Rutgers - New Brunswick
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 2003
Raleigh, North Carolina, United States of America
  •  13
    Can human nature be saved?
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 103 (C): 39-45. 2024.
  •  30
    Examining the Business Ethics Training and Development Practices of Canadian Organizations
    with Wendy R. Carroll, Margaret C. McKee, and Terry H. Wagar
    Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society 22 4-12. 2011.
    Ethics training has been highlighted as essential for building and fostering business ethics in organizations. National and international trends show that over 40% of businesses have some form of business ethics training. We use data collected from 199 firms to examine the presence of ethics training in top Canadian companies and found that the presence varied by region and firm size, and that the Canadian average (35%) lags other countries.
  • The Doll Machine: Dolls, Modernism, Experience
    In Miriam Forman-Brunell Whitney & Jennifer Dawn (eds.), Doll Studies: The Many Meanings of Girls' Toys and Play. pp. 185-204. 2015.
  •  26
    Don, Betty and Jackie Kennedy: On Mad Men and Periodisation
    with Prudence Black
    Cultural Studies Review 18 (2). 2012.
    Why is it that we watch _Mad Men_ and think it represents a period? Flashes of patterned wallpaper, whiskey neat, babies born that are never mentioned, contact lining for kitchen drawers, Ayn Rand, polaroids, skinny ties, Hilton hotels, Walter Cronkite, and a time when Don Draper can ask ‘What do women want?’ and dry old Roger Sterling can reply ‘Who Cares?’ This essay explores the embrace of period detail in _Mad Men_ finding it to be both loving and fetishistic, and belonging, like all period …Read more
  •  47
    Cultural evolution and the social sciences: a case of unification?
    Biology and Philosophy 33 (1-2): 7. 2018.
    This paper addresses the question of how to understand the relationship between Cultural Evolutionary Science and the social sciences, given that they coexist and both study cultural change. I argue that CES is best understood as having a unificatory or integrative role between evolutionary biology and the social sciences, and that it is best characterized as a bridge field; I describe the concept of a bridge field and how it relates to other non-reductionist accounts of unification or integrati…Read more
  •  31
    The Evolutionary Culture Concepts
    Philosophy of Science 84 (1): 35-55. 2017.
    Most attempts to define culture as used in the cultural evolution literature treat culture as a single phenomenon that can be given a single nondisjunctive definition. In this article I argue that, really, cultural evolutionists employ a variety of distinct but closely related concepts of culture. I show how the main prominent attempts to define a culture concept fail to properly capture all the uses of “culture” employed in cultural evolutionary work. I offer a description of some of the most i…Read more
  •  18
    An Assessment of Sustainability Integration and Communication in Canadian MBA Programs
    with Shelley Price, Margaret McKee, and Jason Nicholls
    Journal of Academic Ethics 15 (2): 93-114. 2017.
    This paper explores how sustainability has been integrated into and communicated in Canadian Master’s of Business Administration programs. We content analyzed university, business school, and MBA program mission and values statements; communicated strategic priorities; and relevant academic calendar content, as well as sustainability rankings and select media depictions of sustainable MBA programs and practices. We explore the potential for greenwashing practices in relation to the integration o…Read more
  •  16
    Integrating Ethics into Business Education
    with Jacqueline Finn
    Journal of Business Ethics Education 2 (1): 51-69. 2005.
    In a study of the integration of ethics in an MBA program at an Atlantic Canadian University, we found evidence of discrepancies between students and professors with regards to their perception of the integration of ethics into coursework. In addition, discrepancies were found among the perceptions of some of the students taking the same course. Possible reasons for these discrepancies are explored, as well as some of the examples of marginalization of ethics and some of the barriers to teaching…Read more
  •  11
    “Big” Business Ethics Textbooks: Where Do Small Business and Entrepreneurship Fit?
    with Mengsteab Tesfayohannes
    Journal of Business Ethics Education 6 25-42. 2009.
