Do workers’ unions promote gender equality? The scholarship in the past thirty years has increasingly questioned the ability of unions to give voice to the needs of all workers, including foreign workers, workers with disabilities, elderly workers, gay and lesbian workers, and women. This article shows that unions promote a patriarchal division of labor in society through an empirical study of ...

Margaret Gilbert explores the phenomenon referred to in everyday ascriptions of beliefs to groups. She refers to this type of phenomenon as “collective belief” and calls the types of groups that are the bearers of such beliefs “plural subjects”. I argue that the attitudes that groups adopt that Gilbert refers to as “collective beliefs” are not a species of belief in an important and central sen...

Tagging has proven to be a successful and efficient way for creating metadata through a human collective intelligence. It can be considered not only an application of individuals for expressing one’s interests, but also as a starting point for leveraging social connections through collaborative user participations. A number of users have contributed to tag resources in web sites such as Del.ici...

We distinguish between a collective’s goal and a collective goal, concentrating on the latter. Its relations to collective intention and action are spelled out. It is shown how a given goal, when additional predicates are ascribed to it, yields collective goals of increasing complexity. Our main task is to answer the question, “What makes a goal collective?” To this end, we will deal with the n...

As knowledge becomes a crucial asset to organization’s survival, an efficient knowledge management policy should be set up and should result into an organizational memory. Similarly, an effective eLearning program must be implemented in the organization and exploit the organizational memory to manage competence evolution. In this paper, we propose a framework that integrates knowledge managemen...

Groups of collaborative agents need to create group beliefs (acceptances) in order to act as a single entity. The notion of mutual or collective belief, which has been used extensively to cope with group belief, is not appropriate in organized settings where group members exploit shared policies to accept that certain states hold, even if some members of the group do not believe them. This pape...