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Two linked topics concerning environmental issues at the WTO and their implications for MNEs are considered – namely, international business in the environmental goods and services sector, and the relationship of the WTO to the emerging climate change regime, particularly the Kyoto Protocol. Liberalization of barriers to international trade and investment in environmental goods and services could expand market access and otherwise change competitive conditions for multinational firms. The relationship of the WTO to the Kyoto Protocol is on the broader agenda of environmental and economic diplomacy. Decisions concerning these two sets of issues during the next few years will affect multinational firms’ competitive positions, strategies and operations in many industries. For instance, the liberalization of barriers to trade and FDI in the environmental goods and services industry creates new international market opportunities for firms that want to expand abroad; it also creates new competitive threats in home markets. The chapter was in press when the WTO Cancun ministerial meeting collapsed in mid-September 2003.

This chapter provides a legal and theoretical overview of environmental PPMs articulated in private standards. It seeks to expand the debate about environmental PPMs, elucidating important dimensions to the issue from the perspective of global governance and international trade law. One of the arguments advanced in this chapter is that a comprehensive analysis of environmental PPMs should consider not only their role in what is regarded as trade barriers (governmental and market driven) but also their significance in global objectives such as the transition towards a green economy and sustainable patterns of consumption and production.

This chapter is based on an extensive literature review and doctrinal legal research.

This research shows that environmental PPMs represent a key issue in the context of the trade and environment relationship. For decades such measures have been thought of as being trade distortive and thus incompatible with WTO law. Although it seems clear now that they are not unlawful per se, their legal status remains unsettled. PPMs can be regarded as regulatory choices associated with a wide range of environmental concerns. However, in trade disputes, challenged measures involving policy objectives addressing production issues in the conservation of natural resources tend to focus on fishing/harvesting techniques. On the other hand, an important goal of Global Environmental Governance (GEG) is to incentivise sustainable consumption and production in order to achieve the transition to a green economy. In this sense, it can be argued that what are generally denominated as ‘PPMs’ in the WTO terminology can alternatively be regarded ‘SCPs’ in the language of environmental governance. Environmental PPMs are not only limited to state-based measures, such as import bans, tariff preferences, and governmental labelling schemes. Environmental PPMs may also amount to good corporate practices towards environmental protection and provide the rationale for numerous private environmental standards.

Most academic attention afforded to environmental-PPMs has focused on their impacts on trade or their legality under WTO law. Although legal scholars have already referred to the significance of such measures in the context of environmental governance, this issue has remained almost entirely unexplored. This chapter seeks to fill the gap in the literature in this regard. In particular, it addresses the relevance of environmental PPMs in the context of decentralised governance initiatives such as the UN Global Compact and private environmental standards.

Overall, this chapter assists in the understanding of the significance of environmental PPMs in the context of private environmental standards and other governance initiatives involving goals related to sustainable consumption and production. This chapter adds to the existing body of literature on the subject of PPMs in international trade and environmental governance.

This paper sets a case study of missing children in the Republic of Ireland against a review of international research to explore broader understandings and responses to the problem.

The study begins by reviewing the literature on pioneering American initiatives dating back to the 1970s and more recent literature from Great Britain where a series of high-profile scandals involving sexual exploitation of teenage girls provoked a number of controversial inquiries into the police and social work professions. The present study was prompted by an evaluation of the 116 000 Missing Children Hotline which was introduced to Ireland in 2012 under the auspices of the European Union (EU) Daphne III Programme by the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (ISPCC).

The central conclusion emerging from analysis of the evidence is that Missing Children Hotlines remain rooted in representations of ‘stranger danger’ and disconnected from repeat runaway children who feature prominently in police reports from formal care settings or family homes and who are actively targeted by sexual predators and criminal gangs. The implications are that systemic change requires grounding in research strategies which combine police data with anthropological studies to give legitimacy to the voices of runway and sexually exploited children.

The study offers original international perspectives on missing children to epistemological research communities in the fields of social work, criminology and policing with recommendations that Missing Children and Runaway Safe-lines are targeted systemically at keeping runaway children, homeless children and at-risk-youth safe and off the streets.

