When organizations solve collective action problems or realize values, they do so by means of institutions. These are commonly regarded as self-stabilizing. Yet, they can also be subject to endogenous processes of decay, or so we argue. We explain this in terms of psychological and cultural processes, which can change even if the formal structures remain unchanged. One key implication is that the extent to which norms, values and ideals motivate individuals to comply with institutions is limited.

There are increasing calls for coverage of medicine during the Holocaust in medical school curricula. This article describes outcomes from a Holocaust and medicine educational program featuring a study trip to Poland, which focused on physician complicity during the Holocaust, as well as moral courage in health professionals who demonstrated various forms of resistance in the ghettos and concentration camps. The trip included tours of key sites in Krakow, Oswiecim, and the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps, as well as meeting with survivors, lectures, reflective writings, and discussions. In-depth interviews and reflective writings were qualitatively analyzed. Resulting themes centered on greater understanding of the relationship between bioethics and the Holocaust, recognizing the need for moral courage and social awareness, deeper appreciation for the historical roles played by dehumanization and medical power and their contemporary manifestations, and the power of presence and experiential learning for bioethics education and professional identity formation. These findings evidence the significant impact of the experience and suggest broader adoption of pedagogies that include place-based and experiential learning coupled with critical reflection can amplify the impact of bioethics and humanism education as well as the process of professional identity formation of medical students.

I argue that more and less are always determinatives, contrary to the categorization in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL), which treats them as adverbs in analytic comparatives. Evidence is presented of contrasts between more/less and much/little in various contexts, challenging CGEL’s empirical claim that such contrasts never occur in analytic comparatives. The observed distributional patterns can largely be explained by the semantics of more/-er and much without positing a category distinction: more/-er establishes a salient scale-internal reference point, while much requires such a point to already be present. Furthermore, mere distributional differences should not be relied upon for category assignment, following arguments by Payne , Huddleston & Pullum (2010). For these reasons, analyzing more and less as adverbs in any context is unnecessary and unparsimonious. The determinative analysis can account for all the relevant data. Beyond the narrow point about categorization, the paper illustrates the contributions of semantic, pragmatic, and distributional evidence in resolving category assignment.

Multiple independent studies have highlighted the remarkable process of multistakeholder dialogue in the development of Peru’s first National Action Plan (NAP) on business and human rights. While facing several challenges, not least a global pandemic, the process was indeed a success in so far as it opened up a new path for policy making in Peru: that of multistakeholder dialogue including actors who traditionally deeply mistrust each other. This piece describes the key enabling conditions and operational strengths that allowed for such a highly participatory process and, ultimately, resulted in some strong commitments on business and human rights.

From the seventeenth to the twentieth century, rivers played a key role in the colonization of Hokkaido, a northern island in the Japanese archipelago. The Kushiro River, in eastern Hokkaido, was transformed into infrastructure, a process which shaped the institutions, strategies, and practices of territorial control during the transition from the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868) to Imperial Japan (1868–1947). Trade between local Ainu communities and the shogunate's vassals contributed to a river-based territoriality. Later in the 1800s, as the island became territory of the modern state, the river was further converted into infrastructure through settler colonialism, industrial development, land reclamation, and the dispossession of indigenous communities. This transformation empowered the state to probe territories, exert control over labor, and access natural resources. Drawing on research on the political ecology of rivers, this paper focuses on two hydrosocial functions that emerged during the process of reworking river basins into legible and governable spaces: the transportation conduit and the water delivery system. The river's transition from a living system to infrastructure coincided with and furthered the establishment of colonial settlements and the expansion of the Japanese state's imperial reach.

Between 1903 and 1952, there was a Jesuit and French university in Shanghai called l’Aurore. This article focuses on its medical faculty, which operated from 1912 to 1952. It shows that, in a precarious political and military context, l’Aurore simultaneously benefited from Jesuit missionary activity and the French quest for imperial influence, without fully identifying with either. The faculty was not an official missionary institution, and most of its hundreds of students were not Christians. However, the Jesuit administration kept a record of baptisms among the students and, based on Catholic principles, encouraged opposition to birth control through courses on ‘medical ethics’ and a special oath that medical graduates had to take. Nor was the medical faculty an overtly imperial institution. It was part of a concession and the result of an alliance between Jesuit missionaries and anti-clerical diplomats of the French Third Republic. Yet, the faculty was key to a French policy of imperial influence designed to compete with other imperial, religious, and private foreign powers active in medical education in China. During the years of war between China and Japan (1937–1945), the faculty consolidated its influence by increasing student numbers and building new infrastructure, whereas its Chinese staff assumed a more prominent role, reinforcing the importance of Chinese medicine in teaching and research. Doctors trained at l’Aurore who stayed in China remained active in public health until well into the second half of the twentieth century, even after the medical faculty was abolished by the Communist regime.

