Tara McMullin

Variety of work is the next point, and a most important one. To compel a man to do day after day the same task, without any hope of escape or change, means nothing short of turning his life into a prison-torment. Nothing but the tyranny of profit-grinding makes this necessary.

Sometimes, one needs to be emotionally invested in a hypothetical situation to fully appreciate its consequences. In such cases, fiction seems a better tool to explore the consequences of particular philosophical views than philosophical thought experiments.

I think of a comparably personal comment I once heard my colleague Judith Shapiro, former provost of Bryn Mawr and then president of Barnard, make to a group of young people about what they should expect from college: “You want the inside of your head to be an interesting place to spend the rest of your life.”

Research as a way of life is having the ability and the time to question the world around you and add to its understanding. It’s defined by our access and ability to contribute to production of knowledge and evaluate the information around us.

Whatever conditions people grow up with are the ones they generally consider normal. This is a tribute to the amazing plasticity of the human mind, but it means that we tend to take for granted things that should never be accepted.

What distinguishes human economies is merely that they recognise that the chief business of any social system – or, indeed, of any system of the production and distribution of material goods – is the creation and mutual fashioning of human beings. Indeed, one could well argue that it’s only the emergence of commercial currencies that made it possib... See more

Using empowerment theory, we depart from this consensus to focus on the moderating role that social structural empowerment can have on the empowering leadership-psychological empowerment relationship. We propose that empowering leadership and social structural empowerment interact to affect employee psychological empowerment, such that lower (vs. h... See more