This article considers the practices of companies worldwide in attempting to implement human rights due diligence (HRDD) as envisaged by the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Based on empirical research conducted through surveys and interviews, it analyses corporate practices in this area. It examines the responses of companies with reference to the core elements of implementing HRDD: identifying actual or potential human rights impacts; taking action to address these impacts; and tracking or monitoring the effectiveness of actions. In addition, the article places these practices in the context of the legal developments in the field of HRDD. The research shows the difference that dedicated HRDD – in comparison with non-human rights specific processes – can make in terms of identifying adverse human rights impacts of both the company as well as of those which are part of its business relationships.

This article concerns John Gay's 1731 essay ‘Preliminary Dissertation Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality’. Gay undertakes two tasks here, the first of which is to supply a criterion of virtue. I argue that he is the first modern philosopher to claim that universal happiness is the aim of moral action. In other words: Gay is the first utilitarian. His second task is to explain the source of moral motivation. He draws upon the principles of association to argue (a) that we develop benevolent motives by associating the idea of our happiness with that of others and (b) that we come to approve of benevolence by recognizing that our happiness is inextricably connected with the general happiness. While some scholars have taken an interest in Gay's essay, a sustained treatment of its contents does not exist, despite its acknowledged influence on Hume, Hartley, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill.

This paper describes the first Polish expedition to Greenland in 1937. The fieldwork was carried out in western Greenland at the eastern edge of Arfersiorfik Fjord between Disko Bay in the north and Nordre Strömfjord in the south. The main goal was to undertake a comprehensive study of a fragment of the Greenland ice sheet edge and its foreland focusing on a cartographic survey. The first ever map of this region entitled The Polish expedition to give new names. In the post-war history, expedition members exerted great influence on the development of Polish polar research.

This article presents the key results of a major survey carried out by the NEARCH project on the public perception of archaeology and heritage across Europe. The analysis focuses on three main points of significance for contemporary archaeological practice. The first is the image of archaeology and its definition in the perception of the general public. The second concerns the values that archaeology represents for the public. The third focuses on the social expectations placed on archaeologists and archaeology. The NEARCH survey clearly indicates that there is a significant public expectation by Europeans that archaeology should work comprehensively across a broad range of areas, and that cultural heritage management in general needs to engage more with different archaeological and heritage groups.

A common justification offered for unequal pay is that it encourages socially beneficial productivity. G. A. Cohen famously criticizes this argument for not questioning the behaviour and attitudes that make those incentives necessary. I defend the communal status of incentives against Cohen's challenge. I argue that Cohen's criticism fails to appreciate two different contexts in which we might grant incentives. We might grant unequal payment to someone because they demand it. However, unequal payment might be an offer instead. I claim that incentives as offers promote the ideal of society as a cooperative venture for mutual advantage.

While histories of ideas in premodern perspectives habitually understood history as divisions of fixed periods, modernists tend to narrate these histories in terms of flowing streams curving through timelines, intersections, and junctions. Crucial moments, accordingly, are turns and returns, shifts and orientations. I am not sure what it takes to diagnose and proclaim an intellectual turn or how to affirm or refute such a phenomenon, but I take the audacious risk and argue that the last couple of decades have seen a “legal turn” in the study of religions—a renewed focus on legal aspects of religion that includes legal concepts, theories, and practices.

In this article I address a number of recent controversial language-related incidents and ideological statements regarding the use of French in the public sphere by Flemish nationalist aldermen in two Flemish towns. By drawing on interviews with different stakeholders (shop owners, aldermen, and passers-by), I address the different perceptions and ideological indexicalities of French shop names and signs in these Flemish contexts. In the data, the indexical field (Eckert 2008) of French in Flanders emerges as both polyvalent and indexically ordered, while the Flemish nationalist interpretations involve rescaled and historically recursive indexical meaning that can only be understood vis-à-vis the historical language ideological debate in Belgium. Language use in the public sphere has thus become a tool to impose monolingual ‘doxic logics’ (Bourdieu 1977) in Flanders, in spite of the fact that commercial and private language use is not regulated by language laws in Belgium. (Flemish nationalism, language ideologies, linguistic landscape)*

Russia's strategy in the Arctic is dominated by two overriding international relations (IR) discourses – or foreign policy directions. On the one hand, there is an IR-realism/geopolitical discourse that puts security first and often has a clear patriotic character, dealing with ‘exploring’, ‘winning’ or ‘conquering’ the Arctic and putting power, including military power, behind Russia's national interests in the area. Opposed to this is an IR-liberalism, international law-inspired and modernisation-focused discourse, which puts cooperation first and emphasises ‘respect for international law’, ‘negotiation’ and ‘cooperation’, and labels the Arctic as a ‘territory of dialogue’, arguing that the Arctic states all benefit the most if they cooperate peacefully. After a short but very visible media stunt in 2007 and subsequent public debate by proponents of the IR-realism/geopolitical side, the IR-liberalism discourse has been dominating Russian policy in the Arctic since around 2008–2009, following a pragmatic decision by the Kremlin to let the Foreign Ministry and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov take the lead in the Arctic. The question asked here is how solid is this IR-liberalist-dominated Arctic policy? Can it withstand the pressure from more patriotic minded parts of the Russian establishment?

Several areas of welfare economics seek to evaluate states of affairs as a function of interpersonally comparable individual utilities. The aim is to map each state of affairs onto a vector of individual utilities, and then to produce an ordering of these vectors that can be represented by a mathematical function assigning a real number to each. When this approach is used in intertemporal contexts, a central theoretical question concerns the rate of pure time preference, i.e. the evaluative weight to be applied to utility coming at different times. This article criticizes the standard philosophical account of pure time preference, arguing that it ascribes to economists a methodological commitment they need not accept. The article then evaluates three further objections to pure time preference, concluding that it might still be defensible under certain circumstances. I close by articulating a final argument that, if sound, would constitute a decisive objection to pure time preference as it currently figures in much intertemporal welfare economics.

Ecclesiology is the study of the church which explores the origins, nature, and purposes of the church universal. Its method includes developing categories to indicate the attributes of the church, as e.g. one, holy, catholic, and apostolic; the people of God; and the fellowship of the spirit. One aim of ecclesiology is to teach and help us understand what may be authentic, required, permissible, or appropriate church structures, such as in ministry, government, discipleship, evangelism, worship, and teaching. Legal theology might be considered to be a branch of ecclesiology. Many scholars refer to church law as applied ecclesiology, and in so doing they speak of a “theology of church law” and a “theology in church law.” The former is a doctrinal and perhaps more speculative exercise; the latter is more descriptive and scientific.