Searle and Collective Intentionality

A BSTRACT . Several key elements go into Searle's construction of social reality, namely, collective intentionality, constitutive rules, and status functions. But by far the most important and arguably contentious of these is collective intentionality. Searle postulates his notion of collective intentionality as a solution to a conflict between two of his own problematic claims: the irreducibility of collective intentions to singular intentions and what he sees as the requirements of methodological individualism. According to Searle, methodological individualism seems to require that we reduce collective intentionality to individual intentionality; however, this contradicts his claim that collective intentionality is irreducible to individual intentionality plus some mutual beliefs. I will show that at least part of what is really at stake here is Searle's internalism or, as he puts it, his "brain in a vat condition." My strategy will be to examine his internalism and show that Searle's account is far more radical than other internalists in that he extends internalism beyond its usual domain of the mental to incorporate social facts. While there are no knockdown arguments in favor of either internalism or externalism as normally construed in the philosophy of mind, I will show that Searle's account of collective intentionality introduces an element of privacy to social facts that denies us the public access to the conditions on the basis of which we normally take collective facts to obtain.     

Explaining Mrs Thatcher's Success

What are the origins of Mrs Thatcher's Success? Kent Mathews and Peter Stoney argue that the economic revolution of the 1980s represents a genuine structural improvement in the British economy.     

Explaining incubators using firm analogy

Incubators are initiated to accelerate the development of new technology-based firms. Policy actors see them as a tool to initiate or revive innovativeness in regions and universities as a way to commercialize research results. However, even though the intended results of the incubator are good it is not known how the incubator should be managed and organized in order to achieve this end. When faced with a new type of organizations analogies can provide insights gathered from other contexts. To contribute to the further understanding of incubators this paper discuss the implications, in terms of highlighted dimensions and further clarifications needed when using the analogy of a firm. The paper uses empirical findings from six incubators. The discussion shows it is not clear who is the actual customer of the incubator. For example, can the policy actors that provide the funding to the incubator be seen as a customer paying for the service of regional revival and the NTBFs customers when their fees are not in relation to the services they are provided? In the discussion it is suggested that the incubator can have many customers with different value creation processes or no customers depending on the viewpoint taken.     

Explaining the succession of management fads

A continuing feature of personnel management and human resource management has the constantly changing ideas and approaches, many of which have been labelled ‘management fads’ and ‘flavour-of-the-month’ techniques. While the characteristics of popular applications such as team-building and customer care programmes are well known, little attention has so far been paid to explaining the changing preferences in human resource management ideas.

The paper is based on a historical analysis of management ideas (Huczynski, 1993). The author argues that the phenomenon of management fad succession is the result of the conscious and unconscious collusion between managers as consumers of management ideas and consultants as suppliers of such ideas. He concludes that, given the nature of capitalist economies, the process of management fad succession is unlikely to decline and, indeed, may accelerate as companies seek a competitive advantage.     

Explaining productivity differences in North Carolina factories

Using detailed survey data collected from 95 large factories in North Carolina, this article examines the reasons why some factories are more productive than others. Six distinct measures of productivity are used as independent variables in the regression analyses reported. The results suggest five major themes that are shared by the most productive plants: simpler flow of materials through the process, valuing people, attending to quality, investing in hardware, and accounting for the industry's productivity growth. Several factors such as size and unionization are of no apparent importance to an explanation of cross-factory productivity differences.     

Explaining Performance Changes in Newly Privatized Firms

Much debate has been generated about whether privatization tends to enhance firm financial performance. The research presented here seeks to identify the strategic choices that differentiated firms with superior post-privatization performance from those with inferior post-privatization performance. Using agency theory as a theoretical foundation, it is hypothesized that superior post-privatization firm performance will be associated with (1) the government not retaining a significant stock holding, (2) changes in leadership, (3) management stock options being initiated, (4) employee head count being reduced, and (5) the company being restructured financially. The sample draws from 41 privatized firms from six industry classifications and 15 countries. To accommodate comparisons of small subsamples, non-parametric statistical methods are used. Controlling for size, industry and country (economic/regulatory effects), the hypotheses are generally supported except for the one relating to headcount.     

