Search results

Rights and duties are involved in every area of business and markets, and society and governments. Most often, rights and duties involve serious ethical and moral issues of conflict. A good theory of the ethics of rights and duties, obligations, and responsibilities will empower us to understand the impact of our actions on various stakeholders. Additionally, a deep understanding of rights and duties could help us to analyze better the impact of our executive actions on various stakeholders and, in particular, to fathom the damaging effects of rights and duties violated by the man-made current financial crisis when seen from an ethical and moral point of view. Our coverage on the ethics of corporate rights and duties will comprise of two parts: Part 1: The Nature of Corporate Business Rights and Duties, and Part 2: Respecting Corporate Rights and Duties. The chapter will feature Newcomb Wellesley Hohfeld’s framework of legal interests such as claims, privileges, power, and immunity and its various applications to contemporary market and corporate executive situations. We illustrate the theory of rights and duties using several cases from the current turbulent markets.

Asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants’ access to healthcare vary in South Africa and Cape Town due to unclear legal status. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the source of this variation, the divergence between the 1996 South African Constitution, the immigration laws, and regulations and to describe its harmful consequences.

Based on legal and ethnographic research, this paper documents the disjuncture between South African statutes and regulations and the South African Constitution regarding refugees and migrants’ access to healthcare. Research involved examining South African jurisprudence, the African Charter, and United Nations’ materials regarding rights to health and health care access, and speaking with civil society organizations and healthcare providers. These sources inform the description of the immigrant access to healthcare in Cape Town, South Africa.

Asylum-seekers and refugees are entitled to health and emergency care; however, hospital administrators require documentation (up-to-date permits) before care can be administered. Many immigrants – especially the undocumented – are often unable to obtain care because of a lack of papers or because of “progressive realization,” the notion that the state cannot presently afford to provide treatment in accordance with constitutional rights. These explanations have put healthcare providers in an untenable position of not being able to treat patients, including some who face fatal conditions.

The research is limited by the fact that South African courts have not adjudicated a direct challenge to being refused care at healthcare facility on the basis of legal status. This limits the ability to know how rights afforded to “everyone” within the South African Constitution will be interpreted with respect to immigrants seeking healthcare. The research is also limited by the non-circulation of healthcare admissions policies among leading facilities in the Cape Town region where the case study is based.

Articulation of the disjuncture between the South African Constitution and the immigration laws and regulations allows stakeholders and decision-makers to reframe provincial and municipal policies about healthcare access in terms of constitutional rights and the practical limitations accommodated through progressive realization.

In South Africa, immigration statutes and regulations are inconsistent and deemed unconstitutional with respect to the treatment of undocumented migrants. Hospital administrators are narrowly interpreting the laws to instruct healthcare providers on how to treat patients and whom they can treat. These practices need to stop. Access to healthcare must be structured to comport with the constitutional right afforded to everyone, and with progressive realization pursued through a non – discriminatory policy regarding vulnerable immigrants.

This paper presents a unique case study that combines legal and social science methods to explore a common and acute question of health care access. The case is novel and instructive insofar as South Africa has not established refugee camps in response to rising numbers of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants. South Africans thus confront a “first world” question of equitable access to healthcare within their African context and with limited resources in a climate of increasing xenophobia.

Background: This work is a situation analysis of reported human rights abuses that have characterized the COVID-19 controls and lockdown in some countries of the world. This is as documented by reliable mass media sources, relevant international organizations and human rights non-governmental organizations between January 2020 to April 2020.

Methods: A combined content analysis, critical analysis, and doctrinal method is applied in this study in line with the reproducible research process. It is a secondary-data-based situation analysis study, conducted through a qualitative research approach.

Findings: The findings revealed among other things that: COVID-19 lockdowns and curfews' enforcement by law enforcement officers contravened some people's fundamental human rights within the first month. Security forces employed overt and immoderate forces to implement the orders. The lockdown and curfew enforcements were not significantly respectful of human life and human dignity. The COVID-19 emergency declarations in some countries were discriminatory against minorities and vulnerable groups in some countries.

Research limitations/implications: This report is based on data from investigative journalism and opinions of the United Nations and international human rights organizations, and not on police investigations or reports. The implication of the study is that if social marketing orientations and risk communication and community engagement attitudes were given to the law enforcement officers implementing the COVID-19 lockdowns and or curfews, the human rights and humanitarian rights breaches witnessed would have been avoided or drastically minimized.

Originality: The originality of this review is that it is the first to undertake a situation analysis of the COVID-19 lockdowns and curfews human rights abuses in some countries. The study portrayed the poor level of social marketing orientations and risk communication and community engagement attitudes amongst law enforcement officers, culminating in the frosty police-public relationships.

This study aims to investigate how media content consumed through immersive technology may evoke changes in human rights attitudes. It has been proposed that our inability to empathize with others could be overcome by stepping into another's shoes. “Immersive journalism” has been postulated as being able to place us into the shoes of those whose feelings and experiences are distant to us. While virtual reality (VR) and 360-degree news videos have become widely available, it remains unclear how the consumption of content through immersive journalism affects users' attitudes.

Utilizing a between-subject laboratory-controlled experiment (N = 87) this study examined participant scores on the Human Rights Questionnaire before and after consuming 360-degree video immersive journalism content via VR (n = 31), 2D (n = 29), and Article (n = 27) formats. Collected data were analysed using statistical inference.

Results indicate that immersive journalism can elicit a positive attitudinal change in users, unlike an Article, with mobile VR having a more prominent effect than a 2D screen. Furthermore, this change is more strongly affected by users' higher Involvement in the content.

