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This chapter pulls together the main strands of Child Labour in Global Society, and addresses their implications for the sociological study of children’s lives, schooling and slavery.

In popular and scholarly discourses there is a tendency to emphasize the differences between the social lives of children and those of adults rather than the similarities and continuities; to misrepresent children’s social activities in comparison with those of adults; to rationalize the differential way in which children’s social activities and participation are assessed and rewarded relative to those of adults; and to fortify children’s actual and/or assumed marginal situation in modern society.

There are sociological gains to be had from emphasizing the comparable features and structural links between ‘childhood’ and ‘adulthood’ due especially to the common participation of children and adults in productive labour.

The way in which children’s social activities are differentially assessed and rewarded is reflected in how children are denied full citizenship rights, and so are non-citizens.

In particular, children are denied the right to freely exchange their labour power on the labour market.

While viewing educational labour as forced labour does not sit well with ideas about children and childhood in modern society, doing so is consistent with the element of compulsion in for instance the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).

Being compulsorily required to perform educational labour is indicative of how in modern societies children are owned and in slavery, not just of the de facto kind, but also of the de jure kind.

The purpose of this paper is to review the economic arguments for and against raising the tariff on imports of cotton into China.

The paper reviews first the possible arguments for raising the tariff, and particularly the possibility that such an increase in tariffs would have a favorable distributional effect by redistributing from those involved in the production of textiles and clothing to the producers of cotton. The core analysis of the paper examines the policies in place using descriptions of policies and interviews with policymakers. It also assembles statistics designed to assess the export status of cotton, whether in raw or processed form.

The paper reviews the situation with respect to WTO commitments and confirms that such an increase, up to 40 percent, would be permitted under WTO rules. The paper then examines other constraints on the effective use of such higher tariffs on cotton. Policies that are better than tariff increases in dealing with the serious problems of rural incomes are identified.

The paper is unable to assess the distributional impacts of an increase in the tariff on cotton. It raises a number of cautions about the issues that need to be confronted in making such an assessment.

The issue of raising the tariff on cotton has been a subject of intense debate in China and this paper is intended to provide an input into this debate. The paper agrees that urgent action is clearly needed to mitigate the poverty problems in rural China, but concludes that a number of policy options appear likely to be more effective in dealing with these problems than protection of cotton.

Information about Volkswagen’s human and animal testing was obtained from the secondary sources cited.

In 2014, Volkswagen (VW), BMW and Daimler funded an institute to conduct research to support their position that diesel engines are cleaner and safer than other fuel alternatives. One of the research studies conducted by the institute examined the effects of diesel fumes on humans and monkeys. Researchers put ten macaque monkeys in sealed rooms and pumped in exhaust fumes from a Volkswagen Beetle for four hours. For comparison, another group of monkeys was exposed to fumes from an older Ford pickup. The monkeys were later anesthetized and examined to see what the fumes did to their bodies. Other tests involved willing human subjects who were exposed to similar conditions.

This case is applicable to upper-level management or business ethics class.

Social participation or public participation is a mechanism that aims to enable decision makers to understand the real needs of society and to promote more appropriate and acceptable public policies. The purpose of this paper is to analyze, through Douglasian Cultural Theory, the public-consultation mechanism, and to what extent it encourages the participation of people with different points of view in the formulation of public policies.

This research paper uses theoretical propositions from Douglasian Cultural Theory to investigate the process of public consultation adopted by the Brazilian National Health Surveillance Agency (Anvisa) in the formulation of public policies for Brazil’s health sector.

The results contribute to the findings of previous studies, i.e., that social participation is unequal, and that some points of view are dominant in policy formulation. This indicates that public managers should seek mechanisms of participation that promote more inclusive and pluralistic public participation.

The main limitations of this study are the subjectivity inherent in the classification of “voices” in Douglasian Cultural Theory, the small number of contributions analyzed and the absence of some unpublished data.

