Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication

Organisational Evil and the Responsibility of Management and Managerial Practices

Isabelle Choinière — 2022-09-06

How is it that ordinary people decide to take part in genocides? Philosophers and psychologists have attempted to provide explanations of how genocidal organizations (i.e. set up to conduct executions) bear on the moral judgment of genocide participants. Here, I resituate those findings within the field of organizational behavior (OB). I highlight how organizational behavior mechanisms (selection of personnel, division of labour, the One-Best-Way principle, and reinforcement methods) can lead ordinary individuals to judge their participation in a genocide as acceptable. Although initially only designed to increase motivation and productivity, these techniques also affect individuals’ awareness of ethical issues. Consequently, participants shift their judgments in favor of the genocidal organization, forgetting the victims. Management studies have seldom addressed the topic of genocide, despite clues in the literature that genocides are organizational in nature. By combining the three fields of organizational behavior, business ethics, and genocide studies within an approach based on transdisciplinary analysis, I hope to show that genocides constitute a legitimate subject for management studies.

Self, Community, Narrative in the Information Age

Gábor Dr. Szécsi — 2022-09-06

Narrative thinking has a significant role in the formation of the self and identity. In fact, to such an extent that the self is seen as the product of narrative thinking, a fictional character emerging at the intersection of autobiographical narratives. In this article I investigate what effect the narrative interpretative schemes used in everyday communication have on our conceptualization of the self, on our self-image, while, I also intend to analyze what effect media narratives displaying intentions, beliefs and desires have on the narratives of self- and community construction of individuals in the information age. The aim of this essay is to demonstrate that analyses like this can, in the long run, contribute to a great extent to the preparation of models and philosophical concepts targeting the description of the functioning and formation of narratives that capitalize on the shared cognitive structures of human motivational factors, goals, emotions and actions.

Celebrity Manufacture Theory

Jonathan Matusitz — 2022-09-06

Celebrity Manufacture Theory postulates that both the emergence of celebrities and our fascination with them are shaped by the media. Another premise of the theory is that a person’s fame does not necessarily correlate with the talent or achievements of that person. Rather, it often depends on the way the media manufacture that person as a celebrity. Today’s celebrity culture extolls a particular type of fame – one created and sustained by media production. Hence, there is a painstaking method of personification and commodification at work. The pursuit for authenticity is not the objective of Celebrity Manufacture Theory. For this reason, the theory is an example of a “manipulation theory.” It describes how media industries manipulate audiences through mass-mediated celebrity production. To best understand Celebrity Manufacture Theory, four major tenets are thoroughly described in this paper: (1) Media mirage, (2) democratization of spotlight, (3) commodity, and (4) cultural mutation.

Toward New Conceptions of Multicultural Identity in Intercultural Communication

Min-Sun Kim — 2022-09-06

As people struggle to come to terms with cultural pluralism, there is growing recognition the bicultural or multicultural persons and their potential communication patterns. Prior conceptualizations of multicultural identity focused on the idea that people are capable of blending multiple cultures in their mind or switch between representations of cultures, as ways to be really good toward the Other. This approach may sound sensible, but there is the inescapable injustice embedded in any formulation of the other, and not only the Other, but also the other of the Other. The very openness of a genuinely multicultural identity precludes the establishment of such things as ethnic, racial, or cultural "identities." The basic propositions of this paper are that (1) multicultural identity can be seen as different ways of being in the world, which is a facet of enlightened experience by coming into being of “intuitive intelligence” that “self/personhood/identity” is an illusion; (2) the acquisition of multicultural identity a natural process of human growth, one that does involve a radical shift of personal perspectives, maturation of vision. Ultimately, I suggest a radical rethinking and reversal of the essentialist view of multicultural identity, and present multicultural identity as an awareness event transcending one’s cultural identity. It is time for a paradigm shift.

Hailing black holes

Brian Zager — 2022-09-06

This article addresses the challenge philosophical realism poses to the field of rhetoric by exploring the possibility of symbolic communion with nonhuman entities. As a matter of framing, I invoke Timothy Morton’s concept of the hyperobject to better understand the complexities of communicating with and about sublime nonhuman objects such as black holes. I then delineate how the stylistic modality of the weird best exploits the chasm between autonomous thingness and human (re)presentation that is a primary source of consternation for rhetorical realism. Finally, I draw from Kathe Koja’s (1991) novel The Cipher to reconsider a bizarre rhetoric of black holes which displays the omnipresent tension of accessible-alterity characteristic of the struggle to rhetorically breach the nonhuman world.