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- Ratkić, Adrian
(författare)
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Avvikelsens konst : metod och analogiskt tänkande
- 2004
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- I denna avhandling presenteras en fallstudie vars studieobjekt är dialogseminariemetoden tillämpad inom forskarprogrammet KTH Advanced Programmein Reflective Practice. Dialogseminariemetoden kan ses som ett sätt att iscensätta dialog genom en systematiserad och disciplinerad procedur.Metoden utvecklades i Bo Göranzons och Maria Hammaréns samarbete med företaget Combitech Systems, mellan 1996 och 1999, i syfte att underlätta reflektion kring erfarenhetsgrundad kunskap. Sedan dess har metoden tillämpats i en rad andra situationer och i olika syften.Varför är just denna metod värd att studera? Enligt min mening löper många trådar från forskningsområdet yrkeskunnande och teknologis nu tjugoåriga metodutveckling ihop i dialogseminariemetoden. Inte minst uttrycker metoden en genomtänkt hållning i frågan om vad som förbinder litteratur, filosofi, idéhistoria och konst med yrkeskunnande och vetenskap.Denna hållning uttrycks i sättet att föra dialog; olika teman utforskas i samtalet genom associativa förbindelser, utvikningar och avvikelser. Detta kallas för analogiskt tänkande, till skillnad från tänkande som bygger på induktion eller deduktion. Att tänka analogiskt innebär att reflektera kring likheter och skillnader mellan olika företeelser. Analogiskt tänkande dominerar i omdöme och handling och är av stor betydelse i bland annat utvecklingsprojekt,inom konstnärligt arbete, all slags problemlösning, samt de faser i forskningsarbetet som kräver uppfinningsrikedom och fantasi.Dialogseminariemetoden utgör ett exempel på det som filosofen Tore Nordenstam kallar ”tillämpad humaniora”, och min beskrivning av hur metoden använts vid KTH kan ses som ett inlägg i den offentliga diskussionenom humanioras plats inom högre utbildningen.
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| 2. |
- Surber, Nicholas, 1992
(författare)
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Too Enabling to Fail – Ethics and Practices in the Legitimation of Nanotechnology
- 2023
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis reads Beck’s Risk Society in the context of nanotechnology and the politicization of failure in the promise of enabling technologies. It aims to investigate how researchers and innovators legitimate nanotechnology in society. Nanosafety research is the empirical focus, with an approach that builds upon the setting of a Nordic research program. Reflections from STS, in terms of empirical ethics, articulate the conjoining of applied ethics and toxicology in the value-laden endpoint of the (nano)safe society. The thesis exposes three research questions, which broadly correspond to three appended papers. The first question asks how does legitimation crisis in the political economy of research and innovation manifest today? The second question asks how do responsibility practices in responsible research and innovation (RRI) contribute to said legitimation? Lastly, the third question asks how nanosafety researchers reflexively practice anticipation in the legitimation of nanomaterials? The findings are three-fold. First, concerns surrounding legitimation and crisis in the political economy of research and innovation are connected to technoscientific capitalism. Another contribution is the proposal for pragmatism in the European RRI policy community that helps to produce wider legitimation. A third contribution, aiming at the applied ethics of technology, emerges through the study of nanosafety researchers reflexively anticipating the future of nanomaterials. Two further studies are outlined. One will study the Swedish NGO ChemSec, interrogating their ability to reduce the use of toxic chemicals and problematic nanomaterials. The second proposes a field study situated in the Lund-centered nanosafety milieu to explore the implementation of safe-and-sustainable-by-design.
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| 4. |
- Munter, Dan, 1975-
(författare)
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Ethics at work : Two essays on the firm's moral responsibilities towards its employees
- 2013
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Essay I analyses a sample of corporate codes in the Swedish banking sector. The purpose is to investigate the codes’ ethical status. Are they consistent with the values of fairness or are they instead at a risk of harming the employees? With regard to employees, eight of the nine codes in the material were found to (a) focus one-sidedly on their duties and responsibilities, (b) lack statements regarding their value to the firm, while carefully stating the importance of several other stakeholders, (c) have an anonymous or authoritarian tone, (d) say little regarding the substantial reasons why certain behaviour is forbidden or expected; some of the codes also (e) contained problematic freedom restrictions. The empirical investigation of code content and design leads us to the normative issue of whether such a design can be unfair and risks harming the employees. Departing from the values of equality, reciprocity, care and respect, eight of the nine codes are found to be at risk of being in conflict with these values. The socially responsible firm, which avoids risking employees’ welfare and self-respect, must consider rewriting such corporate codes.Essay II seeks to provide a richer moral assessment of the transactions, offers and working conditions in the labour market. Some of the most influential accounts have focused on either the act of consent (Nozick), the background conditions (Peter) or the quality of the offers (Olsaretti). I argue that all these aspects are ethically relevant and necessary to make agreements morally justified. This leads me to the conclusion that (a) unreasonable offers remain ethically flawed regardless of employees’ consent and adequate background conditions; (b) the mere act of consent is, nonetheless, ethically valuable; (c) there exist different kinds of demands, affected differently by whether they are properly consented to. Then, in a well-ordered liberal democracy (which constitute the necessary background conditions), to ascertain whether a firm’s offers and working conditions are morally sound, we need to know both their quality (how reasonable they are) and whether they have been properly consented to. A firm ends up with three moral responsibilities: (i) not to exploit the workers’ disadvantaged position in the labour market, which requires that they are offered only reasonable proposals, (ii) to inform employees in the contract situation of all the relevant aspects and working conditions associated with the job, thereby enabling proper consent, and (iii) once the worker is employed, to only implement working conditions of the kind that are possible to justify and consistent with treating the employees as persons.
