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Purpose – The aim of the present chapter is to analyse episodes of dispute and conflict in co-located computer gaming. The main purpose is to extend prior research on dispute-interaction to a computer mediated setting.

Methodology – Naturally occurring multiplayer computer gaming was video recorded in Internet cafés (28 hours). A single case was selected that involved a series of escalating disputes over the course of 45 minutes of gaming. The social interaction involved – of two 16-year-old boys playing World of Warcraft – was analysed using conversation analytical procedures.

Findings – The sequential analyses show how the two players engaged in disputes at the points where one or both of the players’ avatars had been killed. The players held each other accountable for their in-game performance, and avatar death was a central event in which gaming competence was contested, often in outright confrontations. Such disputes, where each player attempted to present the other as inferior, were used for negotiating player identities in what Goffman (1967) has called character contests. In gaming, players thus risk losing the game as well as their social standings. Disputes were also linked to the variable stakes of the game: with more at stake, players were more likely to escalate conflicts to the point of even quitting the game altogether.

Originality – The chapter shows how disputes are central components in adolescents’ computer gaming, and how they both structure the players’ intersubjective understanding of the game, and how they play a role in local identity work.

The widespread use of derivatives in asset and liability management raises the issue of appropriate measurement of credit exposure. However, nearly all industry literature focuses on the needs of the most sophisticated dealers, which presents a problem for those users who want to improve the measurement of derivative credit exposure, but are unable to commercially justify the expense of cutting edge techniques. This article attempts to fill this gap by examining the range of pragmatic approaches available, together with their key pros and cons.

In this paper, which was presented at the second Inter‐American Congress on Educational Administration, held July 29‐August 2, 1984 in Brasilia, DF, Brazil, the author sketches criteria for a philosophy that could contribute to advancement in educational administration. He then examines some positions and issues in the light of the criteria.

A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.

This case presents the challenges facing a new pastor at Whitney Avenue Congregational church. For many years the church has seen declining membership. Karl, the new pastor, is expected to help foster growth, but as he has learned, some organization members fear that he may want to change more than they would like to see changed. Karl must decide how to conduct himself at the next church council meeting. He also must decide on an approach to effect positive change in the organization.

This paper explores the links between economic and social structures and ethical norms for economic life. As such, the essay is a contribution to the more general philosophical discussions on the relation between fact and value in the social sciences. I begin with a brief discussion of ethics which highlights the social character of ethical “value” and draws upon the work of the Canadian philosopher, Bernard Lonergan, to introduce a novel way of understanding social structures. The analyses show how economic structures can be understood as cooperative meaning schemes, how such schemes are embedded within a wider ecology of social meaning schemes, and how the dynimic relations among such schemes reveal ethical goals and make ethical demands upon participants who depend upon them for their living. I illustrate these linkages in a discussion of three examples drawn from economic life: a consumer purchase transaction, an ancient trade scheme drawn from the work of Karl Polanyi, and a rather novel approach to economic development proposed by Jane Jacobs.

Although the investigation of brand extension strategies has gained importance, existing research focusses primarily on consumer attitudes to brand extensions, and to date, little research has been made on the luxury market. Moreover, studies on the impact of brand extensions have been limited to explicit measurement methods. Therefore, the aim of this study is to provide new insights by focussing on the change of consumers’ brand perception related to downgrading and upgrading brand extensions strategies in the luxury market based on an implicit association test (IAT).

In this exploratory study context of examining the spontaneous reaction time with reference to the luxury concept by confronting respondents with adequate verbal brand extension stimuli, a ST‐IAT was considered for the empirical tests of these hypotheses.

The study results give evidence that consumers’ perception of an upgrading or downgrading strategy of a brand varies in accordance to these hypotheses. Hence, the reaction time of the H&M subjects decreased after having read the upgrading stimulus whereby, in the case of Karl Lagerfeld, the ST‐IAT reaction times showed that the downgrading information resulted in a weaker association of Karl Lagerfeld with luxury.

The use of implicit measurement methods is becoming increasingly important for assessing consumer reaction to the new product line. Particularly, when luxury brands apply a downgrading strategy, the risks of possible damages to the core brand are much higher than in the case of an upgrade of a basic brand to the luxury or premium segment.

Reflecting on “The Rehabilitation of Karl Marx” as a theoretical economist 100 years after his death, Robert Paul Wolff, on the way to writing Understanding Marx, noted that Marx had written, “at a conservative estimate, five thousand pages of theoretical material”. Therefore, in order to understand Marx's theoretical achievement, which Wolff compares with Darwin, Freud and Einstein (p. 714), “The simplest sort of common sense demands that we estimate Marx's place in the intellectual history of our civilization on the basis of this mass of economic theory” (p. 713). In addition to the three volumes of Capital, the three volumes of the Theories of Surplus Value, the Grundrisse, and the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, however, “Marx also wrote, as a young man, a handful of exuberant, obscure, derivative, romantic reflections on the human condition…The same sort of common sense dictates that we not construe these youthful speculations as the final utterances of the true Marx” (p. 713). With these assertions, Wolff is reviving an old issue, for the benefit of a “modern mathematical reinterpretation of Marx” (pp. 715–16), that some had thought was laid to rest by the widespread availability of the Grundrisse.