Digital Commons Network^™

Philosopher's Stone: The Faustian Geist Of Development, Salikyu Sangtam

Dissertations

The present study juxtaposes scientific rationality with polyphonic rationality in respect to societal development. This is done to illuminate how scientific rationality provides a narrow and truncated view of development. In order to explicate the exclusion of polyphonic rationalities/knowledges in favor of scientific rationality, several development scholarships are examined along with an episode of developmental scheme and two episodes of development programs. This is done to expound (note: ‘→’ = influences) how scientific rationality → scholarships → organizational/institutional schemes, such as the MDGs → actual applications of development schemes, such as transmigration and compulsory villagization. The present inquest, …

Spectacle, Consumer Capitalism, And The Hyperreality Of The Mediated American Jury Trial: The French Perspective On O.J. Simpson, Casey Anthony, And Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Bailey Miller Wamp

Masters Theses

This study investigates modern French criticism of jury trial mediation in the United States. By engaging the work of twentieth-century French theorists Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, and Pierre Bourdieu, as well as French journalistic reporting on the jury trials of O.J. Simpson, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and Casey Anthony, this study argues that mediated images of the American jury trial abandon the pursuit of justice in favor of a consumer capitalist endeavor to create spectacle. Ultimately, jury trial mediation generates a hyperreality in which the media simulates the pursuit of justice with no reference to the “real” pursuit of justice.

In order …

Exploring How J. David Velleman’S Theory Of Mutual Interpretability Affects Our Personal Identity And Self-Understanding, Felipe A.Z. Peterson

CMC Senior Theses

How do we understand ourselves? How do we relate with others? How do we build communities? These are some questions David Velleman’s theory of mutual interpretability appears to answer. In Foundations For Moral Relativism, Velleman argues that self-understanding is interlinked with one’s ability to understand others; in other words, with one’s ability to be mutually interpretable. However, being mutually interpretable requires that a person share some set of beliefs or a perceptional framework with another person that would allow the two to interact successfully with one another. Thus, communities are simply a collection of individuals whose shared beliefs …

Ethical Insights Of Early 21st-Century Corporate Leaders, Kevin B. Jones

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

From 2001 to 2010, a lack of documented standards within ethics programs inhibited decision making, management practices, and corporate strategies for corporate leaders in the United States. Seminal theories in transformational, charismatic, servant, spiritual, and ethical leadership formed the conceptual framework for this phenomenological study, whose intent was to explore how senior leaders of Fortune 500 companies in Washington, DC integrated ethics into daily business decisions and the role in organizational performance. A convenience sample of 20 Fortune 500 leaders participated in face-to-face semistructured interviews to explore the assessment, definition, and documentation of various ethical standards in the company; the …

Was It Something They Said? Stand-Up Comedy And Progressive Social Change, David M. Jenkins

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

From our earliest origins in every civilization across the globe, comic performances have fulfilled an important social function. Yet stand-up comedy has not attracted the serious academic inquiry one might expect. This dissertation argues that in the absence of public intellectuals stand-up comics are important to how we talk about and negotiate complicated issues like gender and race. These comic texts are sites of cultural critique, public discourse, tools for articulation, a means of persuasion, and serve to galvanize communities.

This dissertation argues that stand-up comedy performances are a vital part of modern American intellectual and social life and are …