http://repub.eur.nl/res/concept/jel-A13/ Recent publications classified by JEL Code A13 en http://repub.eur.nl/static-eur/img/logo.png http://repub.eur.nl http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/38275/ 2012-07-11T00:00:00Z ABSTRACT The rational pursuit of happiness requires knowledge of happiness and in particular answers to the following four questions: 1: Is greater happiness realistically possible? 2: If so, to what extent is that in our own hands? 3: How can we get happier? What things should be considered in the choices we make? 4: How does the pursuit of happiness fit with other things we value? Answers to these questions are not only sought by individuals who want to improve their personal life, they are also on the mind of managers concerned about the happiness of members of their organization and of governments aiming to promote greater happiness of a greater number of citizens. All these actors might make more informed choices if they could draw on a sound base of evidence. In this paper I take stock of the available evidence and the answers it holds for the four types of questions asked by the three kinds of actors. To do this, I use a large collection of research findings on happiness gathered in the World Database of Happiness. The data provide good answers to the questions 1 and 2, but fall short on the questions 3 and 4. Priorities for further research are indicated. Veenhoven, R. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/22352/ 2010-06-01T00:00:00Z The concepts of well-being and quality of life concern evaluative judgements. There is insufficient understanding in current literature that these judgements aremadevariously due to the use of not only differing values and differing research instruments but also differing standpoints, differing purposes, and differing theoretical views and ontological presuppositions. The paper elucidates these sources of differences and how they underlie the wide diversity of current conceptions. Gasper, D.R. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/18710/ 2009-11-01T00:00:00Z The concepts of well-being and quality of life concern evaluative judgements. There is insufficient understanding in current literature that these judgements are made variously due to not only use of differing values and differing research instruments but also differing standpoints, differing purposes, and differing theoretical views and ontological presuppositions. The paper elucidates these sources of differences and how they underlie the wide diversity of current conceptions. Gasper, D.R. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/7645/ 2006-03-30T00:00:00Z The case of the Danish “cartoon war” was a premonition of things to come: accelerated social construction of inequalities and their accelerated symbolic communication, translation and negotiation. New uses of values in organizing and managing inequalities emerge. Values lead active social life as bourgeois virtues (McCloskey, 2006), their subversive alternatives or translated “memes” of cultural history. Since social life of values went global and online, tracing their hybrid manifestations requires cross-culturally competent domestication (Magala, 2005) as if they were “memes” manipulated for further reengineering. Hopes are linked to emergent concepts of “microstorias” (Boje,2002), bottom-up, participative, open citizenship (Balibar,2004), disruption of stereotypical branding in mass-media (Sennett, 2006). However, Kuhn’s opportunistic deviation from Popperian evolutionary epistemology should fade away with other hidden injuries of Cold War, to free our agenda for the future of social sciences in general and organizational sciences in particular (Fuller, 2000, 2003). Magala, S.J. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/1824/ 2004-12-14T00:00:00Z This paper discusses how markets and society relate to each other. We present and discuss three views: markets as separate, markets as embedded, and markets as impure. One’s stance on the contribution of markets to welfare hinges on the conceptualization of market and other spheres in society. If, for instance, one perceives of the economy (the economic domain) as an all-encompassing sphere or as a sphere totally separate from others, then one would believe markets necessarily contribute to welfare. Markets are presumed to be ubiquitous in mainstream economics; the orthodox view is that of the ‘market as separate’. Indeed, Frank Hahn notably conceded that neoclassical economics does not describe markets, but ‘conjures’ them up. Mainstream conceptions of the market are functionalist – in the appropriate conditions the market is an efficiency conduit, and hence wealth and welfare generating. Creating these appropriate conditions then drives policy, such as the provision of health care, and tends to produce a one size fits all approach. This paper argues that this is an overly restrictive conceptualization of markets, and is an inadequate basis for conceptualizing the potential effects of markets. Conceptualizing the market as impure and embedded must be added. We contribute to this discussion by developing the concepts of ‘boundaries’ separating spheres. Such an approach broadens the notion of welfare and well-being beyond the monetized parameters of economic orthodoxy. Dolfsma, W.A. Finch, J. McMaster, R.