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Purpose – This chapter contributes to comparative biopolitics and reviews primatological literature, especially about our nearest relatives, the Great Apes.

Design/methodology/approach – Biopolitics in this chapter means evolutionarily informed political science, with emphasis on power relations. I review the literature on intrasexual and intersexual dominance interactions among individuals and competitive and/or agonistic interactions among groups in the Great Apes (Hominidae, formerly Pongidae): orangutan (Pongo with two species and three subspecies), gorilla (Gorilla with four subspecies), bonobo (Pan paniscus), and common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes with four subspecies). In the final section I present some (speculative) thoughts on Pan prior or the modern human ancestor.

Findings – Not only Man is a political animal.

Originality/value – Impartial, objective, and as complete as possible review of the literature for the students of (comparative) politics, ethology, and psychology.

It was elementary school field trip day at the National Zoo, and the lines at the animal exhibits were long and hot. Escaping to the deserted orangutan learning laboratory, called the ThinkTank, I was intrigued to find an exhibit titled, “Can Animals Think?” The scientists, I learned, used only three criteria to determine the existence of thinking in this simian world: (1) the evidence of ability to create and hold in mind an image, a mental representation of something not present; (2) the evidence of intention, having a goal or purpose and a plan to achieve that purpose in a certain way; and (3) the evidence of flexibility, the ability to discover multiple ways to reach a goal when the initial plan failed to work. Image, intention, flexibility. How many of the managers and MBAs I work with, I wondered, could pass the Orangutan's Test?

Controversy occurs among professionals, such as veterinarians and zookeepers in Japan, as to whether a zoo should be educational or recreational. The purpose of this paper is to examine how a zoo's culturally crafted entertainment value conflicts with educational value. Using a front/back framework of the zoo, both entertainment and educational values are negotiated.

This paper conceptualizes differences between a zoo's front and back regions to examine operations and visitor behavior. Observing and interpreting visitor and zoo employee interactions provide rich data about the educational versus recreational dynamic. The author observes visitor behavior in both zoo regions and interprets their cognitive schema.

Animal representation in mass media reinforces the zoo animal's amusement value to visitors, leading to the construction of tourist texts. Tourist text images affect the viewer's perception of reality, sometimes conflicting with the animal's reality. The zoo's back region helps alleviate this paradox. In this process, tour guides play a mediatory role between entertainment and educational values.

The author argues about zoos and zoo animals from the Cartesian dualism view of “culture/nature”. A zoo represents culture's triumph over nature. This paper develops this idea and discusses how entertainment and educational values conflict, and are reconciled, from the perspective of symbolic and pragmatic dimensions.

Stakeholders require organisations to meet all ethical standards in every aspect of their operations including marketing. This has led to consumers becoming sensitive to the violation of expected ethical standards by organisations. Hence, consumers give precedence to brands that are environmentally friendly in the production and deployment of the brand. The increased customer sensitivity to environmental issues is the realisation of the negative effects of mismanaged environment. For example, the activities of eco-unfriendly businesses affected the human and economic survival of some communities (see Gomis & Sodji, 2021; Naz, Chowdhury, Mishra, & Gupta, 2016). In realisation of the importance of being eco-friendly in the entire value chain of a product, this chapter considers the importance of adhering to ethical standards required from the conceptualisation, consumption and disposal of materials in organisation's production system. The chapter began by laying out the consequences of eco-unfriendly behaviours and the human and business activities that create the problems. It documented the short-term and long-term consequences of unethical behaviour of businesses, and ways to mitigate or reduce such consequences. Corporate social responsibility was presented as a mindset that is aimed at maintaining the integrity of the ecosystem while deriving economic benefit from it. The chapter concluded with the case study of a disguised company that believes that ‘money can grow on trees’ and thus invested in the recovery of the damage caused by deforestation.

The law-oriented short stories and novels of lawyer/English professor John William Corrington are receiving increasing attention from legal scholars. However, no one has analyzed the science fiction screenplays he co-wrote with his wife, Joyce, from a legal perspective. This article analyzes two such screenplays and concludes that they are “Socratic” texts whose narrative structures and epistemological processes work in much the same way that the traditional participatory exchange works in law school. My analysis explores the links between law, allegory and science fiction as intersecting methods to imagine the possibilities for the future.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to bring data to suggest that group processes have a biological base, lodged in human neurology as it evolved over the last 7 million years.

