Need is a concept that carries intuitive appeal in moral decision-making. As it stands, need is relatively under-theorised, given its currency not just in philosophical argumentation but in news coverage, charitable appeals, and political practice. Need claims carry compelling normative force, and they are amenable to widespread support as our most basic needs are some of the things we most transparently share with our fellow human beings. However, how should we understand that normative force? Is need best understood to compel us as a matter of justice? I begin my account by considering the kind of need relevant to the project. I build from an understanding of need as a three-place relation, which is by its nature needing for a purpose. I suggest that morally important needs are those which aim at the objective interests that all people have in virtue of what is good for each of us qua human beings ('non-arbitrary needs'). Further, I distinguish the existentially urgent subset of those non-arbitrary needs as 'basic needs.' Given this understanding, I consider how basic needs theory relates to its conceptual neighbours. I focus on capabilities as the nearest neighbours, but also comment on wants, interests, and rights. I judge that the theories developed by Martha Nussbaum (capabilities) and Len Doyal and Ian Gough (needs) benefit from a complementary reading, with each supplementing the other. I then draw from Amartya Sen's early writings on capabilities to ultimately see capabilities and needs as two sides of the same coin. This helps to situate needs theory in relation to a mainstream branch of political theory more generally, and indicates that we can recognise the special significance of needs without eschewing other morally important categories. I then move to establish a scope of justice that allows us to distinguish between duties of justice and other moral duties. If we think that duties of beneficence are weak and optional, whereas duties of justice are binding and enforceable, a great deal rides on how we characterise our duties to the global poor. I offer a 'moral enforceability' account, claiming that duties of justice are those which are, in principle, morally enforceable. It is the in-principle enforceability of justice duties which gives them teeth. Returning to need, I then ask how another's need comes to give me a moral reason for action. I canvas a range of existing accounts, many of which furnish important insights. I then propose that it is the morally relevant capacities of the being in need which gives them moral status such that their needing is morally significant. We are morally required to answer this need with responsiveness, as a demonstration of appropriate respect for the sort of being that the human in need is. If this is right, we are morally required to be responsive to need, even if we are not always required to reduce it. Finally, I bring the diverse strands of the foregoing argument together to return to the relationship between need and justice. I consider what a duty of responsiveness might amount to in practice, and suggest that our duties of responsiveness are best thought of as collective duties, grounded in the capacity of the global well-off to contribute. Further, I argue that duties of responsiveness are a matter of justice, as they are the sort of duties that are, in principle, morally enforceable. A wide range of threats to the necessary conditions for human flourishing, and even human life, are on the horizon, and many of these are uniquely collective challenges. The seriousness of those challenges, and the extent to which we have treated our responsibilities to those in need as discretionary in the past, means collective action and problem solving are called for when there are no easy answers.

The purpose of this study was to integrate research on Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) and organizational justice by proposing and evaluating plausible interactions between LMX and the various dimensions of organizational justice. In addition, this study contributes to the sparse literature on antecedents to LMX by including three previously unexamined antecedents, which consist of basic intra- and interpersonal motivations (i.e., attachment, identity, and regulatory focus), that are under-researched compared to personality and demographic variables. Data were collected from 150 supervisor-subordinate dyads. Results revealed several significant LMX by justice interactions and indicated that interdependent identity levels (relational and collective) and promotion regulatory focus are positively related to LMX quality. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

The primary objective of this study is to foster career outcomes such as job satisfaction and turnover intentions in early childhood educators (ECEs). ECEs are defined as individuals teaching children from the age range of birth to 5 years old and work in child care programs. The focus on ECEs population was due to the fact they work in demanding environments with little wage incentives, and as a result, they experience high levels of job dissatisfaction, which in turn leads to turnover. Research has demonstrated that most ECEs are intrinsically motivated, but previous research has not quantitatively tested this construct in a model. A third objective is to explore the role of person-organization fit (P-O fit) and person-job fit (P-J fit) as mediators. Prior research has examined fit a mediator for the K-12 teacher population but it has not been explored in ECEs. The last objective of this study is to investigate distributive justice on career outcomes through P-O fit and P-J fit. Data for the study were collected from a community-based sample. The participants were teachers that worked in the field of early childhood education. Our findings show educators’ motivation and perceptions of organizational justice have a considerable impact on their career outcomes. Our results provide support for the mediation model that we hypothesized. This study can also assist in the selection of early childhood educators by utilizing the intrinsic motivation to work with children to identify which educators are intrinsically motivated and assess their fit as it relates to a specific organization.

