Entrepreneurship: The Blind Men and the Elephant
In this series of 3 chapters, we will present entrepreneurship through its three main Schools: Economic, Behavioral, and Managerial. The parable ‘The blind men and the elephant’1 is used throughout the chapters – we adapted some parts for the didactic purpose. In a city in India, there were six wise men, all blind. Because they […]
Ethics and Technology – Part 1
There is a common sense of what technology is, and although it is not wrong in its entirety, it does not reflect the depth and complexity that encompass its definitions – which by the way are far from reaching consensus. The first associations with technology refer to “last generation” devices, cars and modern buildings, among […]
Phenomenology and ethics within organizations
It is increasingly perceived the relevance of active subjects, problem solvers, especially when talking about ethical issues within organizations. A person, in order to act ethically and give answers to ethical problems, needs to highlight the reality at every moment. In Husserl’s phenomenology, the process of arriving at the reality’s evidence involves making epochs, that […]
Survey Experiment: a promising methodological approach
The survey experiment is a very promising methodological approach in scientific research. In this article, which will probably be divided into two parts, I want to summarize in a very objective way what this methodological approach is and why it is so important in the field of experiments. In a second step, I intend to […]
News of speculation about what the organization is and should be, administratively speaking
Faced with the greater intention of explaining what management is, me and my study partner, Professor Paulo Grave, have been led, due to a purposeful and imperative discursive circularity in the construction of an answer-argument, to the elaboration of a speech about a certain complex object – the organization – that corresponds to the convenience […]
The Queen’s Gambit and anti-drug policies
The word “gambetto” has been used in Italian dictionaries since the 13th century, as a synonym for “tripping up someone”. When migrating to English, it became “gambit” and had the meaning extended to “trickery to beat the opponent”. Its most popular use occurs in the expression “queen’s gambit”, which designates a chess move in which, […]
Virtues and utilitarianism: an impossible dialogue?
At first sight, utilitarianism and virtue ethics are absolutely incompatible currents of thought: utilitarianism calls for a principle of maximization, to an instrumental calculation of consequences as a criterion for the classification of moral acts, while virtue ethics requires careful analysis of the situation and the context in which the agent finds himself to determine […]
The ethics of Nudges in the time of coronavirus
In the introduction of the book “Nudge: improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness”, Richard Thaler and Carl Sunstein tell the story of Carolyn, a director who runs experiments in school cafeterias whether the way the food is displayed influence children in healthier choices. At the launch of the book in 2008, it was a […]
Free will
Today’s idea is a reflection on free will and good action. Although it does not talk about morality, it is implied in the good action provided by free will, will and reason. Free will is a recurring theme both in philosophy and in people’s daily lives. Its concept refers to the freedom of action. Although […]
The virtue ethics approach in Administration
As stated by the professor of Organizational Theory at the IESE Business School (University of Navarra, Spain), Juan Antonio Pérez López (1912-1996), “science can have no other object than to help human beings make the right decisions”. Such decisions can have a technical or technological support, whose criterion is the adequacy of the means / […]