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Given the impending introduction of legislation requiring large Australian listed companies to make supply chain disclosures about modern slavery, the paper aims to reveal current voluntary practice. The purpose of this paper is to provide a benchmark for assessing the current engagement of large companies with modern slavery in Australia.

Institutional theory provides the foundation for assessing current voluntary practice in relation to modern slavery disclosures by large Australian listed companies. Content analysis is used to identify quantity and quality of modern slavery disclosures of the top 100 companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. The contents of annual and standalone reports available on websites, as well as other online disclosures, are examined using terms associated with modern slavery identified from the literature.

Evidence gathered about modern slavery disclosures by ASX 100 companies shows information in annual and standalone reports reveal far less than other disclosures on company websites. Overall, the volume and quality of disclosures are low and, where made, narrative. A wide range of themes on modern slavery are disclosed with bribery and corruption and human rights issues dominant. Although currently in line with institutional theory, as there appear to be mimetic processes encouraging disclosure, results support the idea that legislation is needed to encourage further engagement.

The paper provides a baseline of understanding about the volume and quality of modern slavery disclosures as a foundation for future research into the practices of Australian companies prior to the signalled introduction of legislation mandating reporting. It also identifies potential lines of research. The sample only examines large Australian listed companies which restricts generalisation from the results.

This is the first academic research paper to examine quantity and quality of modern slavery disclosures of large Australian companies. Results add support for the introduction of legislation by government.

The purpose of this study is to examine the individualistic and the structural nature of human capital and its relationship with poverty.

An examination was made of the individual and the interaction effects of three dimensions of human capital (education, training, and health), gender, race, and underemployment on poverty status, after controlling for the direct effect of these variables. The sample included working‐age individuals in the USA taken from the 1996 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP).

The results show that among the human capital variables, postsecondary education is a particularly important factor associated with poverty among women and minorities. Job training, on the other hand, worsened the economic situation for non‐Whites. For individuals with less than post‐secondary education, the combined effect of training participation and health status significantly reduced the likelihood of being poor. Underemployment consistently moderated the effects of human capital, gender, and race on poverty status. Interestingly, underemployed women were less likely to be poor compared to those with more secure jobs. Women with training were more likely to be poor when they were underemployed compared to being in good jobs. This same relationship held true for minority groups with training having greater likelihood of being poor when they were underemployed.

This study provides an empirical validation of human capital as the structurally vulnerable attributes that are disproportionately distributed in the labor market for many American poor.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become an input to the production of goods and services. Therefore, a general question is there that “How the labor hour/human resource will be replaced by the artificial intelligence?” To answer this question, the paper considers that both AI and the human resources (HR) are the inputs to the firm and explains the choice between the two with reference to the customer relationship management. The paper derives the individual firms and the industry demand functions of the AI and the HR when both are present in the production of the identical or closely related goods and services. Moreover, the paper also shows the strategic behavior of an individual firm with the industry in selecting the AI and the HR. It has been shown that the individual firm's choice in the industry depends on the choice of the industry leader. The paper explains the supermodular game between the firms in an industry.

Game theory, industrial organization and non-convexity theories have been used in this paper to identify the choice between the HR and the AI in the customer relationship management.

The paper explains analytically the preference and demand for AI in the industry. Individual firm's strategic behavior and decision on choosing AI and the industry equilibrium have been studied logically. Moreover, the paper gives some light on the question of employment in presence of AI. The paper proves that in the presence of AI, labor demand will not be reduced but both will be used.

This work proves for the first time using some logical derivation that AI will not crowd out labor from the market. Moreover, to run AI, labor should also be used. It has been proved that to complete a job with speed and quality, both AI and HR are to be used.

The purpose of this paper is to explore potential benefits and possible pitfalls of the removal of the default retirement age.

A human capital and labour market perspective provide theoretical lenses for exploring the potential implications for individuals, organizations and societies. The paper employs financial costing analysis to demonstrate.

The paper uses the UK case to illustrate anticipated managerial and societal outcomes. The main finding from the discussion and the financial analysis is that indeed the current system is unsustainable.

The paper offers areas where lessons about age management can be learnt from other experiences of flexible retirement strategies such as enhancing older workers ' human capital. The idea is of global nature and relevance and forms a “wake-up call” for decision makers at national level.

The purpose of this paper is to critically review the arguments for and against a social clause as an ethical benchmark for international trade.

