An introduction to attachment theory while completing an undergraduate degree in South Africa opened an opportunity to study at Johns Hopkins University with the recognized mother of attachment theory, Mary Ainsworth. My tenure with her was intensive but short, as she decided to leave Hopkins for Virginia, leading me to head further north to Yale, though not until Ainsworth had introduced me to both Melvin Konner (a distinguished anthropologist) and Urie Bronfenbrenner, a doyen of developmental psychology then determined to radically transform stuffy developmental psychology into a contextually sensitive sub-discipline. With Ainsworth and Bronfenbrenner as off-site mentors, William Kessen introduced sophisticated developmental theory while Edward Zigler expounded the importance of using research to inform social policy in pursuit of a better world for children.

Relatively few works of ancient literature survive intact. Many more are known only as fragments or through the testimony of other authors. How should literary history acknowledge the fact and the consequences of such extensive loss? This chapter reviews the difficulties in identifying and presenting the evidence for lost works, explores what (besides their hypothetical reconstruction) can be learned from their remains, and considers how accommodation of the lost and the fragmentary challenges historians of literature to rethink the objectives and the methods of their enterprise.

This chapter starts by framing the larger debate concerning universalism versus contextualism in ethics, largely mirroring the one between positivism and relativism in science. It proposes that pragmatism transcends this dichotomy by considering the role of general (and particular) ethical norms and values in context and by focusing on moral deliberation. The pragmatist approach to ethics is described before discussing the ways in which ethical concerns and forms of reasoning accompany every phase of a research project. The practice of using deception, which is both widespread and controversial in social and psychological research, is reflected upon. Finally, the chapter ends with considerations regarding mixed methods, multi-resolution designs, and their ethical commitments.

This chapter introduces the book and its inspiration, mission, central research questions and structure. It links the effectiveness of corporate social responsibility (CSR) to better understanding of its interdependent relationship with law, regulation and governance. The chapter shows that the book is unconstrained by conventional understandings and the neo-liberal voluntarism orthodoxy of some disciplines in suggesting opportunities for tackling substantive and procedural barriers for CSR in public international law, private international law and national law. It underlines the need for contextualism and a spectrum for possible legal and regulatory intermediation in fifteen ingredients of CSR.

This chapter underlines the need for contextualism in showing that small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are more suited than multinational enterprises for wider corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities and impacts in developing and emerging markets. While highlighting institutional conditions for enabling socially responsible practices by firms, it is argued that an appropriate regulatory environment is necessary to enhance the potential of SMEs.

The chapter considers the concept of regulation and a range of regulatory and non-regulatory options, including market and non-market mechanisms that governments have used and can use to advance corporate social responsibility (CSR). It recommends a six-step model for developing a CSR policy framework for governments of developing and emerging countries. The chapter therefore reiterates a more nuanced approach to regulation of CSR than the voluntarism orthodoxy acknowledges.

This chapter argues that ‘stakeholder needs’ and the ‘value system paradigm’ are alternative approaches to regulating corporate social responsibility (CSR). Drawing on Pound’s Theory of Social Interests and the institutional and stakeholder theories, it highlights the importance of contextualism in CSR and demonstrates that a values system paradigm may be a more suitable regulatory strategy, particularly in the developing and emerging markets. The chapter suggests that the stakeholder needs approach should be coupled with a values system paradigm for a more effective CSR when stakeholder responsiveness is desired.

Stage 7 of the journey moves to utterance meaning and to various ways of explaining how speakers communicate more than what the sentence says. It introduces the intention-and-inference-based concept of meaning in Grice’s and post-Gricean pragmatics, travelling though maxims, principles, and heuristics proposed by various scholars of this orientation. It then moves to introducing (i) approaches that advocate the ‘maximalist’, contextualist semantic content and (ii) semantic minimalism that preserves a much clearer boundary between semantics and pragmatics – suggesting ‘food for thought’ at many points in the discussion.

[7.1] The aims of this chapter are to state, elaborate on and illustrate the context principle: the duty to have regard to the context of the text whose meaning is in issue. It is not the purpose of this chapter to examine each of the individual contextual aids. Later Parts (Parts IV–VIII) elaborate on the contextual aids that may be considered.

In a seminal contribution, Paul Grice took what he called the ‘total signification of an utterance’ (i.e. the complete content someone communicates by a linguistic signal) and divided it in two, distinguishing between ‘what the speaker says’ versus ‘what the speaker implies’. However, recent developments have served to throw doubt on Grice’s taxonomy, with both sides of his divide coming under fire. I examine these challenges to Grice’s framework, but argue that they do not show that Grice’s notion of implicature is ill-founded, nor that his ’favoured sense’ of what is said is unnecessary. What they do serve to highlight is a peculiar tension in Grice’s original account. For it seems Grice merged two distinct features when defining what the speaker says versus what the speaker implicates: the idea of a content dictated by word meaning and structure alone, on the one hand, and the idea of an asserted or directly expressed proposition on the other. Yet once we resolve this tension it is possible to deliver an account of the total signification of an utterance which is both (fairly) faithful to Grice’s original account and which is able to do a great deal of explanatory work.

This chapter briefly examines contract law trends over the past 200 years or so. The chapter explores the development of the common law of contract, identifying the broad shift from the classical law of the 1800s to the neo-classical law characteristic of the second half of the twentieth century. By the second half of the twentieth century, thanks to the rise of the consumer and empirical evidence demonstrating the minor role played by contracts and contract law in business practice, the classical law model appeared to be under considerable pressure from realist and contextualist rivals that stressed the life of a contract outside its formal express terms. The shift to a more standards-based, neo-classical contract law in response to these tensions was not easily confined to consumer contracts, and there was plenty of scope for importing the broad values of ‘consumer-welfarism’ into commercial contracts. The move to a contextual method of interpretation and the willingness to relax doctrines such as consideration in response to business realities suggested further classical law disintegration. The chapter notes that this process now seems to have gone into reverse.

This chapter begins by summarising the development of the history of ideas out of which conceptual history emerged. It discusses in detail the founding figure of conceptual history, Reinhart Koselleck, and compares his approach to that of the influential Cambridge school, in particular Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, and their ‘contextualism’. The bulk of the chapter is then dedicated to a discussion of a range of examples of how conceptual histories have helped to deconstruct a rainge of collective identities, including class, religious, racial and gender identities. In all of these areas we have seen an intense interest in linking the history of conceps with the study of emotions, social practices and the problematisation of the national container for historical studies. In particular the move to a transnational history of concepts has contributed in a major way to de-essentialising collective national identities but also transnational, i.e. European ones. Furthermore, conceptual history has been emphasising the importance of studying the translation of concepts into different languages and cultural spheres.