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Graphic novels have a concept known as the origin story. The origin story is background information on how a hero or villain came into being. The purpose of this paper is to explore the origin story of corporate social responsibility at British American Tobacco (BAT). The CSR origin story is unpacked by examining corporate documents from BAT that discuss the initial development of the company’s CSR program. The BAT documents are part of the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL), a searchable, digital archive developed and managed by the University of California, San Francisco. It contains 85,569,326 pages in 14,360,422 documents. The library was created as part of the tobacco company settlement of a major law suit in the USA.

For this case study, the authors searched the archive for documents from BAT that had the key words “corporate social responsibility.” The documents were then analyzed using qualitative content analysis to identify key themes related to BAT’s created of its CSR programs.

The two dominant themes were business case BAT made for CSR and the environmental factors that shaped CSR. The business case had sub-themes of the new operating environment and reinforcing employees. The environmental sub-themes were the importance of NGOS and the top issues to be addressed in CSR efforts. The themes helped to explain why BAT was engaging in CSR, the factors shaping the start of its CSR programs, and the issues it intended to address through CSR.

The analysis is limited to one organization and does not include interviews to go with the archived documents.

The paper considers the implications of the analysis for theory and practice for internal CSR communication.

The documents provide a rare glimpse inside a corporate decision to begin a CSR program and how the managers “talked” about CSR. Instead of examining external CSR communication, it examines the early days of internal CSR communication at a specific firm. The yields of the document analysis provide insights into how BAT conceptualized CSR and communicated the rationale for creating a CSR program internally. Research has relied primarily upon speculation of corporate motives or corporate public discourse designed to frame their CSR efforts. The internal documents provide an unfiltered examination of the motives for a CSR program. This allows us to better understand why a CSR program was created including the motives, targets, and desired outcomes.

The author addresses ways in which secondary American history textbooks reflect and perpetuate the normative American story and identity by framing American Indians as the “first Americans,” while at the same time silencing indigenous voices in the telling of their own stories. This paper contributes to existing literature by providing an updated and critical analysis of a particular dimension of social studies texts and provides concrete examples and critical discussion of the master narrative at work in curricula. Suggestions are made for applying critical multiculturalism to the portrayal of the origins of humans in North America, using examples of indigenous texts currently used in classrooms that offer a truly multicultural resource for teachers.

In his later works Charles Tilly extended his analysis of contention by scrutinizing the dynamics of contentious performances and the enactment of identities through them. Complementing these investigations he analyzed the centrality of trust networks in sustained challenges to authority. On a somewhat detached track Tilly developed an examination of reason giving in social life and more particularly the ways in which people do critical transactional work through stories, often with the assessment of credit and blame. In this chapter, we quilt these various pieces to offer an analysis of how storytelling is vital to the construction of trust and blame in contentious performances, both in the face of threat and opportunity. We explain how these later works on storytelling, identities, and trust can be integrated fruitfully with his many writings on contention to expand the analysis of its culture dimensions. We draw on three years of field work with a chapter of the Voice of the Faithful, an organization of Catholics that formed in the wake of the priest sexual abuse crisis, to exemplify this integration of Tilly's work. Using data from field notes and interviews we demonstrate how chapter members engage in the telling standard stories of origin, legacy and transformation, and trust in their pursuit of change and in maintaining internal solidarity. We conclude that our integration of Tilly's later work can be added to other perspectives on narrative to broaden the cultural analysis of contention.

This paper aims to use the origin story of Dalhousie’s Faculty of Management as a foil for unpacking the tensions between deep disciplinary specialization and liberal education in business schools in Canada and the USA. Ultimately, the paper reveals that those tensions are not irreconcilable, and that through the fortunes of historical contingencies and deliberate decision-taking, a faculty can embrace the benefits of both breadth and depth.

The paper proposes a critical organizational history of management education through a case study. By drawing on secondary literature and archival sources, the authors focus on moments in business education, such as the founding of the Wharton School of Business, the release of the Carnegie and Ford Reports and the trend towards increased specialization to situate a case study of Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Management.

The authors find that the evolution of business education in North America from its broad, liberal origins towards narrow, specialization has come at a cost to some of the benefits of business and management education. An alternative approach, one reflected in the design of Dalhousie’s Faculty of Management, its programme offerings and its interconnection with other disciplines, enables the advantages of deep disciplinarity to co-exist (and cross-inform) with the advantages of liberal approach to knowledges.

