Search results

This study examines shareholder and board motivations regarding corporate social responsibility (CSR) to understand boards' stewardship approaches to environmental issues.

Using content analysis, the authors classify CSR motivations in all environmental shareholder proposals and board responses of Fortune 250 companies from 2013 to 2017 from do little (a shareholder primacy perspective) to do much (a stakeholder pluralism perspective). The authors calculate the motivational dissonance for each proposal-response pair (the Talk Gap) and use cluster analysis to observe evidence of board stewardship and subsequent environmental disclosure and performance (ED&P) changes.

Board interpretations of stewardship are not uniform, and they regularly extend to stakeholders beyond shareholders, most frequently including profit-oriented stakeholders (e.g. employees and customers). ED&P changes are highest when shareholders narrowly lead boards in CSR motivation and either request both action and information or information only. The authors observe weaker ED&P changes when shareholders request action and the dissonance between shareholders and boards is larger. When shareholders are motivated to do little for CSR, ED&P changes are weak, even when boards express more pluralistic motivations.

The results show the important role that boards play in CSR and may aid activist shareholders in determining how best to generate change in corporate CSR actions.

This study provides the first evidence of board stewardship at the proposal-response level. It measures shareholder and board CSR motivations, introduces the Talk Gap, and examines relationships among proposal characteristics, the Talk Gap, and subsequent ED&P change to better understand board stewardship of environmental issues.

I suggest that the search for Adam Smith’s theodicy is likely to be in vain. The paper begins with a brief history of approaches to evil, emphasizing the context in which they arose, and the questions authors were addressing. Approaches most relevant to Adam Smith include those of Augustine and Calvin, and the early modern theodicies of Leibniz, Samuel Clarke and William King, as well as the attacks on them by Bayle and Voltaire. Scottish Enlightenment writers were not terribly interested in theodicy, though Hutcheson and Kames did devote space to their versions of problems of evil. David Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion are often taken to be classic statement of the problem of theodicy and argument against religious belief, but his concern was to demolish rationalistic theodicies rather than religious belief or practice. The paper then turns to Smith’s writings, considering similarities and differences to these approaches to evil. Smith emphasizes the wisdom and beneficence of God, and that evils we observe are part of a larger providential plan. He makes no attempt to justify the God in the face of evil, and in this respect Smith shares more with Augustine and Calvin than he does with the early modern theodicists. Smith’s approach to evil is simple and ameliorative. Smith’s approach contrasts with early nineteenth century English political economists, from Malthus onwards, for whom theodicy was important. Whatever view we take of the theodicists project of justifying an all-powerful and good God in the face of evil may, we still struggle to make sense of economic suffering and evil.

Following the ‘Sarkozy’ era (2007–2012), France has engaged in ‘zero-tolerance’ policies, which have brought an increasing number of people into the criminal justice system (CJS). In an already extremely impoverished CJS, these policies have led to serious financial problems and have made an already existing prison overcrowding problem worse. Consequently, the CJS has gradually opted for a McDonald (Ritzer, 2019; Robinson, 2019) type of offender processing, whether in prosecutor-led procedures (representing roughly half of all penal procedures: Ministry of Justice, 2019) or in the sentencing phase (Danet, 2013). A similar trend has been found in probation and in prisoner release (in French: ‘sentences’ management).

The prison and probation services, which merged in 1999, have since then been in a position to benefit from the 1958 French Republic Constitution, which places the executive in a dominant position and notably allows it to draft the bills presented to a rather passive legislative power (Rousseau, 2007) and even to enjoy its own set of normative powers (‘autonomous decrees’ – Hamon & Troper, 2019). By way of law reforming (2009, 2014, and 2019 laws), the prison and probation services have thus embraced the McDonaldisation ethos. Their main obsession has been to early release as many prisoners as possible in order to free space and to accommodate more sentenced people. To do so, the prison services have created a series of so-called ‘simplified’ early release procedures, where prisoners are neither prepared for nor supported through release, where they are deprived of agency and where due process and attorney advice are removed. Behind a pretend rehabilitative discourse, the executive is only interested in efficiently flushing people out of prison; not about re-entry efficacy. As Ritzer (2019) points out, McDonaldisation often leads to counter-productive or absurd consequences. In the case of early release, the stubborn reality is that one cannot bypass actually doing the rehabilitative and re-entry work. I shall additionally argue that not everything truly qualifies as an early release measure (Ostermann, 2013). Only measures which respect prisoners’ agency prepare them for their release, which support them once they are in the community, which address their socio-psychological and criminogenic needs, and which are pronounced in the context of due process and defence rights truly qualify as such. As it is, French ‘simplified’ release procedures amount to McRe-entry and mass nothingness.