    We content-analyzed sixteen business ethics textbooks to assess the extent to which small business and entrepreneurship concepts appear in these texts. We found that scenarios related to large corporations and executive level decision-making dominate discussions and applications. These texts have very little to no coverage of small business and entrepreneurship and relevant ethical issues. We discuss this missing link and implications for integrating small business,entrepreneurship, and ethics i…Read more
  •  24
    Codes of Ethics and the Pursuit of Organizational Legitimacy: Theoretical and Empirical Contributions
    with Brad S. Long
    Journal of Business Ethics 77 (2): 173-189. 2008.
    The focus of this paper is to further a discussion of codes of ethics as institutionalized organizational structures that extend some form of legitimacy to organizations. The particular form of legitimacy is of critical importance to our analysis. After reviewing various theories of legitimacy, we analyze the literature on how legitimacy is derived from codes of ethics to discover which specific form of legitimacy is gained from their presence in organizations. We content analyze a sample of cod…Read more
  •  78
    Restorying a Culture of Ethical and Spiritual Values: A Role for Leader Storytelling
    with Margaret McKee
    Journal of Business Ethics 73 (2): 205-217. 2006.
    In this paper, we outline some of the connections between the literatures of organizational storytelling, spirituality in the workplace, organizational culture, and authentic leadership. We suggest that leader storytelling that integrates a moral and spiritual component can transform an organizational culture so members of the organization begin to feel connected to a larger community and a higher purpose. We specifically discuss how leader role modeling in authentic storytelling is essential in…Read more
  •  33
    Responsible and Respectful Romance at Work
    Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society 22 62-74. 2011.
    Study of office romance has for the most part adopted an oversimplification of the reality of office romance and the impact that some of these relationships can have on individuals and organizations. The nature of the relationship with respect to being extramarital or not (or cheating on a committed partner or not) is an area of office romance that has been under investigated. Adopting an interpretive approach, I acknowledge the role of researcher reflexivity in the development of my understandi…Read more
  •  31
    “Big” Business Ethics Textbooks: Where Do Small Business and Entrepreneurship Fit?
    with Mengsteab Tesfayohannes
    Journal of Business Ethics Education 6 25-42. 2009.
    We content-analyzed sixteen business ethics textbooks to assess the extent to which small business and entrepreneurship concepts appear in these texts. We found that scenarios related to large corporations and executive level decision-making dominate discussions and applications. These texts have very little to no coverage of small business and entrepreneurship and relevant ethical issues. We discuss this missing link and implications for integrating small business,entrepreneurship, and ethics i…Read more
  •  66
    Codes of ethics and the pursuit of organizational legitimacy: Theoretical and empirical contributions (review)
    with Brad S. Long
    Journal of Business Ethics 77 (2). 2008.
    The focus of this paper is to further a discussion of codes of ethics as institutionalized organizational structures that extend some form of legitimacy to organizations. The particular form of legitimacy is of critical importance to our analysis. After reviewing various theories of legitimacy, we analyze the literature on how legitimacy is derived from codes of ethics to discover which specific form of legitimacy is gained from their presence in organizations. We content analyze a sample of cod…Read more
  •  185
    The primordial stakeholder: Advancing the conceptual consideration of stakeholder status for the natural environment (review)
    with Mark Starik
    Journal of Business Ethics 49 (1): 55-73. 2004.
    This article furthers the argument for a stakeholder theory that integrates into managerial decision-making the relationship between business organizations and the natural environment. The authors review the literature on stakeholder theory and the debate over whom or what should count as a stakeholder. The authors also critique and expand the stakeholder identification and salience model developed by Mitchell and Wood (1997) by reconceptualizing the stakeholder attributes of power, legitimacy, …Read more
  •  35
    Geoffrey Miller argues that we can account for the evolution of human art and altruism via the action of sexual selection. He identifies five characteristics supposedly unique to sexual adaptations: fitness indicating cost; involvement in courtship; heritability; variability; and sexual differentiation. Miller claims that art and altruism possess these characteristics. I argue that not only does he not demonstrate that art and altruism possess these characteristics, one can also explain the orig…Read more
  •  56
    Fatal Attraction? Why Sperber’s Attractors do not Prevent Cumulative Cultural Evolution
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 62 (2): 301-322. 2011.
