Journal of Human Values

The year 2018 is the 150 anniversary of the Tata group. This article is an attempt to examine the role of spiritual family values in shaping Tata as a sustainable business. Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata, the founder of Tata, was a trained Parsi priest, who was greatly influenced by Humata or good thoughts, Hukhta or good words, and Hvarshta or good deeds toward others. Since its founding in 1868, the Tata leadership legacy has persistently followed those watchwords of the Zoroastrian faith. The extant workplace spirituality literature posits that the role of spiritual and religious values is vital for organizations and individuals to prosper. Employing historical data and biographical method, we trace the history of Tata to examine the causal mechanism between spirituality and sustainable business, under the influence of stakeholder concept, sustainability and family values-based leadership. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

This article examines two potential Rawlsian arguments, namely the moral dualism argument and the educative effect of institutions argument as regards the extension of the primary subject of justice to personal conduct. The article makes two claims. First, while moral dualism is a logical step to make, it suffers from a potential conflict between the principles that apply to institutions and those that govern personal conduct. Second, despite the attractive features of the educative effect of institutions argument, an explanative gap has to be filled in order to account for how and why individuals comply to just institutions. In the end, the article concludes that extending Rawls’s theory of justice to include personal conduct may be difficult to sustain.

Doing research on cancer patients often involves painful journeys through the processes of involvement and detachment with research settings and participants. It is a self-transforming event to see close cared for people die. Yet frequently these experiences remain unreported in academic writing. The present article attempts to depict the narratives of attachment in the context of terminal illness and detachment as a consequence of death of the research participant, Jabbar, to reflect on such a journey. It focuses on the formation of a relationship beyond the boundaries of the purposes of research to reflect on two related issues, first, the nature of attachments and relationship building that goes in parallel to the formal dimensions of the research, and second, emotions, self-transformation and contextual embeddedness of doing research with terminally ill cancer patients.

The present study focuses on furthering the theoretical foundations of the field of spirituality and religiosity in the workplace (SRW) by providing a parsimonious definition, and multi-dimensional model for the construct of spirituality grounded in a pluralistic and historically authentic framework using the Sophia Perennis or Perennial Philosophy (Lings, 2005, A return to the spirit.... Fons Vitae, Louisville). In this process, the study addresses the dilemma of religiosity versus spirituality faced by researchers in this area (Benefiel, Fry, & Geigle, 2014, Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 6(3), 175). It also addresses concerns regarding the potential conflicts related to spirituality and religiosity that could arise in a secular workplace, which emphasizes inclusiveness and equality. A three factor model of spirituality is developed using the grounded theory approach (Corbin & Strauss, 1990, Qualitative Sociology, 13(1), 3–21) and is corroborated by factor analysis of multiple samples (n = 159 and n = 181), and participants representing three major world faith traditions (both Eastern and Western).

This study examines the representations conveyed by sports practitioners and the ideologies that govern sports institutions in three European countries. Sports organizations seem to construct identitary references for practitioners through the values they convey and the forms of sociability that they develop. This international study compares the practices and representations of sport based on a questionnaire sent to a sample of practitioners in Cardiff, Great Britain; Nice, France; and Pitesti, Romania. The findings indicate some differences. In Great Britain, sports practices remain imbued with educational values, in line with the ideals that were at the origin of the sporting movement. In France, sports practices seem more rooted in an orthodoxy promoted by community supervision. In Romania, sport remains attached to a therapeutic vocation and social mobility in connection with the communist past.

It is the metaphoric doubling of past into present that gave Renaissance ekphrastic representations its techniques of self-understanding. In effect, in the ekphrastic doubling of the past in the present, we notice that historicity becomes an inalienable part of its contemporary credibility. The reduction of distance between life and art, as evident in contemporary obsession with selfies and photographs, thus begins to become the central project of early modern ekphrasis, enhanced in the Renaissance. In sum, art becomes equivalent to legal tender, and ekphrasis, a principle of exchange and substitution, through which objects and artefacts seem to be in danger of losing their particularities and gaining new generic human values. When Shakespeare wrote The Rape of Lucrece (1593–1594), it was ekphrasis that allowed Shakespeare to speak about the ills of his own times through a Greco-Roman subject. The metaphorical implications that his story has for the issues of good government and private and public security embedded in colonial mercantilism are implicit in his tropological practice. And in doing so, Shakespeare conducts an ekphrastic economy of exchange, which is in this sense the intransitive art of shielding life.

David James, Rousseau and German Idealism: Freedom, Dependence and Necessity, 2013. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 246, $23.27 (paperback). ISBN: 978-131-66094-84

Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love: Evil, Rationality and the Drive for Recognition, 2010. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 296, $27.55 (paperback). ISBN: 978-019-95920-50

Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Critique of Inequality: Reconstructing the Second Discourse, 2015. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 250, $3.55 (paperback). ISBN: 978-110-76446-63