Agency theorists diagnosed the economic malaise of the 1970s as the result of executive obsession with corporate stability over profitability. Management swallowed many of the pills agency theorists prescribed to increase entrepreneurialism and risk-taking; stock options, dediversification, debt financing, and outsider board members. Management did not swallow the pills prescribed to moderate risk: executive equity holding and independent boards. Thus, in practice, the remedy heightened corporate risk-taking without imposing constraints. Both recessions of the new millennium can be traced directly to these changes in strategy. To date, regulators have proposed nothing to undo the perverse incentives of the new “shareholder value” system.

This study uses data from the British National Child Development Survey (NCDS) to examine interactions between socio-economic status (SES), children's test scores, and future wages and employment. We find that children of lower SES have both lower age 16 test scores and higher returns to these test scores in terms of age 33 wages and employment probabilities than high-SES children.

We then examine determinants of age 16 scores. Conditional on having had the same age 7 mathematics scores, high-SES children go on to achieve higher age 16 mathematics scores than children of low or middle-SES. They are also much more likely to pass O-levels in English and Mathematics. These differences are either eliminated or greatly reduced when observable measures of school quality are added to the model, suggesting that high-SES children get better age 16 test scores at least in part because they attended better schools.

On the other hand, conditional on age 7 scores, low-SES children achieve higher age 16 reading scores than high-SES children and the estimated relationship between the two is not affected by the addition of school quality variables. This observation provides evidence consistent with the conjecture that success in reading may be less dependent on school quality than success in mathematics.

We review literature linking patterns of vocal accommodation in the paraverbal range of the voice to small group structures of status and dominance. We provide a thorough overview of the current state of vocal accommodation research, tracing the development of the model from its early focus on patterns of mutual vocal adaptation, to the current focus on structural factors producing patterns of unequal accommodation between group members. We also highlight gaps in existing knowledge and opportunities to contribute to the development of vocal accommodation as an unobtrusive, nonconscious measure of small group hierarchies.

We trace the empirical development of vocal accommodation as a measure of status and power, and discuss connections between vocal accommodation and two prominent theoretical frameworks: communication accommodation theory (CAT) and expectation states theory. We also provide readers with a guide for collecting and analyzing vocal data and for calculating two related measures of vocal accommodation.

Across multiple studies, vocal accommodation significantly predicts observers’ perceptions regarding interactants engaged in debates and interviews. Studies have specifically linked vocal accommodation to perceptions of relative power or dominance, but have not shown a relationship between accommodation and perceptions of prestige.

Vocal accommodation measures have clear applications for measuring and modeling group dynamics. More work is needed to understand how accommodation functions in clearly-defined status situations, how the magnitude of status differences affects the degree of accommodation inequality, and how vocal accommodation is related to other correlates of social status, including openness to influence and contributions to group tasks.

This chapter analyzes the ways that individuals develop person-to-group ties. The chapter reviews the development and evidentiary basis of the theory of relational cohesion, the affect theory of social exchange, and the theory of social commitments.

We survey twenty-five years of published literature on these theories, and review unpublished theoretical tests and extensions that are currently in progress.

The research program has grown substantially over the past twenty-five years to encompass more varied and diverse phenomena. The findings indicate that structural interdependencies, repeated exchanges, and a sense of shared responsibility are key conditions for people to develop affective ties to groups, organizations, and even nation-states.

The research implies that if people are engaged in joint tasks, they attribute positive or negative feelings from those tasks to their local groups (teams, departments) and/or to larger organizations (companies, communities). To date, empirical tests have focused on microlevel processes.

Our work has practical implications for how managers or supervisors organize tasks and work routines in a way to maximize group or organizational commitment.

This research helps to understand problems of fragmentation that are faced by decentralized organizations and also how these can be overcome.

The chapter represents the most complete and comprehensive review of the theory of relational cohesion, the affect theory of social exchange, and the theory of social commitments to date.

In this chapter, we explain the significance and need for a spiritual approach among techies that would help them be human-centric, compassionate and value-based for sustainable development. We introduced four perspectives of workplace spirituality, higher purpose, interconnectedness, meaningfulness and mindfulness, as significant indicators of sustainable behaviour among the techies. Finally, we discuss how a spiritual approach could help techies contribute to sustainable development. We contribute to the literature by elucidating the role of spirituality among techies that could help advance sustainable technological development and techie's well-being.