This is a general review study aiming to specify the key customer-based factors and technologies that influence the value co-creation (VCC) process through artificial intelligence (AI) and automation in the hospitality and tourism industry.

The study uses a theory-based general literature review approach to explore key customer-based factors and technologies influencing VCC in the tourism industry. By reviewing the relevant literature, the authors conclude a theoretical framework postulating the determinants of VCC in the AI-driven tourism industry.

This paper identifies customers' perceptions, attitudes, trust, social influence, hedonic motivations, anthropomorphism and prior experience as customer-based factors to VCC through the use of AI. Service robots, AI-enabled self-service kiosks, chatbots, metaversal tourism and new reality, machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) are technologies that influence VCC.

The results of this research inform a theoretical framework articulating the human and AI elements for future research set to expand the models predicting VCC in the tourism industry.

Few studies have examined consumer-related factors that influence their participation in the VCC process through automation and AI.

Despite widespread recognition of the importance of place in entrepreneurship research, much less attention has been paid to the methodological challenges that inquiries into place presents. Understanding the relationship between place and entrepreneurship is becoming increasingly important as focus turns to sustainable entrepreneurship and as policy makers turn to ‘place-based’ approaches to regional sustainability challenges. This chapter provides insight one researcher’s experiences engaging stakeholders in discussions about the relationship between a place-based university programme for sustainability and local sustainability agendas. The chapter reveals the struggles experienced by both researcher and participants in articulating what places and the local region means to both individuals and to the programme. The findings provide an important insight into how researchers studying place need to be cognisant of the limitations and flexibility of language when engaging research participants in discussing the relationship between place, sustainability, and entrepreneurship.

In this chapter, I take a symbolic interactionist look at the anthropomorphic projections of 38 people in four large Canadian cities who report having encountered ghosts. As part of a larger project on perceived encounters with ghosts, I interviewed these people using audiotape, transcribed the interviews, and identified themes within them. Together, they mentioned 195 ghosts and described their appearances and actions. I identified anthropomorphic projections in four areas: (1) Physicality – pertaining to the bodies of the ghosts, (2) Relational – pertaining to kinship ties, e.g., mothers, fathers, grandmothers, (3) Rational – the ghosts' motivations and justifications, and (4) Affective – pertaining to the ghosts' emotions. These anthropomorphic projections were the respondents' efforts at sense making after having encountered what they believed to be phantasmal.

In this article, we discuss an innovative audience research methodology developed for the AHRC-funded “Beyond the Multiplex: Audiences for Specialised Film in English Regions” project (BtM). The project combines a computational ontology with a mixed-methods approach drawn from both the social sciences and the humanities, enabling research to be conducted both at scale and in depth, producing complex relational analyses of audiences. BtM aims to understand how we might enable a wide range of audiences to participate in a more diverse film culture, and embrace the wealth of films beyond the mainstream in order to optimise the cultural value of engaging with less familiar films. BtM collects data through a three-wave survey of film audience members’ practices, semi-structured interviews and film-elicitation groups with audience members alongside interviews with policy and industry experts, and analyses of key policy and industry documents. Bringing each of these datasets together within our ontology enables us to map relationships between them across a variety of different concerns. For instance, how cultural engagement in general relates to engagement with specialised films; how different audiences access and/or share films across different platforms and venues; how their engagement with those films enables them to make meaning and generate value; and how all of this is shaped by national and regional policy, film industry practices, and the decisions of cultural intermediaries across the fields of film production, distribution and exhibition. Alongside our analyses, the ontology enables us to produce data visualisations and a suite of analytical tools for audience development studies that stakeholders can use, ensuring the research has impact beyond the academy. This paper sets out our methodology for developing the BtM ontology, so that others may adapt it and develop their own ontologies from mixed-methods empirical data in their studies of other knowledge domains.