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The chapter presents a senior management view on the role of new and technologically advanced tools, such as social media in internal communications.

We conducted 23 in-depth interviews with senior managers of large- and medium-sized companies in Slovenia.

The results obtained in the research confirmed that the senior management possess a strong awareness of the importance of internal communications in managing their organizations. Moreover, many top managers even pointed out that internal communications play a crucial role, and add value to the business performance through more motivated employees and that social media in the context of internal communications are vivid and growing in importance.

The study provides a starting point for further research in this area. However, the core policy recommendation would mainly be focused on internal communication experts, who must no longer underestimate the urgency of developing communication programs that help employees and senior management start working with social media successfully.

The research presents a new — senior management view on the role of social media in internal communications.

Formal research ethics codes perpetuate imbalances between ethics regulators and researchers in the social sciences. Some of these imbalances are an outcome of ethics regimes that use the biomedical paradigm when evaluating social science research. The bureaucratic nature in the manner by which ethics committees operate is yet another factor that produces imbalances that reshape social scientific enquiry. This chapter, however, underscores some of the less recognised ways that ethics codes produce a disequilibrium. First, ethics codes require, in effect, that researchers in the social sciences ‘other’ themselves at the expenses of their traditional stock of social scientific methodology by seeing themselves through the eyes of the colonising ethics codes. Second, ethics codes insist that researchers need to exemplify a far larger number of virtues than the very few set aside for members of ethics review committees. Ethics regimes place social scientists on the margins of the ethics world: the regime not only colonises them, but also insists that they hold on to virtues that are quite absent with respect to members of ethics committees.

Research on job precarity and job instability have largely neglected the labor market trajectories in which these employment and non-employment situations are experienced. This study addresses the mechanisms of volatility and precarity in observed work histories of labor market entrants using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth of 1997. Several ideal-typical post-education pathways are modeled for respondents entering the labor force between 1997 and 2010, with varying indicators and degrees of precarity. A series of predictive models indicate that women, racial-ethnic minorities, and lower social class labor market entrants are significantly more likely to be exposed to the most precarious early careers. Moreover, leaving the educational system with a completed associate’s, bachelor’s, or post-graduate degree is protective of experiencing the most unstable types of career pattern. While adjusting for these individual-level background and education variables, the findings also reveal a form of “scarring” as regional unemployment level is a significant macro-economic predictor of experiencing a more hostile and turbulent early career. These pathways lead to considerable earnings penalties 5 years after labor market entry.

This chapter focuses on the development of corporate human rights standards since the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, better known as the Earth Summit was held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. One of the important agendas for this Summit was human rights (apart from the climate change issue). This chapter provides a critical evaluation of institutional change in human rights guidelines and associated corporate (non) accountability in relation to human rights in line with the RIO summit. Based on a review of the media reports, archival documents and a case study, we argue that while there are a number of international organisations working towards the creation of corporate accountability in relation to human rights, there is limited real change in corporate action when faced with no government regulation. A radical (reform-based) approach, such as mandatory monitoring (compliance audit) and disclosure requirements is necessary to ensure corporate accountability in relation to human rights.

This volume of Sociological Studies of Children and Youth showcases the timely and important work of active, early career sociologists, who are helping to define the direction of the sub-field. Their work shares basic premises and concerns, and these underlie and provide cohesion to this diverse collection of chapters. Children and youth are active agents in their own “socialization,” producing meaning and action collaboratively with their peers, and they struggle for agency and control in various social contexts – these are the themes that, both explicitly and implicitly, shape essentially all of the contributions. The underlying concern of our own introduction above, and of many of the chapters, is that the current processes and practices may stifle children's creativity and undermine their potential to collaboratively construct innovative solutions to societal problems.