An Exploratory Assessment of Sales Culture Variables: Strategic Implications Within the Banking Industry

Growing, or even simply sustaining, profitability in today's rapidly changing environment is a daunting task. Today's firm must contend with increasing competition, changing customer requirements, and unprecedented technological change. Further, changing government regulations, such as the recent wave of deregulation, have dramatically changed the way business has traditionally been done in certain industries. In such a turbulent environment many firms have discovered that a total organizational sales effort is necessary. For many firms, this means a paradigm shift that involves strengthening their sales culture.

The purpose of this study is to empirically examine the sales culture (SC) concept and discuss its importance in contemporary business strategy. First, we will discuss market orientation from a corporate culture perspective. Second, the sales culture component of a market orientation will be defined and examined. Third, an exploratory investigation of constructs associated with sales culture will be investigated using an example taken from an industry that is experiencing rapid change, the banking industry. Finally, strategic implications, limitations and suggestions for future research will be shared.     

Growth in agreement II: Reports and agreed statements of ecumenical conversations on a world level 1982–98∗

The French thinkers who influenced the American social activist Dorothy Day through Peter Maurin are representative of French progressive thought connected with the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum and its 1931 successor, Quadragesimo Anno. This article discusses the influence of Kropotkin, de Foucauld, Maritain and Mounier on Day. In France itself, this thought was often frustrated but Day provides an example of the implementation of Roman Catholic Personalism in the American setting. Day was both a popularising journalist and a tireless practitioner of the threefold platform deriving from Maurin's philosophy of Roundtable Discussion, Farming Communes and Houses of Hospitality. By the early 1950s, the tangential nature of Day's interest in the worker priest movement, when the question of its suppression had global prominence, shows that Maurin had been successful not in interesting her in his French influences for their own sake but in bequeathing to her a workable synthesis as a framework for her own efforts.     

‘New Age’ revisited: By way of entry into restorative justice

The present article pursues striking similarities between the discourse of philosophies and practices often categorised as ‘New Age’, and that of restorative justice. By bringing observations from data material produced in seemingly very different fields of research to a close encounter, a common discourse of transformation is tentatively explored, adding to contemporary works that warn against assuming ‘New Age’ as a sui generis movement or milieu. The article is an exercise in tracing connections across different fields of study, lending support to the claim that such tracing may contribute to the opening out of our topic in ways that have implications for what we can understand as constituting a social environment, for what we can understand as constituting context, for what we can understand as constituting ‘New Age’.     

Health Literacy,Health Inequality and a Just Healthcare System

Limited health literacy is a pervasive and independent risk factor for poor health outcomes. Despite decades of reports exhibiting that the healthcare system is overly complex, unneeded complexity remains commonplace and endangers the lives of patients, especially those with limited health literacy. In this article, we define health literacy and describe the empirical evidence associating health literacy and poor health outcomes. We recast the issue of poor health literacy from within the ethical perspective of the least well-off and argue that poor health outcomes deriving from limited health literacy ought to be understood as a fundamental injustice of the healthcare system. We offer three proposals that attempt to rectify this injustice, including: universal precautions that presume limited health literacy for all healthcare users; expanded use of technology supported communication; and clinical incentives that account for limited health literacy.     

Collaboration of Churches and Service Providers: Meeting the Needs of Older African Americans

ABSTRACT

This article describes a community outreach volunteer project designed to reach frail community-based older adults. The project is an example of church and secular agency collaboration in which the church provides leadership in volunteer recruitment and the agency provides training and outreach activity monitoring. The church's role in this project illustrates that small and medium-size African American churches can play an important role in mobilizing volunteer resources and can perform a linking role in helping secular agencies to gain access to frail, hard-to-reach, low-income older adults.     

On the origin of happiness by means of natural felicitation

The present study tested theoretical models of the forgivingness – well-being association with depression symptoms and social justice commitment as outcome measures and with differentiation of self (DoS) and dispositional humility as mediators. In doing so, we addressed the need to explicitly frame the study of virtues in a relational view of the self and extended the research on forgivingness and humility that moves beyond a focus on personal benefit and attends to the ways in which virtues also benefit other persons. The sample consisted of 213 graduate students from a religiously-affiliated university who completed a questionnaire of self-report measures. Results supported the proposed models as significant specific indirect effects were observed through DoS and humility. The findings support a self-regulating mechanism, as measured by DoS and dispositional humility, for the protective influence of forgivingness on depression symptoms and the promotive influence of forgivingness on prosocial relating.     

Keynote Address to the Third International Global Ethics Association, 30 June 2010, Bristol Human dignity,respect, and global inequality

In this paper I argue that respect for human dignity establishes a justificatory presumption in favor of egalitarian rules, which presumption is applicable to the global economic association. This is the basis for condemning several feature of current global inequality as unjust.     

Ecological issues of justice

In the first part of this article the author explores the implications for justice of the wider range of parties holding moral standing that environmental ethics has recently disclosed. These implications concern the equitable treatment of future generations and nonhuman creatures, and are relevant both to policies, such as approaches to global warming, and procedures, which may need to be revised to give an equitable voice to unrepresented interests. Later the author considers some radical implications of regarding humanity as stewards of the planetary environment, a view defended in his recent book Creation, Evolution and Meaning. If all adult humans have this role, but many are prevented from discharging it by poverty and related constraints, then those who are thus disempowered need to be empowered to exercise this role. This requirement of equity would arise not from their moral patienthood but from what is involved in respecting them as moral agents. Some approaches to tackling global warming are considered in this connection.     

Ethics: universal or global? The trends in studies of ethics in the context of globalization

The article discusses how theory and practice in global ethics affect each other. First, the author explores how the study of ethics has changed in the era of globalization and ponders what the role of the field of study of global ethics is in this context. Second, she wants to show how the logical fallacies in widening study field of ethics produce false polarizations between facts and value judgements in social ethics made in various cultural contexts. She further elaborates how these false polarizations prevent constructive cross-cultural and transnational discussions on ethical guidelines and principles that are needed to produce joint action (plans) to deal with serious ethical issues globally and nationally. Finally, the paper argues that in order to find a way to solve our shared complex ethical problems in global context, we need to get back to basics by focusing on the method of ethics, that is, self-critical and logical analysis of sound argumentation and justification of our values and moral principles.