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| 5. |
- Törnberg, Petter, 1987
(författare)
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Innovation in Complex Adaptive Systems
- 2014
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Our society is increasingly beset by a range of interrelated crises - with the financial crisis, the energy crisis, and the global warming crisis as leading examples - forming a "meta-crisis" with its roots in processes deeply entrenched in society (Lane et al., 2011), and emanating from large-scale complex adaptive systems so strongly interlinked that they are hard to even define and delimit. This has made our lack of understanding of such systems simultaneously more obvious and threatening, an issue further amplified by empirical developments brought about by new information and communication technology. In response to this, a substrate of semi-congruent critiques and new ideas - the former generally more articulated than the latter - are emerging in a number of major disciplines facing similar challenges, but still without the theoretical foundation needed to align and direct this substrate across disciplinary boundaries. The first part of the thesis attempts to develop such an abstraction by departing from the nature of the large-scale complex systems, concluding that the theoretical crises are founded in common difficulties in approaching the complexity of the systems under study, and attempts to provide an understanding of the challenges related to these kind of complex systems: it may be uncontroversial to suggest that the systems are complex, but it remains unclear exactly what this entails. Based on this understanding, the second part aims to show how a synthesis approach to this type of systems could look by bringing together a number of different research strands facing challenges emanating from such systems, with the goal of forming an integrated, empirically grounded and complexity-informed perspective on change in large-scale complex systems.
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| 6. |
- Lindqvist, Maria
(författare)
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Promised Soils : Senses of Place Among Yezidis in Dalarna and Sheikhan
- 2021
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This is an ethnographic study that focuses on Zahmanê Êzîdîa Li Dalarna, the Yezidi cemetery, in Borlänge. The Swedish town of Borlänge has one of the largest Yezidi diaspora communities in Western Europe; a majority emigrated from the Northern Iraqi region of Sheikhan during the 1990s and early 2000s. The overall aim of this project is to investigate how the Yezidi community in Borlänge puts Zahmanê Êzîdîa Li Dalarna into use, the meanings ascribed to the site by individual interviewees, and how these relate to ritual places and practices in Sheikhan.The empirical material stems from observations and interviews among members of three extended Yezidi families in Borlänge and in Sheikhan, and archival material from the Church of Sweden. Fieldwork in Sheikhan focused on the valley of Lalish and the cemetery sites in the Yezidi villages in Sheikhan. The empirical material is presented, analysed and discussed through a theoretical framework of place, creation and maintenance of social memory through ritual practice, and the concept of transfer of ritual.The empirical material reveals that salient ritual actions and elements from ceremonies in Lalish and the Yezidi villages in Sheikhan are transferred to Borlänge, and there put into use for ritual practices and for creating and maintaining a collective identity outside of Iraq.
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| 7. |
- Ahlin, Jesper
(författare)
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Personal Autonomy and Informed Consent : Conceptual and Normative Analyses
- 2017
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This licentiate thesis is comprised of a “kappa” and two articles. The kappa includes an account of personal autonomy and informed consent, an explanation of how the concepts and articles relate to each other, and a summary in Swedish.Article 1 treats one problem with the argument that a patient’s consent to treatment is valid only if it is authentic, i.e., if it is “genuine,” “truly her own,” “not out of character,” or similar. As interventions with a patient’s life and liberties must be justified, the argument presupposes that the authenticity of desires can be reliably determined. If the status of a desire in terms of authenticity cannot be reliably determined, discarding the desire-holder’s treatment decision on the basis that it is inauthentic is morally unjustified. In the article, I argue that no theory of authenticity that is present in the relevant literature can render reliably observable consequences. Therefore, the concept of authenticity, as it is understood in those theories, should not be part of informed consent practices.Article 2 discusses the problem of what it is to consent or refuse voluntarily. In it, I argue that voluntariness should be more narrowly understood than what is common. My main point is that a conceptualization of voluntariness should be agent-centered, i.e., take into account the agent’s view of her actions. Among other things, I argue that an action is non-voluntary only if the agent thinks of it as such when being coerced. This notion, which at first look may seem uncontroversial, entails the counterintuitive conclusion that an action can be voluntary although the agent has been manipulated or coerced into doing it. In defense of the notion, I argue that if the agent’s point of view is not considered accordingly, describing her actions as non-voluntary can be alien to how she leads her life. There are other moral concepts available to describe what is wrong with manipulation and coercion, i.e., to make sense of the counterintuitive conclusion. Voluntariness should be reserved to fewer cases than what is commonly assumed.