The paper takes a social economic approach in analysing the case for and against a social clause in international trade. It considers an economic, jurisprudential, social and human rights case for a social clause.

The consideration of a social clause purely in economic terms, removed from its social context fundamentally flaws the arguments on both sides of the debate. The conclusion of south‐south labour agreements, north‐south bilateral free‐trade agreements and regional integration schemes incorporating labour standards has a positive impact on diffusing tension and helping in consensus building around the issue. Labour standards are human rights and to claim comparative advantage in human rights in trade is unethical. There is a need to keep the debate alive especially within the World Trade Organization.

The paper provides an insight into the utility of a social clause in the trade and development agenda for both developed and developing countries.

Given the strength of emotions surrounding the issue, the proposed approach will assist in detoxing the debate and in providing an avenue for vertical and horizontal consensus building on the issue.

A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.

This chapter is about the modern, Western education system as an economic system of production on behalf of the capitalist mode of production (CMP) and globalization towards a single, global social space around market capitalism, liberal democracy and individualism.

The schooling process is above all an economic process, within which educational labour is performed, and through which the education system operates in an integrated fashion with the (external) economic system.

It is mainly through children’s compulsory educational labour that modern schooling plays a part in the production of labour power, supplies productive (paid) employment within the CMP, meets ‘corporate economic imperatives’, supports ‘the expansion of global corporate power’ and facilitates globalization.

What children receive in exchange for their appropriated and consumed labour power within the education system are not payments of the kind enjoyed by adults in the external economy, but instead merely a promise – the promise enshrined in the Western education industry paradigm.

In modern societies, young people, like chattel slaves, are compulsorily prevented from freely exchanging their labour power on the labour market while being compulsorily required to perform educational labour through a process in which their labour power is consumed and reproduced, and only at the end of which as adults they can freely (like freed slaves) enter the labour market to exchange their labour power.

This compulsory dispossession, exploitation and consumption of labour power reflects and reinforces the power distribution between children and adults in modern societies, doing so in a way resembling that between chattel slaves and their owners.

This chapter argues that modern societies are changing in ways that disrupt the complementarity between social structure and character structure. One source of this divergence occurs because, on the one hand, there exists a “neoliberal” character structure that is oriented toward the accumulation of human capital and holds that such accumulation and hard work will allow one to achieve the “American Dream.” On the other hand, the deep embeddedness of this character structure may in fact deepen the possibility of structural crisis, as developments in automation and ongoing transformations of labor continuously shift the economic structure and many feel they are employed in meaningless “soul crushing” jobs. This diagnosis prompts the question: is the accumulation of human capital futile? In other words, can there exist an abundance of jobs that simultaneously pay enough to provide a middle-class lifestyle and be both socially respected by most members of society while also providing subjective meaning for the individual – without accruing high social costs? Through reflections upon my own biography growing up in East Tennessee, this chapter utilizes the framework of Planetary Sociology to encourage sociologists to rethink the category of “human capital” and recognize the divergence of social structure and character structure to be a serious problem with planetary implications. Only by critical examination of the sociohistoric context from a planetary perspective can these challenges be constructively evaluated and reckoned with.

This paper traces the path of Marxism in the 20th century with special focus upon its place within political economy. It argues that the emphasis upon Marxism as a political economy has been directly connected to movement away from Marxism as a theory of class struggle. It begins by establishing how and why, in Marx’s view, all history is a history of class struggles and integrates this perspective with his work in Capital. It is argued that political economy was one of the things Marx was critiquing and that he was attempting to show political economy to be a product of capitalism rather than seeking to establish a Marxist political economy.

This paper poses the question of whether the mainstream feminist movement in the United States, in concentrating its efforts on achieving gender parity in the existing workplace, is selling women short. In it, I argue that contemporary U.S. feminism has not adequately theorized the problems with the relatively unregulated market system in the United States. That failure has contributed to a situation in which women’s participation in the labor market is mistakenly equated with liberation, and in which other far-ranging effects of the market system on women’s lives inside and outside of work – many of them negative – are overlooked. To theorize the effects of the market system on women’s lives in a more nuanced manner, I borrow from the insights of earlier Marxist and socialist feminists. I then use this more nuanced perspective to outline an agenda for feminism, which I call “market-cautious feminism,” that seeks to regulate the market to serve women’s interests.