Socialisme en Vrije Ondernemingsgewijze Produktie

Summary In his address to the Dutch Christian Employers Association the socialist prime minister Den Uyl analyzed the strained relations between socialism and the system of free enterprise. The authoritarian type of socialism is rejected. Den Uyl avoids an analysis of the economics of liberal socialism; the idea of workers' management seems to suffer from hypertrophy of democracy. It is pointed out that the new scarcity, the demand for workers' participation in management and new legislation will inevitably result in a decline of the freedom of free enterprise.     

Can futures research contribute to tourism policy?

Following a definition of the basic terms employed, the author examines the interrelationships between planning, policymaking and forecasting. The main trends in futures research are described, and some forecasting methods and techniques conventionally used in tourism studies are considered. Criteria are derived by which tourism policy-makers could measure the usefulness of forecasts presented to them.     

Tourism forecasting and the policymaker: Criteria of usefulness

This article is a sequel to one by the author in the September 1982 Issue of Tourism Management in which the question of what futures research could contribute to tourism policy was raised. Here the subject is explored further and a comparison of various forecasting techniques is used to investigate how far forecasting is and could be useful in supporting tourism policies.     

Applying Rawlsian Approaches to Resolve Ethical Issues: Inventory and Setting of a Research Agenda

Insights from social science are increasingly used in the field of applied ethics. However, recent insights have shown that the empirical branch of business ethics lacks thorough theoretical grounding. This article discusses the use of the Rawlsian methods of wide reflective equilibrium and overlapping consensus in the field of applied ethics. Instead of focussing on one single comprehensive ethical doctrine to provide adequate guidance for resolving moral dilemmas, these Rawlsian methods seek to find a balance between considered judgments and intuitions concerning particular cases on the one hand and general principles and theories on the other. In business ethics this approach is promising because it enables decision-making in a pluralist context with different stakeholders who often endorse different or even conflicting cultural and moral frameworks without giving priority to any of them. Moreover, the method is well founded in political theory. A taxonomy of different kinds of applications is developed, and classified according to the purpose, the content, and the type of justification. On the basis of this taxonomy an inventory of 12 recent applications is made. In terms of the purpose and content of the method the applications are rather diverse. Two conceptual obstacles for applying Rawlsian methods are identified, viz. inclusiveness and the communitarian objection that people have to become detached from their personal life. It is found that methodological questions, such as the question how to retrieve the relevant empirical data, are scarcely addressed in the literature. To advance the use of empirical approaches in general, and that of Rawlsian approaches in particular, it is important not only to use empirical data but to use methodological insights from social sciences in order to further advance the field of empirical ethics. It is recommended that stakeholders be given a more active role in the assessment and justification of these methods.