Abstract This thesis is both an empirical and theoretical contribution to the study of tax-compliance by taxi-operators and drivers. The exploratory case-study adopts a critical sociological perspective in assessing the limits of both the currently dominant academic literature and the industry-specific legislation on tax conformity, including the most recent strategies and explicit tax-compliance measures from the Australian Tax Office (ATO) with regard to Australian cab-drivers. The core premise of this thesis is that the social and economic activities (both legal and illicit) of cab-drivers are embedded within unique networks of social relations. The study utilises focus-group interviews to explore cabbies’ views on taxation, their perceptions of fairness and trust, and to elucidate how individual taxi-workers justify circumvention of Australian tax laws and regulatory measures in their actual work-practices. This exploration is achieved by analysing the verbal accounts and conversations among cab-drivers that involve their guilt-free justifications for non-compliance. The analysis presents further insights into their “vocabulary of motives” and “aligning actions” vis-à-vis non-compliant tax behaviour. The respondents’ views and perceptions about trust, and distributive and procedural justice, are compared and contrasted against the tax-regulator’s views and the ATO’s current enforcement measures. This study is semi-grounded and qualitative in approach, and is a first contribution to a field of inquiry that appears to be dominated by quantitatively-oriented criminological and social-psychological approaches. In contrast, the case-study presents a sociologically-inspired inquiry, by emphasising that cab-drivers are subjected to a multitude of structural arrangements and social control mechanisms, which influence their attitudes and actions with regard to non-compliance. Moreover, current regulatory initiatives towards diminishing non-compliance in the taxi-industry tend to neglect the concept of “mixed-embeddedness” and the inter-relatedness between tax rules, concomitant enforcement practices, and the nation’s broader legislative framework. The state’s regulation of tax-compliance behaviour of taxi-drivers cannot strictly be detached from other laws and regulatory measures in areas such as taxi-cab licensing, occupational health & safety (OH&S) or industrial & workplace relations, which affect every taxi-operator and contracted driver, albeit in different ways. A social-action approach that grasps more comprehensively the rich contexts and complexities involved in the informal behaviours of cabbies may be regarded as an additional and powerful information tool in the governance of modern taxation systems. The study will demonstrate how serious tensions and contradictory forces arise when tax regulators attempt to enforce a National Compliance Model which is, of itself, inherently mal-integrated and underpinned typically by a bureaucratic ‘one-size-fits-all’ enforcement approach in regard to local networks of taxi-drivers. It will be argued that legislative changes to the (legal) employment status of Australian taxi-drivers may produce a far more expedient and cost-effective way for curtailing the enduring and deeply imbued tax non-compliant modus operandi within this particular sector of Australia’s transport-services industry.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 97-99).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 97-99).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Michigan State University, 1993. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 330-344).

This study deals with the employee fairness perceptions of their performance management system in a South African organisation. The concept of justice, with particular reference to procedural, distributive and interactional justice, is used as a guide in assessing employee perceptions of fairness of the organisations’ performance management system. A qualitative approach was used to gain an in-depth understanding of employee perceptions of fairness based on their personal experiences of the organisation’s performance management system. Data was obtained through extensive semi structured interviews with 20 employees who had been with the organisation and participated in the performance management system for 5 or more years. All interviews were transcribed and assessed using a thematic analysis. The overall findings show that there are negative fairness perceptions of the performance management system as assessed according to the three organisational justice factors of procedural, distributive and interactional justice. / Industrial and Organisational Psychology) / M.A. (Industrial and Organisational Psychology)

