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According to The Ethics Centre (2018) ‘[T]he social license to operate (SLO) is made up of three components: legitimacy, credibility, and trust’. These three components serve to frame the relationship that has emerged and continues to evolve, its root arguably dating back to the Enlightenment and Post-industrial ages, between the worlds of capitalist commercial and industrial operations, and the liberal-democratic citizenry/consumers of society. The ‘SLO’, it will be shown, has historical grounding that indicate the SLO is a broader translatable concept not limited to the business realm. The SLO, the evidence will show, is a multifaceted concept not least, a unifying vehicle utilized for the purpose of acceptance, to advance normative concerns, and resistance, against questionable and harmful practices. Evidently, many domains of human services operate sub-optimally with less than favourable outcomes. In effect, this translates to structural injustices as characterized by poor understanding, insufficient standards of practice, ineffective safeguard, and governance institutions, perpetuated by entrenched practices, allowing the rise of mediocre service providers no less enabled by deficient regulation. Accordingly, the ethical focus of this paper is on the healthcare system, the evident and unnecessary deficiencies, and the failings of the central governance institutions involved. The underlying characteristics of what constitutes a SLO arguably, whether in name or not, have been engaged to expose, challenge, and repel, unethical conduct that gave rise to multiple health care-related Royal Commissions across Australia; predominantly, impacting the Disability, Aged Care, and Mental Health (DAM) sectors to name a few of recent times.

History in Argentina shows that, from 1945, rotation between democratic and de facto governments was accompanied with changes in policies of free or restricted university access, respectively. In this way after more than 20 years of democracy, 60 percent of the university matriculation of the public system stays under the modality of free access. Nevertheless, the socioeconomic composition of the students of public universities shows overrepresentation of the higher income quintiles. This means that the policies of free access to the public universities have been better taken advantage of by the population with major resources. However, the ideology of free access remains in the social imaginary as the representative of progress policies. In this chapter, we set out, first of all, to describe the admission system to the universities in Argentina. Second, we analyze the relationship between unrestricted access and equity. Finally, we will raise the necessity to design policies of affirmative action, for the case of Argentina and more likely in other countries of Latin America, that consider the asymmetries in the distribution of the wealth on the questions of race and gender.

This paper is the first to use the individual level, longitudinal catch-up growth of boys and girls in a historical population to measure their relative deprivation. The data is drawn from two government schools, the Marcella Street Home (MSH) in Boston, MA (1889–1898), and the Ashford School of the West London School District (1908–1917). The paper provides an extensive discussion of the two schools including the characteristics of the children, their representativeness, selection bias and the conditions in each school. It also provides a methodological introduction to measuring children’s longitudinal catch-up growth. After analysing the catch-up growth of boys and girls in the schools, it finds that there were no substantial differences between the catch-up growth by gender. Thus, these data suggest that there were not major health disparities between boys and girls in late-nineteenth-century America and early-twentieth-century Britain.

The realities of access to higher education changed dramatically within the last century. The second half of the twentieth century more particularly was characterized by a worldwide increase in access to higher education institutions that proved to be the main force disrupting the traditional organization of academia. This international trend is due to the several intertwined dynamics: demographic, economic and political pressures.

This paper examines how changes in immigration policy levers actually affect the skill characteristics of immigrant arrivals using a unique Canadian immigrant landings database. The paper identifies some hypotheses on the possible effects on immigrant skill characteristics of the total immigration rate, the point system weights and immigrant class weights. The “skill” characteristics examined are level of education, age, and fluency in either English or French. Regressions are used to test the hypotheses from Canadian landings data for 1980–2001. It is found that (i) the larger the inflow rate of immigrants the lower the average skill level of the arrivals, (ii) increasing the proportion of skill-evaluated immigrants raises average skill levels, and (iii) increasing point system weights on a specific skill dimension indeed has the intended effect of raising average skill levels in this dimension among arriving principal applicants.

As a sort of Italian equivalent of US’s Chapter 11, the Preventive Arrangement with Creditors (Concordato Preventivo) is now the main instrument in Italy for small and medium-sized companies (and sometimes large ones) to manage insolvency by avoiding bankruptcy.

Through the examination of 60% of the total cases filed at the Court of Milan during the 2005–2014 period, authors investigated the different features of the procedure, the characteristics of the company that adopts it, and its diverse purposes of liquidation or restructuring. The complexity of the Italian system and the novelty of the legislation have made it rather difficult to reach definitive conclusions. However, Preventive Arrangements with Creditors can be considered a more efficient instrument than the alternative bankruptcy, both in terms of timeframe and creditors’ satisfaction. Within the overall European reform process of insolvency proceedings, Italy seems to provide useful insights for other countries in Europe, following in particular the 2014 Recommendation issued by the European Commission.

The study compares the demographics and degree attainment in Washington University’s (the University) Chancellor’s Graduate Fellowship Program (CGFP) in the pre- and post-Grutter era. The fellowship program’s aims included bolstering African American graduate degree completion and preparing African American faculty members. The 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger affirmative action case serves as a break point to compare the 1991–2003 cohorts and the 2004–2008 cohorts. Interviews of key leaders give a historical perspective on the program’s mission. Institutional data organized to form two cohorts, pre- and post-Grutter comparison groups, provide insight into demographic trends and degree attainment. The CGFP realized its original mission to diversify the professoriate by supporting underrepresented graduate students. The vast majority of alumni in both cohorts earned a graduate degree and earned their intended degrees. The two cohorts achieved high doctoral degree attainment. Time-to-degree findings and placement within the academy demonstrated a positive outcome. However, the program post-Grutter has generated fewer African American participants. In the post-Grutter era, the University needs to develop new strategies to increase the racial diversity of graduate education. As a complementary resource, the CGFP, as part of a broader portfolio of programmatic and policy tools designed to diversify, merits continued investment. Only a fraction of programs focused on African American doctoral attainment publish evaluation data. The study captures the programmatic effects of the Grutter decision at an elite American university.