The status of universalism has been much debated by feminists at the end of the twentieth century. Poststructuralist feminism is readily positioned in these debates as antagonistic to normative universalism. It is criticized as such: how is injustice to be judged and condemned if contestation and the openness of ungrounded universalism are the only ideals? This paper is a ‘sub-philosophical’ en...

In an attempt to question the ascendency of today’s relativism, this essay asks two different but interrelated questions: (1) Does the celebration of cultural differences guarantee the disappearance of ethnocentric universalism? (2) Is it possible to envision a universalism that is not ethnocentric? Answering the first question negatively and the second question affirmatively, this essay analyz...

This paper investigates the role played by the cultural norms of particularism and universalism for collusive bribery. In our theoretical framework, the act of proposing or demanding a bribe violates a commonly held social norm, thus producing a psychological cost. By lowering this psychological cost, particularism increases the probability of offering or asking for a bribe. We test the predict...

In the past two decades, Australia’s social policy approach to Indigenous people has been based on the overarching goal of striving for equality of outcomes, while also increasingly recognising difference. Such an approach is appropriate and allows for an amalgam of Indigenous citizenship rights, fully recognised since the late 1960s, and an expanding envelope of inherent rights, with the forme...

In a proportionate flow shop problem several jobs have to be processed through a fixed sequence of machines and the processing time of each job is equal on all machines. By identifying jobs with agents whose costs linearly depend on the completion time of their jobs and assuming an initial processing order on the jobs, we face two problems: the first is how to obtain an optimal order that minim...

It is well known that except in the case of makespan problems, there are hardly any analytical results for flowshop problems. This paper considers of a class of flowshop problems where job processing time at a machine is proportionate to the processing time on the first machine. We show that for the pre-emptive version of the problem, in order to minimize any regular measure of performance, it ...