The analysis contributes to the literature by supporting some and rejecting other propositions of Douglasian Cultural Theory, as well as indicating possible potential from this theory through public administration in the evaluation of mechanisms of social participation.

Examines the tenth published year of the ITCRR. Runs the whole gamut of textile innovation, research and testing, some of which investigates hitherto untouched aspects. Subjects discussed include cotton fabric processing, asbestos substitutes, textile adjuncts to cardiovascular surgery, wet textile processes, hand evaluation, nanotechnology, thermoplastic composites, robotic ironing, protective clothing (agricultural and industrial), ecological aspects of fibre properties – to name but a few! There would appear to be no limit to the future potential for textile applications.

This paper investigates how organisations are responding to mandatory modern slavery disclosure legislation. Experimentalist governance suggests that organisations faced with disclosure requirements such as those contained in the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 will compete with one another, and in doing so, improve compliance. The authors seek to understand whether this is the case.

This study is set in the UK public sector. The authors conduct interviews with over 25% of UK universities that are within the scope of the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 and examine their reporting and disclosure under that legislation.

The authors find that, contrary to the logic of experimentalist governance, universities' disclosures as reflected in their modern slavery statements are persistently poor on detail, lack variation and have led to little meaningful action to tackle modern slavery. They show that this is due to a herding effect that results in universities responding as a sector rather than independently; a built-in incapacity to effectively manage supply chains; and insufficient attention to the issue at the board level. The authors also identity important boundary conditions of experimentalist governance.

The generalisability of the authors’ findings is restricted to the public sector.

In contexts where disclosure under the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 is not a core offering of the sector, and where competition is limited, there is little incentive to engage in a “race to the top” in terms of disclosure. As such, pro-forma compliance prevails and the effectiveness of disclosure as a tool to drive change in supply chains to safeguard workers is relatively ineffective. Instead, organisations must develop better knowledge of their supply chains and executives and a more critical eye for modern slavery to be combatted effectively. Accountants and their systems and skills can facilitate this development.

This is the first investigation of the organisational processes and activities which underpin disclosures related to modern slavery disclosure legislation. This paper contributes to the accounting and disclosure modern slavery literature by investigating public sector organisations' processes, activities and responses to mandatory reporting legislation on modern slavery.

This study delves into the factors that influence the practice of female genital mutilation in West Africa, as well as the health implications. An online cross-sectional study was conducted with the use of electronic questionnaire. The study was targeted at adult females who were between the age of 18 and 50 years old. The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) of the electronic questionnaire was administered on social media platforms (Facebook and WhatsApp) only through convenience and snowball sampling techniques. A sample size of 3,119 adult females participated in the study. Spearman rank correlation (r) was employed to test the hypotheses. Responses were gathered from adult females whom originates from nine West African countries which are Nigeria, Ghana, Mali, Liberia, Benin, Cameroon, Chad, Gambia and Guinea. The study found a strong and positive relationship between culture and the practice of female genital mutilation in West Africa, and there was a weak and positive relationship between religion and education, and the practice of female genital mutilation in West Africa. Despite the health risks, it was revealed that female genital mutilation remained uninterrupted in West Africa. The findings of this study imply that the culture of the people, religious belief system and education are critical factors in efforts to be considered when discouraging the practice of female genital mutilation. Therefore, for healthy living, the practice of female genital mutilation should be discouraged in the study area. Based on the study outcome, recommendations were suggested.

In recent years, the issue of human trafficking has become a key component of a growing number of corporate social responsibility initiatives, in which multinational corporations have furthered the pursuit of “market based solutions” to contemporary social concerns. This essay draws upon in-depth interviews with and ethnographic observations of corporate actors involved in contemporary anti-trafficking campaigns to describe a new domain of sexual politics that feminist social theorists have barely begun to consider. Using trafficking as a case study, I argue that these new forms of sexual politics have served to bind together unlikely sets of social actors – including secular feminists, evangelical Christians, bipartisan state officials, and multinational corporations – who have historically subscribed to very different ideals about the beneficence of markets, criminal justice, and the role of the state.