    In order to explain why cultural traits remain stable despite the error-proneness of social learning, Dan Sperber has proposed that human psychology and ecology lead to cultural traits being transformed in the direction of attractors. This means that simple-minded Darwinian models of cultural evolution are not appropriate. Some scientists and philosophers have been concerned that Sperber’s notion of attractors might show more than this, that attractors destroy subtle cultural variation and preve…Read more
  •  68
    In this paper I argue the best examples of the methods in the evolutionary social sciences don’t actually resemble either of the two methods called “Adaptive Thinking” or “Reverse Engineering” described by evolutionary psychologists. Both AT and RE have significant problems. Instead, the best adaptationist work in the ESSs seems to be based on and is aiming at a different method that avoids the problems of AT and RE: it is a behavioral level method that starts with information about both the tra…Read more
  • Darwinizing Human Nature: Methodological Issues in Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology
    Dissertation, Rutgers the State University of New Jersey - New Brunswick. 2003.
    This dissertation is designed to discuss central issues raised by two of the evolutionary behavioral sciences, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. Both sciences purport to be able to explain the origins of human behavioral and cognitive adaptations respectively and give us some insight into "human nature." My purpose is to go some way towards determining how well these two sciences do as means of determining human evolutionary origins, both by examining some of the central issues that they…Read more
  •  48
    The problem of adaptive individual choice in cultural evolution
    Biology and Philosophy 23 (1): 101-113. 2008.
    This paper tries to explain how individuals manage adaptive individual choice (i.e., the decision to acquire a fitter than average behavior or idea rapidly and tractably) in cultural evolution, despite the fact that acquiring fitness information is very difficult. I argue that the means of solving this problem suggested in the cultural evolution literature largely are various types of decision rules employing representations of fitness correlated properties or states of affairs. I argue that the…Read more
  •  41
    Grandmothers, hunters and human life history
    Biology and Philosophy 24 (5): 665-686. 2009.
    This paper critiques the competing “Grandmother Hypothesis” and “Embodied Capital Theory” as evolutionary explanations of the peculiarities of human life history traits. Instead, I argue that the correct explanation for human life history probably involves elements of both hypotheses: long male developmental periods and lives probably evolved due to group selection for male hunting via increased female fertility, and female long lives due to the differential contribution women’s complex foraging…Read more
  •  46
    On our best behavior: optimality models in human behavioral ecology
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 40 (2): 133-141. 2009.
    This paper discusses problems associated with the use of optimality models in human behavioral ecology. Optimality models are used in both human and non-human animal behavioral ecology to test hypotheses about the conditions generating and maintaining behavioral strategies in populations via natural selection. The way optimality models are currently used in behavioral ecology faces significant problems, which are exacerbated by employing the so-called ‘phenotypic gambit’: that is, the bet that t…Read more
  •  25
    In “Out of Eden” David Barash argues that humans are naturally polygamous, in that they have innate polygamous preferences. In particular, Barash argues that human males have preferences and other psychological states designed to support aggressive polygynous sexual competition, and that the resulting behavior has driven the selection of various other psychological and behavioral traits in humans. This is controversial, since the prevailing view of the human mating system in our recent evolution…Read more
  •  77
    Can behaviors be adaptations?
    Philosophy of Science 71 (1): 16-35. 2004.
    Kim Sterelny and Paul Griffiths (Sterelny 1992, Sterelny and Griffiths 1999) have argued that sociobiology is unworkable because it requires that human behaviors can be adaptations; however, behaviors produced by a functionalist psychology do not meet Lewontin's quasi-independence criterion and therefore cannot be adaptations. Consequently, an evolutionary psychology which regards psychological mechanisms as adaptations should replace sociobiology. I address two interpretations of their argument…Read more
  •  43
    Review of Studying Human Behavior (review)
    Philosophy of Science 81 (4). 2014.