Corporate social responsibility has been intensively discussed in business ethics literature, whereas the social responsibility of private consumers appears to be less researched. However, there is also a growing interest from business ethicists and other scholars in the field of consumer social responsibility (ConSR). Nevertheless, previous discussions of ConSR reveal the need for a viable conceptual basis for understanding the social responsibility of consumers in an increasingly globalized market economy. Moreover, evolutionary aspects of human morality seem to have been neglected despite the fact that private consumers are undoubtedly human beings. In addition to that, empirical studies suggest that many consumers believe themselves to be responsible but do not act according to their alleged values or attitudes. This raises the question of what deters them from doing so. Therefore, the contribution of this conceptual paper is threefold: we (i) (re-)conceptualize ConSR in terms of a combination of a Max Weber-inspired approach (social action and the ethic of responsibility) with the social connection approach to shared responsibility proposed by Iris Marion Young; (ii) shed light on the previously neglected implications of an evolutionarily induced bounded morality for ConSR, and (iii) identify potential obstacles to socially responsible consumption, particularly against the backdrop of shared social responsibility and bounded morality. In this latter respect, the paper focuses specifically on the obstacles of low moral intensity, moral stupefaction, informational complexity, and the lack of perceived consumer effectiveness. In sum, the paper advances knowledge in the field of ConSR by using a transdisciplinary, literature-based approach.

In the gauge-fixing approach to ͑chiral͒ lattice gauge theories, the action in the U͑1͒ case implicitly contains a free ghost term, in accordance with the continuum Abelian theory. On the lattice there is no BRST symmetry and, without fermions, the partition function is strictly positive. Recently, Neuberger pointed out, Phys. Rev. D 58, 057502 ͑1998͒, that a different choice of the ghost term would lead to a BRST-invariant lattice model, which is ill defined nonperturbatively. We show that such a lattice model is inconsistent already in perturbation theory, and clearly different from the gauge-fixing approach. ͓S0556-2821͑98͒08719-0͔

The mass production technique of gravure contact printing is used to fabricate state‐of‐the art polymer field‐effect transistors (FETs). Using plastic substrates with prepatterned indium tin oxide source and drain contacts as required for display applications, four different layers are sequentially gravure‐printed: the semiconductor poly(3‐hexylthiophene‐2,5‐diyl) (P3HT), two insulator layers, and an Ag gate. A crosslinkable insulator and an Ag ink are developed which are both printable and highly robust. Printing in ambient and using this bottom‐contact/top‐gate geometry, an on/off ratio of >104 and a mobility of 0.04 cm2 V−1 s−1 are achieved. This rivals the best top‐gate polymer FETs fabricated with these materials. Printing using low concentration, low viscosity ink formulations, and different P3HT molecular weights is demonstrated. The printing speed of 40 m min−1 on a flexible polymer substrate demonstrates that very high‐volume, reel‐to‐reel production of organic electronic devices is possible.

We study a concrete lattice regularization of a U(1) chiral gauge theory. We use Wilson fermions, and include a Lorentz gauge-fixing term and a gauge-boson mass counterterm. For a reduced version of the model, in which the gauge fields are constrained to the trivial orbit, we show that there are no species doublers, and that the fermion spectrum contains only the desired states in the continuum limit, namely charged left-handed (LH) fermions and neutral right-handed (RH) fermions.

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