Design/methodology/approach – The method for discovering the neurological basis of group processes is labelled evolutionary sociology, and this method revolves around: (1) cladistic analysis of traits of distant ancestors to humans and the great apes, with whom humans share a very high proportion of genes, (2) comparative neurology between the great apes and humans that can inform us about how the brains of humans were rewired from the structures shared by the last common ancestor to humans and apes, and (3) ecological analysis of the habitats and niches that generated selection pressures on the neurology of apes and hominins.

Findings – A key finding is that most of the interpersonal processes that drive group processes are neurologically based and evolved before the brain among hominins was sufficiently large to generate systems of symbols organized in cultural texts remotely near the human measure. There is, then, good reason to study the neurological basis of behavior because neurology explains more about the dynamics of interpersonal behavior than does culture, which was a very late arrival to the hominin line.

Research implications – One implication of these findings is that social scientific analysis of interpersonal processes and group dynamics can no longer assume that groups are solely a constructed process, mediated by culture and social structure. There were powerful selection pressures during the course of hominin evolution to increase hominin sociality and especially group formation, which required considerable rewiring of the basic ape brain. Since groups are not “natural” to apes in general and even to an evolved ape-like humans, it is important to discover how humans ever became group-organizing animals. The answer resides in the dramatic enhancing of emotions in hominins and humans, which shifts attention away from the neocortex to the older subcortical areas of the brain. Once this shift is made, theorizing and research, as well as public views on human sociality, need to be recast as, first, an evolved biological trait and, only second, as a most tenuous and fragile of a big-brained animal using language and culture to construct its social world.

Originality/value – The value of this kind of analysis is to liberate sociology and the social sciences in general from simplistic views that, because humans have language and can use language to construct culture and social structures, the underlying biology and neurology of human action is not relevant to understanding the social world. Indeed, just the opposite is the case: to the extent that social scientists insist upon a social constructionists research agenda, they will fail to conceptualize and perform research on more fundamental forces in the social world, including group dynamics.

Rapid prototype models are directly integrated into non‐engineering applications such as medicine. Medical models are used to plan complex procedures prior to surgery with potential to optimise patient treatment in the operating theatre. This paper presents results following a 12 month National Health Service Executive research project to assess the feasibility of using rapid prototype medical models. A total of 16 medical models were created. Nine anatomical sites were reconstructed from patient data acquired from five London hospitals. The purpose of the models is described and the commissioning surgeons as part of a questionnaire assessed their usefulness. Future developments are discussed and conclusions about the use of medical models are made.

This chapter proposes a framework for analyzing how stakeholder-initiated challenges through social media and traditional media can shape the meaning of responsible behavior and pressure organizations to alter irresponsible behavior in order to protect their reputations.

Following a description of the nature of stakeholder challenges, concepts from Internet Contagion Theory and Contingency Theory are used to develop the Integrated Framework for Stakeholder Challenges, an analytic tool that can be used to provide insights into how specific digital and traditional public relations tactic can be used by activists. A case study demonstrating application of the framework is presented.

The case study describes how the lens provided by the Integrated Framework for Stakeholder Challenges illustrates how Greenpeace’s detox campaign built power, legitimacy, and urgency to draw attention to environmental and human problems associated with the use of hazardous chemicals in a manufacturer’s supply chain.

The chapter offers one case study of Greenpeace’s detox campaign against Zara to demonstrate the utility of the Integrated Framework for Stakeholder Challenges. Additional case studies are needed to further demonstrate how factors in the framework can account for the success and failure of activist challenges. Moreover, measurement of factors included in the framework, rather than conceptual analysis alone, could demonstrate the relative importance of the factors, as well as various constellations of factors, in accounting for organizational decision making about responses to the challenges.

Concepts derived from Internet Contagion Theory and Contingency Theory provide a vocabulary and conceptual framework for describing and analyzing stakeholder-initiated challenges as well as assessing the potential threats posed by stakeholder challenges to an organization’s reputation.

This chapter proposes a new analytical tool, the Integrated Framework for Stakeholder Challenges, which can contribute to the analysis and evaluation of stakeholder efforts to influence corporate behavior.

In Sabah, Malaysia, illegal hunting has increased in recent years putting considerable pressure on large mammal populations. The causes for this phenomenon lie in increasing rural poverty, ineffective policies to regulate hunting, as well as a ready market for many wildlife products in the Chinese medicine markets. This paper examines how Community-Based Ecotourism has some potential to be used as a tool to reducing poaching using the Tidong community in Sabah as a case study. The key finding is that successful conservation outcomes for Community-Based Ecotourism projects are only sustainable over the long run if projects are structured to ensure that the local community is able to continue effective management once sponsoring organizations hand over control and that revenue from tourism does not decline. If tourist revenue declines communities may be forced to revert to previous practices reversing any initial conservation gains.