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| 8. |
- Kanakulya, Dickson
(författare)
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Governance and Development of the East African Community : The Ethical Sustainability Framework
- 2015
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The pursuit of sustainability of governance and development has become a major challenge in contemporary times because of increasing realization that: various ecological and social systems are interconnected; and the complexity of our natural and constructed environs requires holistic approaches to avoid catastrophic fissures in the systems on which humans depend. As regional governments such as the East African Community (EAC) become important in Africa (and other regions), they present opportunities to generate cross-national approaches to achieving sustainability albeit success in that direction is limited and sporadic. In order to mitigate the underlying causes of that situation, we need to reconceptualize and reconstruct sustainability thinking and policy. From an applied ethics perspective, the study set out to explicate the value of and constructively generate a more viable conceptualization of sustainability in relation to the EAC. The study used qualitative methodology; designed as an atypical regionalization case-study and an analytical-constructive research; compatible research tools were employed in interrogating and analyzing secondary sources relating to member states of the EAC and the research was executed between 2011 and 2014.The research found a divergence between the two main conceptual approaches to sustainability in Africa, namely, the ‘Market inspired sustainability’ (MIS) logic and the ‘Traditional African sustainability’ (TAS) logic. The study also uncovered colonial Social Darwinism as a major underlying governance philosophy that motivated the EAC’s former colonial rulers; which became a key ingredient in the application of a colonial-functionalist approach to the region’s earlier integration project (EAC-1).This was traced as a major premise on which the unsustainabilities within the contemporary regionalization project (EAC-2) were crafted. The research also found some acceptable levels of competence in regional governance within the individual EAC member countries in terms of: i) hierarchical, ii) network, and iii) market styles of metagovernance. However, closer analysis revealed: i) an inverse relationship between transfer of capabilities from colonizers to natives (TCCN) and the sustainability of postindependence states (SPIS); and ii)a directly proportional relationship between colonial governance style (CGS) and the economic performance of post-colonial (EPPC) East African countries. It also revealed an ambitious but inadequately grounded drive to expand the EAC project without due attention being given to existing faultlines of possible disintegration such as: perpetuation of colonially-initiated injustices, citizens’ incapacity to partake of the benefits of the integration, and low levels of integrity, among others.The EAC faces a risk of turning into colonial victimization and villainization writ large; which is unsustainable due to the social laws of victim-disaffection (ViD) and villain-encumbrance (ViE). Further analysis showed that these faultlines of disintegration could be exasperated internally by the governance styles and stances taken by the ruling regimes of the core member states: Kenya’s Jubilee Alliance Party (JAP) has to balance between the forces of ethnically inspired devolution and multicultural capitalism; Tanzania’s Chama Cha Mapimduzi (CCM) still has to overcome a socialist single-party hangover and manage the political marriage between the mainland and the island; and Uganda’s National Resistance Movement (NRM) has chosen a governance philosophy of hybrid Marxism. From a justice point of view, the study advocates for establishing a Regional Basic Structure (RBS) that uses a ‘one-step original position’ as a mitigation measure. The RBS should befounded on universal egalitarianism so as to minimize misrepresentation and diminish the political elitist culture of betrayal of the electorate at all levels of representative leadership.In a reconstructive fashion, the research amplified the classical philosophical position that ethical values within society (the ethical fabric) provide the foundation on which other dimensions of sustainability are built. On the basis of that premise, the study generated and proposes the Comprehensive Ethical Sustainability (CES) frameworkas a scheme of axiomized ethical principles designed to be used towards the realization of the sustainability of systems and processes. The CES scheme is a principlistic recasting of selected intuitively valuable dominant approaches to development; designed to be convertible into a comprehensive program of action (or sets of regional policies) towards the attainment of governance and development sustainability in an integrated EAC. The CES framework is fashioned as a reorganized, multi-dimensional cocktail of i) compound, ii) compatible and iii) complimentary principles of: i) Justice, ii) Capabilities, iii) Ubuntu and iv) Integrity, whose application would make the regional bloc sustainable. These principles are considered and proposed as pillars in the: i) theorization of sustainability; and ii) policy formulation, structural arrangements and individual action aimed at sustainability.
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