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This study explores the extent of environmental management and reporting regulations in Nigeria, highlighting areas of inadequacies in regulatory enforcement and companies’ compliance. We approach the review within the context of the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda (SDA).

This chapter is based on a systematic review of extant environmental regulations and academic literature.

The results show several inadequacies with respect to Nigeria’s environmental management and reporting regulations. We specifically note the changing environmental management and reporting landscape in Nigeria birthing several emerging mandatory reporting codes. We find that fragmented reporting regulations and inappropriate sanctions are responsible for the unsatisfactory compliance and disclosure level noted among firms in the country. Additionally, weak enforcement, funding limitations, unrealistic financial penalties, and general implementation deficits remain factors impeding effective environmental management practice in Nigeria.

This research provides insight into environmental management and reporting inadequacies in Nigeria, and the actions regulators and firm managers need to take on board to help the country actualize the UN 2030 SDA.

This study investigates the effect of honesty reminders on budgetary slack. Based on self-concept maintenance theory, the authors posit that honesty reminders can reduce budgetary slack by making people more aware of their own standards of honesty, resulting in more honest behavior. Using an experimental research design, the authors find evidence that honesty reminders reduce budgetary slack. The authors also find that although penalties can similarly reduce budgetary slack, they tend to cause distrust and resentment from subordinates. Therefore, honesty reminders may be a less costly method than penalties for reducing budgetary slack.

Like many other countries, a reform of school meals policies has been implemented in Portugal, wherein nutritional and health criteria are considered in the design of the public plate. Given that a large literature on school meals focus on cities seen as sites for promising transformation regarding health, resilience and sustainability, it is pertinent to examine how these policies are being received in rural areas. Similar to other vulnerable regions in southern Europe, rural areas in Portugal have been affected by depopulation, the re-localisation of public services (e.g. schools, health centres and courts of justice) to larger conurbations, a drastic reduction of farming areas and its reconversion from sites of production to sites of consumption that thrive on tourism. While research on children’s attitudes, experiences and practices in rural areas had picked up the attention of social scientists, research on children’s relations and engagements with school meals in these areas does not abound. This chapter addresses three issues: first, how the catering staff and health professionals experience children’s engagements with school meals after the policy reform; second, how the discourses of the school staff and parents around the rural and gastro-idylls contrast with the reported food practices and experiences of everyday life, and third, how the multiple engagements of children with animals, plants and other nature conflict with or are juxtaposed to the images of the rural idyll. Drawing from focus groups material with children aged between 7 and 9 years old living in the rural hinterland of an inland medium-size city in Portugal, focus groups with parents and interviews with stakeholders (e.g. school and kitchen staff, local authorities, nutritionists and catering firms) the chapter aims at contributing to a broader understanding of children lived experiences with food consumption in rural contexts.

Capitalism has proved to be by far the best society at producing surpluses. Other societies at particular points in history have been effective, too. For instance Ancient Egyptians were obviously good at it, directing their surplus into building pyramids and great monuments. The Mayans, Incas and Aztecs were good at it too, in the same way as were the Neolithic builders of Stonehenge in England, the Callinish stones in the Hebrides and Carnac in Britanny. Capitalism, however, is unique in the sense that its capacity to produce surpluses far exceeds that of any other period or system. In addition, the capitalist system involves a threefold possibility for the utilization of the surpluses: consumption by individuals, consumption by the state for civil and military purposes and reinvestment by capitalists to produce more surplus. The balance among these three determines the stability of the system and the pace of growth. Consumption by the state is the least new phenomenon; here again, the pyramids of the Aztecs, Mayans and Egyptians are examples. What is new, and certainly new on the scale we now observe, is that the capitalist system is dependent on those individuals who collectively make up the absorptive class, and on the host of small and medium capitalists and the huge corporations to reinvest the surplus to make more capital. However, the system as a whole serves to destroy the surpluses when capitalist processes are such that the capacity to consume diminishes in relation to the quantities produced.

Renewed thinking on the idea of responsibility as the foundation of human relationships and of the relation of humans with nature is essential to face the current worldwide crises. While all people have an equal entitlement to rights, their responsibilities are proportionate to the possibilities open to them: freedom, access to knowledge, wealth and power. All increase the capacity for exercising responsibilities and the duty to account for them.

The practice of responsibility as a two-fold commitment of assuming charges and accounting for one’s actions is affected by ethical erosion, fragmentation, controversy, rugged individualism and rapid structural changes at the global level and within societies partly due to unprecedented progress of the sciences and technologies. Moral appeals, codes of conduct, declarations and manifestos, and unbinding self-regulation in the field of Corporate Social Responsibility are insufficient to counteract structured ‘de-responsibilisation’ and irresponsible unsanctioned behaviour that undermine the solution of the current crises.

A new international reference text on human responsibility, as a complement to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, setting out the basic principles of the idea of responsibility, and serving as a basis for international jurisdiction, must be a priority on the international agenda.

David M. Gordon advanced labour economics with his theory of labour market segmentation, in which jobs rather than the marginal productivity of individual workers were the unit of analysis. He advanced economic historiography and macroeconomics by conceptualising social structures of accumulation – a framework built on the foundation of his institutionalist training and enriched by his study of Marxist economics. By appropriating methods from other social science disciplines into econometrics, he augmented empirical analysis in economics. He was a founding member of the Union of Radical Political Economics and its journal, the Review of Radical Political Economics – that advanced and promoted heterodox, radical, and Marxist economists in the United States. His contributions to economics, to organised labour, and to the New School for Social Research, where I studied with him, were stunning.

Part 1 lays out some context about the New School Graduate Faculty where Gordon taught. Part 2 explores what historical forces, including his family, led to his expansive creativity. Part 3 summarises how he expanded labour economics to include the relations as well as the technology of production, linked his understanding of the production process to a historical materialist view of labour in the United States, then extended that to econometric analyses of the US macroeconomy. Part 4 presents a bibliometric analysis to provide some idea of the impact of his work. I end with some concluding remarks.

This chapter covers a full picture of the remaining chapters. The first part discusses the gap in the literature and the main objectives of this book. The next section overviews the book's design and methodology which includes the conceptual model, the research design and the research methodology. The final section in this chapter is the book's theoretical and practical contributions.

Materialism is a consumer value that stresses the importance of acquiring more and more material goods. Success is defined in terms of the type and quantity of goods one owns and happiness is expected to result from physical wealth (Beutler, Beutler, & McCoy, 2008). Materialism as defined thus is closely tied to the idea of the pursuit of rational self-interest that has been associated with Adam Smith (1776).