This thesis is a work of political philosophy. It aims to set out an egalitarian understanding of the promotion of social capital. The first chapter of the thesis is an introduction to social capital, and contains a normative criticism of contemporary social capital policy-making. A typology of theoretical approaches to social capital policies are outlined in the second chapter, including neoliberal constitutionalism, civic republicanism, and egalitarian pluralism. Of these approaches, egalitarian pluralism seems best able to promote social capital while balancing the competing values of freedom and equality. The third chapter builds on the egalitarian pluralist approach and investigates a relational egalitarian strategy for the promotion of social capital. / Thesis (Master, Philosophy) -- Queen's University, 2013-11-29 11:11:33.823

My intention with this paper is to try to understand the meaning of the double sex symbols which can be identified on a number of Neolithic so called battle axes from the region round the lake Mälaren in Sweden. My conclusions are drawn after having studied a number of archaeological thesises. I have realized that the society was egalitarian from what is said about the funeral habits since women and men were buried with the same care. Ceramics from the Skogsmossen site show a very long continuity over 15-20 generations. These facts indicate a peaceful society without traumatic breaks where knowledge would have been lost. The fingerprints produced on the ceramics are those of women, since they do not seem to fit with the hands of men. Women are by this fact persumed to be the producers of ceramics. In early and primitive farming digging sticks were used, often with a weight. My conclusion is that the boat axe can be a magic tool used on the digging sticks. We have to understand the boat axes as spiritual helpers to fruitful and fertile success.

No description available.

This thesis offers an alternative of political leadership through a literature review of democratic theory as categorized into three models: classical, elitist, and egalitarian. The three models considered an ethical, an institutional, and an economic institutional postulate of political elites and their relationships. Still, the democratic elitist model emerging as the dominant model has been challenged by the egalitarian model enforcing economic institutional elites to be accountable to mass interest. As a competing idea, the egalitarian democratic model has been analyzed for its desirability over the democratic elitist model. This study is worthwhile in instigating an underscored concern surrounding economic institutional elites in the scope of accountable political elites, and in calling forth a further study on the preferred alternative, democratization of economic institutional elites.

The United Nation has declared a number of articles that protect human rights and with those articles imposing special obligations on the state to enforce these requirements. With this in mind it's not too hard to understand the democratic triumph over other regimes. The democratic regime has great theoretical and empirical support for its ability to bring higher levels of human development to citizens. This could be one of the reasons why democracy has spread over the world since the 19th century. But in recent years the importance of democracy has been questioned. The purpose of this paper is therefore to examine the connection of various democratic principles to human development. We are particularly interested in analyzing 1) if dissimilar democratic principle have any relation to human development and 2) if there are any democratic principles that tends to have a distinguishable relation to human development over recent decades. In this paper we use correlation- and regression analysis to analyze this relationship. The democratic principles are measured with the democratic components created by the V-Dem institute while human development is measured with the Human Development Index. Our findings give support to the existence of a relation between all measured democratic principles and human development. According to our findings, the democratic principle of equality has a distinguishable relationship to human development that runs over recent decades. This paper concludes the several shapes of relationships that occur between democratic principles and human development.

“The Stable marriage problem (SMP) is basically the problem of finding a stable matchingbetween two sets of persons, the men and the women, where each person in every group has a listcontaining every person that belongs to other group ordered by preference. The first ones to discovera stable solution for the problem were D. Gale and G.S. Shapley. Today the problem and most of itsvariations have been studied by many researchers, and for most of them polynomial time algorithmsdo not exist. Lately genetic algorithms have been used to solve such problems and have oftenproduced better solutions than specialized polynomial algorithms. In this thesis we study and showthat the Stable marriage problem has a number of important real-world applications. It theexperimentation, we model the original problem and one of its variations and show the benefits ofusing genetic algorithms for solving the SMP.” / Program: Magisterutbildning i informatik

Volunteer-managed nonprofit organizations (VNPOs) are defined as nonprofit organizations managed exclusively by volunteers without paid-staff. There is no well-recognized theory describing how to govern or structure VNPOs, despite their significance in the social economy. This study argues non-bureaucratic governance and non-hierarchical structures are appropriate for some VNPOs. Rothschild-Whitt (1979) proposes six significant challenges for organizations with non-bureaucratic governance. Using multiple case-study methodology, the magnitude of these challenges was assessed in three VNPOs adopting non-bureaucratic governance and non-hierarchical structure. Four challenges, namely, time, homogeneity, emotional intensity, and individual differences, did not adversely affect the selected VNPOs. Two challenges, namely, nondemocratic individuals and environmental constraints, remained obstacles for the selected VNPOs. Five other challenges to non-bureaucratic governance specific to VNPOs were also identified and discussed, specifically, succession planning and recruitment, task completion, minimal socialization, pressure to achieve consensus, and administrative issues. Insights from such studies may help to better manage non-bureaucratic/non-hierarchical VNPOs.