In Republican China, the Factory Act was first promulgated in 1929, after almost thirty years of unregulated industrialization. Little academic effort has been made to comprehend its actual implementation. Some academics have dismissed it as completely useless, while others have credited it with various enhancements in working conditions. This article focuses on workplace health and safety issues and critically evaluates the implementation of the law to scrutinize its effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) in addressing workers’ life and death matters. This article aims to reassert the Factory Act in China's modern history of industrial development. It points out that despite its inadequate enforcement, the law was significant in laying the foundation for the national institutionalization of state responsibility to systematically monitor and regulate workplace health and safety and paving the way for further safety legislation. Nevertheless, the law fell short of safeguarding workers’ rights during industrial accidents.

The Qing dynasty enforced a policy of separate governance for the people of the Eight Banners, ruling that bannermen were neither to be administered under the regular civilian administrative system, nor listed on the civilian register. Institutionally and legally, the labels “Banner” (qi 旗) and “civilian” (min 民) marked a fundamental divide between different social groups in the Qing. However, in actual practice, the boundary between the two was less rigid. An ambiguous area existed within the seemingly strict legal and administrative regime, providing opportunists with an abundance of loopholes to exploit. Some changed their status from “civilian commoner” to “bannermen” to acquire land, while others moved from “bannermen” status to “civilian commoner” status to pursue promotion in the civil service. Shedding light on the everyday lives of these people, this article delves into the intricate Banner–civilian classification of the Qing dynasty, with a focus on the overlapping area between the parallel systems. It aims to rectify the conventional binary perspective that strictly dichotomizes Banner and civilian status. By doing so, it highlights the multifaceted nature and diversity inherent in Qing ethnic relations and local society.

Globally, companies are developing and implementing their strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, in line with the Paris Agreement. However, there is also growing recognition and awareness of the potential negative impacts of these activities on human rights. Recent pressure from international normative standards and ESG expectations, emerging legislative developments, and legal precedents are driving companies to consider human rights impacts across their climate action. This piece explores some of the human rights risks associated with the transition to renewable energy; the transformation to regenerative agriculture; the scaling up of the circular economy; and the implementation of nature-based solutions. It then explores the challenges of conducting effective human rights due diligence given the scale and scope of the transitions needed and provides examples of how companies are seeking to respect human rights in their climate action.

The intervocalic position favors voicing in stops. Yet, some languages have been reported to feature the opposite (unnatural) process of intervocalic devoicing. This paper investigates two such case studies. Pre-Berawan intervocalic *b and *g have developed into Berawan k. Pre-Kiput intervocalic *g, *ɟʝ, and *v have developed into Kiput k, cç, and f, respectively. To account for the data, we invoke Beguš’s (2018, 2019) blurring process model of sound change. The model proposes that unnatural phonology derives from a sequence of at least three phonetically motivated sound changes. We argue that the steps involved in intervocalic devoicing are (i) the intervocalic fricativization of voiced stops, (ii) devoicing of fricatives, and (iii) the occlusion of devoiced fricatives. Each of the steps is independently attested and motivated. We demonstrate that our blurring process proposal explains aspects of the historical development unaccounted for by previous approaches, and present new evidence suggesting that a single sound change could not have operated in the prehistory of Berawan. Thus, we maintain the conservative position that unnatural diachronic developments arise from sequences of natural and phonetically grounded sound changes.

To bring linguistic theory back in touch with commonplace observations concerning the resilience of language in use to language change, language acquisition and ungrammaticality, Pullum and colleagues have argued for a ‘model-theoretic’ theory of syntax. The present paper examines the implications for linguists working in standard formal frameworks and argues that, to the extent that such theories embrace monotonicity in syntactic operations, they qualify as model-theoretic under some minor modifications to allow for the possibility of unknown words.