The Dalhousie model offers business schools an example of a faculty that balances the rich insights of liberal interdisciplinarity with the need for sophisticated approaches to more granular, often disciplinary, topics. In addition, the paper offers the story of a multidisciplinary management faculty, some explanation for how that faculty was maintained despite pressures towards specialization; and in doing so, contributes to the limited historical research of management education, particularly in Canada, post-2000.

This piece argues that television families’ shift away from the traditional nuclear family form is crucial to understand the relatively rapid acceptance of same-sex marriage in mainstream politics. Released in the early 2010s, The Americans focusses on a KGB-created family composed of two Soviet spies, total strangers who ultimately have two children to further their cover as an innocent American family running a DuPont Circle travel agency and living in a Virginia suburb of Washington D.C. Rather than being idealised or sought after, The Americans reveals that the nuclear family is legally, socially, and politically constructed, and, in the end, doomed to failure. Sex and love and even children are instrumentally manipulated on a regular basis to further political goals, transforming basic assumptions about how marriage and family life really work beyond the façade of suburban America. This opens space for consideration and acceptance of alternative family forms, including same-sex marriage.

After the extreme turn of the late 1980s and early 1990s of metal music, three northern England-based bands – My Dying Bride and Paradise Lost from Bradford, and Anathema from Liverpool, commonly referred to as ‘the Peaceville Three’ – went on to pioneer the musical style which came to be known as death/doom. Mid-1990s have seen these bands’ stylistic shift into a more gothic rock-influenced sound. This Paradise Lost-led shift gave birth to the style gothic/doom. Around this deviation, these bands also started to employ a different sense, or rather a sense, of locality in their music: Paradise Lost started calling themselves a Yorkshire band, instead of specifically Bradford; Anathema shot a video for their 1995 song ‘The Silent Enigma’ in Saddleworth Moor (historically part of West Riding of Yorkshire) in Manchester; and later, My Dying Bride became more and more ingrained in the Goth culture of Whitby, including releasing an extended-play titled The Barghest o’ Whitby (2011), a Dracula-inspired trail guide, and frequently appearing in festivals in Whitby. This ethnographic research with both musicians and fans further suggests the involvement of the North in making and perception of gothic/doom. Applying Michel de Certau’s idea stating that ‘every story is a spacial practice’ within the context of northern England landscape, gothic/doom metal style emerges as an act of northernness. The author proposes to discuss how this act is performed within these bands’ oeuvre and how it is perceived from the listener perspective using interviews with people from around the world, and musicological analyses of significant songs from the repertoire of this trio.

Snow White is one of the most popular fairy tales worldwide. Therefore, it is not surprising that the story has been reconsidered multiple times during the current trend of producing fairy tale adaptations. Especially the Evil Queen has become an object of further examination in many recent instalments of the story. In this chapter, I analyse the revision of Snow White's stepmother in the book series The Lunar Chronicles (2012–2016), the films Mirror Mirror (2012), Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) and The Huntsman: Winter's War (2016), as well as the TV-series Once Upon a Time (2011–2018). Compared to other villains in recent fairy tale adaptations, who are, like Maleficent, redeemed, the queen remains an embodiment of evil and terror in most adaptations. I outline the depiction of the Evil Queen in present-day US-American fairy tale narratives, assessing what makes her the most villainous woman in all the fairy tale realms and questioning why many of these stories try to understand but do not forgive her. The focus of this investigation is on the backstory that she is equipped with, her crimes, and her ultimate fate. Although she has been abused, traumatized, and betrayed, she seems to remain an uber villain, not only attempting to kill her stepdaughter but also destroying nature, starving her people, and spreading a deadly virus. This kind of representation might result from the fact that her opponent is by the very name the purest fairy tale princess ever known.

There is no argument among serious researchers that a mongoloid stock first colonized the New World from Asia. Nor is there controversy about the fact that these continental pioneers used the Bering Land Bridge that then connected the Asian Far East with Alaska.– Gerald F. Shields, et al.American Journal of Genetics (1992)

Against the various literatures asserting that myths serve administrators well in varying ways, this paper takes a decidedly skeptical stance. While myth is a tool that may be well or poorly used, its use to fashion administrative theory, or to construct an administrative order, or to enhance administrative thought is most often a poor use indeed. What serves Public Administration best involves the much more difficult effort of constructing theories of historical causation that derive directly from the experiences that practitioners have with the problems they find it necessary or desirable to solve.