Volunteer-managed nonprofit organizations (VNPOs) are defined as nonprofit organizations managed exclusively by volunteers without paid-staff. There is no well-recognized theory describing how to govern or structure VNPOs, despite their significance in the social economy. This study argues non-bureaucratic governance and non-hierarchical structures are appropriate for some VNPOs. Rothschild-Whitt (1979) proposes six significant challenges for organizations with non-bureaucratic governance. Using multiple case-study methodology, the magnitude of these challenges was assessed in three VNPOs adopting non-bureaucratic governance and non-hierarchical structure. Four challenges, namely, time, homogeneity, emotional intensity, and individual differences, did not adversely affect the selected VNPOs. Two challenges, namely, nondemocratic individuals and environmental constraints, remained obstacles for the selected VNPOs. Five other challenges to non-bureaucratic governance specific to VNPOs were also identified and discussed, specifically, succession planning and recruitment, task completion, minimal socialization, pressure to achieve consensus, and administrative issues. Insights from such studies may help to better manage non-bureaucratic/non-hierarchical VNPOs.

The Female Voices of Islam is arguing for feminism to be regarded as a theory instead of an ideology so that the voices of contemporary female Muslims can be heard. This paper reviews the arguments of four such women: Amina Wadud, Fatima Mernissi, Asra Q. Nomani, and finally Zainab al-Ghazali. Collectively their discourses support equality for men and women within the Islamic tradition, while their individual ways of approaching the subject differ dramatically. Wadud and Nomani support the theory that an egalitarian ethic can be found in the roots of the Islamic tradition, in both text and ritual. Mernissi investigates how economic evolution of Islamic society stimulates a shift in spatial boundaries for Muslim women. Al-Ghazali does not address female inequality within the tradition, but advocates an egalitarian ethic through the example she sets in Egyptian society. She is concerned with a world wide observance of “true” Islam.

The first chapter is based on a paper with Jin Li in fair division. It was recently discovered that on the domain of Leontief preferences, Hurwicz (1972)'s classic impossibility result does not hold; that is, one can find efficient, strategy-proof and individually rational rules to divide resources among agents. Here we consider the problem of dividing l divisible goods among n agents with the generalized Leontief preferences. We propose and characterize the class of generalized egalitarian rules which satisfy efficiency, group strategy-proofness, anonymity, resource monotonicity, population monotonicity, envy-freeness and consistency. On the Leontief domain, our rules generalize the egalitarian-equivalent rules with reference bundles. We also extend our rules to agent-specific and endowment-specific egalitarian rules. The former is a larger class of rules satisfying all the previous properties except anonymity and envy-freeness. The latter is a class of efficient, group strategy-proof, anonymous and individually rational rules when the resources are assumed to be privately owned. The second and third chapters are based on two working papers of mine in decision making under uncertainty. In the second chapter, I study the wealth effect under uncertainty --- how the wealth level impacts a decision maker's degree of uncertainty aversion. I axiomatize a class of preferences displaying decreasing absolute uncertainty aversion, which allows a decision maker to be more willing to take uncertainty-bearing behavior when he becomes wealthier. Three equivalent preference representations are obtained. The first is a variation on the constraint criterion of Hansen and Sargent (2001). The other two respectively generalize Gilboa and Schmeidler (1989)'s maxmin criterion and Maccheroni, Marinacci and Rustichini (2006)'s variational representation. This class, when restricted to preferences exhibiting constant absolute uncertainty aversion, is exactly Maccheroni, Marinacci and Rustichini (2006)'s ariational preferences. Thus, the results further enable us to establish relationships among the representations for several important classes within variational preferences. The three representations provide different decision rules to rationalize the same class of preferences. The three decision rules correspond to three ways which are proposed in the literature to identify a decision maker's perception about uncertainty and his attitude toward uncertainty. However, I give examples to show that these identifications conflict with each other. It means that there is much freedom in eliciting two unobservable and subjective factors, one's perception about and attitude toward uncertainty, from only his choice behavior. This exactly motivates the work in Chapter 3. In the third chapter, I introduce confidence orders in addition to preference orders. Axioms are imposed on both orders to reveal a decision maker's perception about uncertainty and to characterize the following decision rule. A decision maker evaluates an act based on his aspiration and his confidence in this aspiration. Each act corresponds to a trade-off line between the two criteria: The more he aspires, the less his confidence in achieving the aspiration level. The decision maker ranks an act by the optimal combination of aspiration and confidence on its trade-off line according to an aggregating preference of his over the two-criterion plane. The aggregating preference indicates his uncertainty attitude, while his perception about uncertainty is summarized by a generalized second-order belief over the prior space, and this belief is revealed by his confidence order.