Employee ownership has ideological cachet in all advanced industrialized democracies. For many observers, the principle of selfgovernance underlying political democracy extends to the economic sphere. All institutions essential to the basic structure of society must be consistent with the norms of moral equality and autonomy. Since corporations allocate income in a market society, and thereby d...

It is argued that the ethical questions and challenges raised by the project of personalizing medicine are not sufficiently addressed without considering the possible effects thereof on our system of healthcare. I argue that the framing of ethical issues in light of the main principles of bioethics, such as autonomy, welfare and even justice, tends to be too narrow and the larger social implica...

The world’s first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium BC. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptati...

The world’s first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium BC. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptati...

The framing of “implementation” of learning technologies in universities can have profound effects on approaches to teaching and learning that may be insufficiently acknowledged by practitioners. This paper investigates a case that demonstrated the formation of strong connections between technology and pedagogy, in which a learning content management system (LCMS) called for a series of accommo...

Social media today provide an impressive amount of data about users and their societal interactions, thereby offering computer and social scientists, economists, and statisticians – among others– many new opportunities for research exploration. Arguably, one of the most interesting lines of work is that of predicting future events and developments based on social media data, as we have recently...

The world’s first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium BC. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptati...

The world’s first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium BC. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptati...

The impact of mobile text messaging is re-interpreted as an emergent technology that has accidentally been instrumental in the configuration of new social networks on a global scale. Using the unintended consequences of this implicit revolution in interpersonal communication as a catalyst for the generation of ideas, the argument is advanced that this is a manifestation of a new type of creativ...