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / O trabalho tem por objetivo articular uma defesa da teoria de justiça distributiva de John Rawls, considerando-se, para tal, as mudanças que o autor efetuou em sua teoria de justiça como equidade. Assim, a pesquisa tomará como base não somente o critério de justiça distributiva que se consolidou em Uma Teoria de Justiça, através do princípio da diferença, mas também avaliará de que forma este ideal continua presente nos textos posteriores do autor: O Liberalismo Político e O Direito dos Povos. Para tal, o estudo retomará as críticas cosmopolitas à proposta de internacionalização da teoria de justiça como equidade e, à luz destas, apresentará uma defesa do projeto de Rawls, evidenciando elementos do mesmo que estão alinhados ao projeto de justiça distributiva e sugerindo que sua proposta teórica é coerente com as premissas de Uma Teoria de Justiça, apesar de o princípio da diferença não estar presente entre os princípios fundamentais que devem ser estabelecidos entre os povos. Logo, trata-se também de uma proposta interpretativa que se vincula à compreensão (minoritária) de que as mudanças teóricas efetuadas por Rawls em sua teoria não a tornaram incompatível com seu projeto originário estabelecido em Uma Teoria de Justiça. / This study aims to defend John Rawlss theoretical approach to distributive justice based on the changes that he made to his theory of justice as fairness. Therefore the research considers not only Rawlss criterion of distributive justice as it was laid out on A Theory of Justice by the difference principle but also proposes to consider how the criterion can be understood in his later work, mainly The Law of Peoples. Contrary to what is commonly held by the cosmopolitan criticism of Rawlss later work, this study argues that Rawls proposes a feasible theoretical framework to deal with problems of justice on the international sphere and will justify within Rawlss theory his motivation for not employing the difference principle as one of the principles that should hold between peoples. To do so, it will be necessary to review the main changes that Rawls made to his theory as well as consider the cosmopolitan challenges that argue for a radically egalitarian criterion of distributive justice on an international sphere, such as the difference principle. Accordingly, this study will side with an understanding of Rawlss theory as a project that kept its main ideas notwithstanding the many changes Rawls made to his theory in the effort of trying to solve some of the inconsistencies that he recognized in A Theory of Justice.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / O trabalho tem por objetivo articular uma defesa da teoria de justiça distributiva de John Rawls, considerando-se, para tal, as mudanças que o autor efetuou em sua teoria de justiça como equidade. Assim, a pesquisa tomará como base não somente o critério de justiça distributiva que se consolidou em Uma Teoria de Justiça, através do princípio da diferença, mas também avaliará de que forma este ideal continua presente nos textos posteriores do autor: O Liberalismo Político e O Direito dos Povos. Para tal, o estudo retomará as críticas cosmopolitas à proposta de internacionalização da teoria de justiça como equidade e, à luz destas, apresentará uma defesa do projeto de Rawls, evidenciando elementos do mesmo que estão alinhados ao projeto de justiça distributiva e sugerindo que sua proposta teórica é coerente com as premissas de Uma Teoria de Justiça, apesar de o princípio da diferença não estar presente entre os princípios fundamentais que devem ser estabelecidos entre os povos. Logo, trata-se também de uma proposta interpretativa que se vincula à compreensão (minoritária) de que as mudanças teóricas efetuadas por Rawls em sua teoria não a tornaram incompatível com seu projeto originário estabelecido em Uma Teoria de Justiça. / This study aims to defend John Rawlss theoretical approach to distributive justice based on the changes that he made to his theory of justice as fairness. Therefore the research considers not only Rawlss criterion of distributive justice as it was laid out on A Theory of Justice by the difference principle but also proposes to consider how the criterion can be understood in his later work, mainly The Law of Peoples. Contrary to what is commonly held by the cosmopolitan criticism of Rawlss later work, this study argues that Rawls proposes a feasible theoretical framework to deal with problems of justice on the international sphere and will justify within Rawlss theory his motivation for not employing the difference principle as one of the principles that should hold between peoples. To do so, it will be necessary to review the main changes that Rawls made to his theory as well as consider the cosmopolitan challenges that argue for a radically egalitarian criterion of distributive justice on an international sphere, such as the difference principle. Accordingly, this study will side with an understanding of Rawlss theory as a project that kept its main ideas notwithstanding the many changes Rawls made to his theory in the effort of trying to solve some of the inconsistencies that he recognized in A Theory of Justice.