第二站 集体试验

随着8848的崛起,越来越多的人开始关注B2C,并将B2C视为下一个最值得挖掘的“金矿”。然而,8848迅速成功的背后有其特殊的原因,很多人只看到了它成功的表面,却忽视了它背后的力量     

Collective decision making by committee

Implicitly or explicitly, economic decisions always contain elements of compromise. However, the bargaining models of economic theory treat only the two decision maker case with linearly aggregated priorities; i.e. compromise decisions under Pareto optimality and no side payments. Even then the relative importance of the decision makers remains indeterminate. This paper proposes a simplified bargaining model with three new features: (a) it allows multiple participants; (b) it uses optimal voting patterns to combine the policy proposals, rather than the policy priorities, to form those compromise decisions; and (c) it determines the relative power of each participant endogenously. Perhaps more important, the method does not depend on each decision maker knowing the preferences of his colleagues exactly.     

Explaining momentum profits with an epidemic diffusion model

We show that information diffusion is a function of its dissemination and assimilation. Whereas dissemniation is a function of observable factors such as volume and price volatility, assimilation is dependent on unobservable factors such as the usefulness and reliability of information. We find that buying low volume (or low volatility) past losers and shortselling low volume (or low volatility) past winners generates a positive net return across the entire sample period and especially during bear markets. Second, buying high volatility past winners and shortselling high volatility past losers generates a positive net return, especially during bear markets.     

Explaining the democracy deficit in the Arab world

This paper strongly corroborates the widely held claim about the democracy and freedom “deficit” in the Arab world and asks the natural question as to why has the Arab world experienced such a deficit. The estimation results of an extended “modernity” model of democracy (measured by the Polity IV global index) suggest that after controlling for a host of economic, social and historical variables a negative and highly significant Arab dummy effect remains. This suggests, therefore, that the modernization theory does not fully account for the democracy deficit of the Arab world. Controlling for the modernity and other determinants, oil is negatively associated with democracy while the net effect of regional conflicts in the Arab world was negative, suggesting that conflicts in the Arab world promote authoritarianism in contrast with other regions where regional wars have been associated with democratic transitions. Moreover, and very significantly the Arab dummy was no longer significant as a stand alone effect though it remains significant when interacted with regional wars.     

我国农村集体土地所有权的演变

农村集体土地所有权是农民土地财产权利的重要组成部分。农村集体土地所有权的演变,经过了从农民私有权向集体所有权发展两个阶段。农村集体土地所有权的演变与发展,客观反映了我国国家的政治稳定与经济发展之间的关系,科学认识集体土地所有权演变历史,对完善农村土地权利体系,推进我国土地制度改革,具有积极意义。     

Explaining unselfish behavior: Crime and the helpful bystander

An important force combatting crime consists of the help and cooperation that citizens provide to the victims of crime and to the criminal justice system. This paper analyzes such behavior in light of economic theories of altruism. Using survey data on responses to questions about hypothetical situations involving various crimes, the analysis provides support for explanations of helping based on purely altruistic behavior, cooperative behavior based on self-interest, and behavior guided by social norms. Specifically, income, wealth, age, and race are found to be important in explaining helping behavior.     

Explaining the route to owner-occupation: A transatlantic comparison

This paper compares the transition of young adults from renting to first-time homeownership in Britain and the U.S. By adopting a common theoretical and methodological framework, we identify behavioural similarities and differences in transitions in the two countries. We find that the higher ownership rates among British young adults are caused by quicker transitions and our study sheds light on which factors contribute to this difference. We use British and U.S. longitudinal data sets for the analysis and a relative risk Cox hazard model in the empirical work. Although there are behavioural similarities in attaining first-time homeownership with regard to the demographic and housing market variables, there are substantial differences in the two populations’ responses to income and wealth, where we find that young adults’ transitions to homeownership in Britain are more responsive.