoning, and was largely overshadowed by modernist morality, the research nonetheless demonstrates that moral reasoning reflects wider cultural heritage, and is not merely a function of corporate culture and individual moral development.     

Can the circle be squared? An enquiry into shale gas mining in South Africa's Karoo

The prospect of ‘fracking’ for shale gas in South Africa's Karoo has generated heated exchanges in public forums and in the media. This article seeks to understand why common ground in the debate has proved to be so elusive. The article divides the parties to the impasse into three camps and examines the ethical positions which seem to inform each faction's standpoint. The article finds that the tensions between the main protagonists’ positions are due to two related ethical ‘faultlines’. The first revolves around the inherent incompatibility of consequentialism with moral absolutism. The second relates to tensions between nature as an instrumental good, and an ethic that treats nature as an intrinsic good. The discussion considers the merits of cost–benefit analysis and whether, at the very least, exploration for shale gas should be permitted. The article concludes by weighing up the preconditions for a rapprochement being reached between the contending factions.     

Absolute Traffic: Infrastructural Aptitude in Urban Indonesia

This article draws attention to the emergent modes of urban sociality and circumscribed mobility that define the lives of traffic‐stricken residents in the megacity of Jakarta, Indonesia. I argue that Jakarta traffic has exceeded the scale and discourse of a technopolitical problem of failed infrastructure; rather, the systemic and rhizomic nature of traffic provides the temporal infrastructure that governs the flow of living and leisure, and the patterning of individual desires and struggles in urban Indonesia. I use the term ‘absolute traffic' to convey the limit horizon of gridlock as a set of exhausting physical and psychic states that urban residents survive daily. Despite such overwhelming challenges to mobility, particularly for the city's underprivileged populations, I argue for an agentive perspective of absolute traffic in which forms of play, negotiation and disruption form important moments for the public display of infrastructural aptitude. Strategies for surviving and engaging with absolute traffic emerge in ephemeral sites of finely attuned traffic subjectivity––in the sociality of strangers, the political demonstrations of activists, the growing citizen journalism for traffic reports on radio shows and social media sites, and finally, in the artistic sensibility of artists captivated by the vernacular forms of urban chaos.     

People-centred environmental management and municipal commonage in the Nama Karoo

This paper examines the problem of managing municipal commonage land in the Nama Karoo, which is increasingly being used by black or coloured emergent farmers. Many of these live in the towns and have very little agricultural experience or knowledge, and some are unemployed farmworkers. The paper presents findings from a survey of emergent farmers who use municipal commonage in Philippolis in the southern Free State. It uses the sustainable livelihoods approach to suggest that environmental knowledge is a key asset for small farmers, and that suitable approaches to agricultural extension need to be adopted to promote ecological knowledge. It suggests that ecological knowledge needs to play a more prominent role in people-centred, participatory developmental approaches so as to strengthen municipal commonage management and prevent the rapid desertification of commonage land.