These findings are relevant for grasping the distinct effects novel and recently popularized technologies and media have on attitudinal change, as well as inform the current debate on the value of VR as “empathy machines”.

Family constitutions are relatively new to the law of family companies, although there might have been forerunners in the history of entrepreneur families. The practical importance and the proliferation of family constitutions in German family companies are increasing, along with the discussion of family constitutions in legal literature. This new instrument of family governance is not law driven but business driven, it has been designed by business advisors. Its analysis and classification are still at the very beginning in academic research and practice. Even though family constitutions are generally deemed to be without any legal effect and not legally binding, from a legal point of view, this assumption is at least highly questionable.

The nonconsensual taking or sharing of nude or sexual images, also known as “image-based sexual abuse,” is a major social and legal problem in the digital age. In this chapter, we examine the problem of image-based sexual abuse in the context of digital platform governance. Specifically, we focus on two key governance issues: first, the governance of platforms, including the regulatory frameworks that apply to technology companies; and second, the governance by platforms, focusing on their policies, tools, and practices for responding to image-based sexual abuse. After analyzing the policies and practices of a range of digital platforms, we identify four overarching shortcomings: (1) inconsistent, reductionist, and ambiguous language; (2) a stark gap between the policy and practice of content regulation, including transparency deficits; (3) imperfect technology for detecting abuse; and (4) the responsibilization of users to report and prevent abuse. Drawing on a model of corporate social responsibility (CSR), we argue that until platforms better address these problems, they risk failing victim-survivors of image-based sexual abuse and are implicated in the perpetration of such abuse. We conclude by calling for reasonable and proportionate state-based regulation that can help to better align governance by platforms with CSR-initiatives.

Many early-career researchers (ECR) are motivated by the prospect of creating knowledge that is useful, not just within but also beyond the academic community. Although research facilities, funders and academic journals praise this eagerness for societal impact, the path toward such contributions is by no means straightforward. In this essay, we address five common concerns faced by ECRs when they strive for societal impact. We discuss the opportunity costs associated with impact work, the fuzziness of current impact measurement, the challenge of incremental results, the actionability of research findings, and the risk of saying something wrong in public. We reflect on these concerns in light of our own experience with impact work and conclude by suggesting a “post-heroic” perspective on impact, whereby seemingly mundane activities are linked in a meaningful way.

In the early 2010s, the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) became increasingly concerned about incidents of academic workplace “bullying” on the campus, and in 2014–2016 created policies designed to address such behavior at the University. The new policies and accompanying initiatives were implemented in 2017, defining a new term to describe these behaviors as “hostile and intimidating behavior” (HIB). We use data from three sources to explore the outcomes of the new HIB policies and initiatives to date. Evaluation data from training sessions show the importance of educating the campus community about HIB, providing evidence that the training sessions increase HIB knowledge. Data from two campus-wide surveys measure incidence of HIB for different groups on campus (e.g., analysis by gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability status, rank, job duty, and/or the intersection of these characteristics), as well as changes in the knowledge about HIB as reported by faculty and staff. These data show that UW-Madison faculty and staff are increasing their knowledge of HIB as a problem and also increasing their knowledge about what to do about it. Underrepresented groups who more commonly experience HIB agree that this culture is improving. At the same time, we are seeing slow and uneven progress in reduction of actual incidence of HIB at UW-Madison. We close with some “lessons learned” about instituting such a sweeping, campus-wide effort to reduce HIB, in the hopes that other campuses can learn from our experience.

This study investigates (1) whether democratization drives sovereign credit ratings (SCR) changes (the “democratic advantage”) or whether SCR changes affect democratization, (2) whether the degree of democratization in sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries affects the associations and (3) whether the associations are significantly affected by resource dependence.

This study investigates the effects of SCR changes on democracy in 22 SSA countries over the period of 2000–2020 VEC Granger causality/block exogeneity Wald tests, and impulse responses and variance decomposition analyses with Cholesky ordering and Monte Carlo standard errors in a panel VECM framework.

The full sample impulse responses find that a SCR shock has a long-run detrimental effect on the democracy and political rights but only a short-run positive impact on civil liberties. Among the sub-samples, it is found that the extent of natural resource dependence does not affect the magnitude of SCR shocks on democratization mentioned above but it is found that a SCR shock affects long-run democracy in SSA countries that are relatively more democratic but is more likely to drive democratic deepening in less democratic SSA countries. The full sample variance decompositions further finds that the variance of SCR to a political rights shock outweighs the effects of all the macroeconomic factors, whereas in more diversified SSA countries, the variances of SCR are much greater for democracy and political rights shocks, which suggests that democratization and political rights in diversified SSA economies are severely affected by SCR changes. In the case of the high and low democracy sub-samples, it is found that the variance of SCR in the relatively higher democracy sub-sample is greater than in the low democracy sub-sample.

These results have three implications for democratization in SSA. First, the effect of a SCR change is not a democratically agnostic and impacts political rights to a greater extent than civil liberties. Second, SCR changes have the potential to spark a negative cycle in SSA countries whereby a downgrade leads to a deterioration in socio-political stability coupled with increased financial economic constraints that in turn drive further downgrades and macroeconomic hardship. Finally, SCR changes are potentially detrimental for democracy in more democratic SSA countries but democratically supportive in less democratic SSA countries. Thus, SSA countries that are relatively politically sophisticated are more exposed to the effects of SCR changes, whereas less politically sophisticated SSA countries can proactively shape their SCRs by undertaking political reforms.

This study is the first to examine the associations between SCR and democracy in SSA. This is critical literature for the Africa’s scholarly work given that the debate on unfair rating actions and claims of subjective rating methods is ongoing.