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Purpose – This study explores legal justifications for applying an enhanced criminal sanction to wrongs committed before, during, and after disasters.

Design/methodology/approach – This study uses recent social science evidence to evaluate the need for criminal statutes covering looting, price gouging, and other disaster-related offenses. Further, this study considers a broader historical context, identifying intersections of disaster crime and the common law's treatment of riots and public disorder.

Findings – Although individual disaster victims and communities are vulnerable to criminal harm, and this vulnerability often appears to motivate the punishment of disaster-related crimes, it is not the only or even the strongest justification available. As an alternative approach, one could focus on the public dimension of the harm – disaster-related crimes are particularly pernicious because they threaten to undermine the legitimate governing authority of the state.

Originality/value of paper – The public-order thesis yokes current legal doctrine to longstanding common law themes and, in so doing, departs from conventional justifications for the enhanced punishment of disaster-related crime. The critical perspective offered here could be extended to criminal penalty enhancements more generally. Moreover, because the rationale for identifying and punishing wrongful conduct is the fundamental question of criminal law, even a modest reassessment has potentially far-reaching implications.

In view of the global warming that has increasingly been plaguing the earth, it should be no surprise that the world has been witnessing an unprecedented wave of natural disasters over the past decades. Among the most important of these natural calamities in recent years, mention can be made of the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami of 2004, hurricanes Katrina and Irene in the United States in 2005, cyclone Nargis in Burma in 2008, the Haiti earthquake of 2010, the Russian heat wave of 2010, the 2011 tornado in Joplin, Missouri, and the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Ranging from earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, avalanches, and floods to heat waves, storms, and epidemics, the field of disaster research presents a myriad of questions for social-scientific exploration.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how and why individuals involved in executive remuneration (top pay) decision-making consider quantum as being appropriate rather than excessive, theorised under the rubric of accountability.

In-depth interviews were conducted with non-executive directors (NEDs) serving on remuneration committees (Remcos), institutional investors, their external advisers and internal HR reward experts. Transcripts were analysed using NVivo and the Gioia qualitative methodology.

Defining, measuring and applying performance conditionality in the determination of top pay quantum such that it aligns with company strategy/culture and values, as well as individual recipient motivations, is difficult. While creative approaches to setting top pay so as to attract, retain and motivate key personnel are welcomed, these risk Remco members' personal/organisational reputations. Members recognise disconnection between top pay quantum and general pay levels and how the media highlights social inequality leading to public distrust. They believe they can contribute to more socially acceptable quantum by applying their own values in top pay decision-making.

Sanctions-based, trust-based and selection/peer networks/felt-based accountability theory is used to explain decision-makers’ actions when determining top pay quantum. This paper extends felt accountability theory to encompass public/societal accountability in the context of the appropriateness of top pay quantum decisions.

The research on the positive effects of children’s learning in and with nature is persuasive yet a deeper examination of the contemporary and historical discourses suggests that the school garden has been neither welcoming nor accessible to all children. Its detrimental effects on groups of children have been masked within the discourses of urban children’s health and wellbeing, environmental stewardship, and children’s connection with nature. The school garden has been used historically to enact adult agendas to contain and protect urban children from the social ills of modernity; civilise and assimilate marginalised, impoverished, and immigrant groups; and make future industrial and agricultural labourers who would in turn, entrench the white affluent society’s economic and social positions. In this sense, the school garden was used to reinforce patriarchal, colonial, white supremacist, and eugenic aspirations. We consider the school garden movement in North America through a discourse analysis of historical school garden texts to explore how childhoods were culturally constructed and how these discourses have influenced children both in the past and present.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the phenomenon of social media addiction among student Millennials. The authors use the consumption continuum as a theoretical framework.

The authors used a “media deprivation” methodology including both qualitative and quantitative measures.

The authors found that social media may exist in some respondents in a “near addiction” phase or the “social media addiction” phase according to the consumption continuum framework. Several themes are discussed.

While the sample is small, this paper is an exploratory study of social media addiction among Millennials and the first to apply the consumption continuum framework to this context (Martin et al., 2013).

This paper explores the idea of social media addiction and begins to examine the role that marketing plays in perpetuating this addiction.

This paper expands the idea beyond Facebook addiction (platform agnostic) and is the first to apply the consumption continuum framework.

Recounts that in‐depth structured interviews were held with 17 masters students (studying Business Management or Marketing Management), including students from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Malaysia. Additionally, three interviews were carried out in Taiwan with managers which provided a limited amount of extra evidence.

By expanding the technology acceptance model, this paper aims to provide a research model for examining the impact of information quality and task technology fit on the adoption of KMS.

To test the proposed research model, data are collected through a questionnaire survey sent to IT managers of 500 large companies in Taiwan.

Based on the study, it is suitable to use a technology acceptance model to study adoption of KMS and explore how two external variables, information quality and task technology fit, affect the intention to adopt. Additionally, information quality has a directly significant effect on ease of use that users perceive and usefulness where fit between task and KMS is high.

A mass mailing of a somewhat lengthy, blind survey to busy managers produces a somewhat low response rate. Thus, the generalized nature of the findings is somewhat in question, making replication of the study in Taiwan important.

The study distinguishes the design of information systems and knowledge management systems. For adoption of KMS, managers must pay more attention to the quality of information provided, and the contextual features of the knowledge involved.

The value of this paper is in demonstrating the role of information quality with KMS, and providing further insight into the co‐relationship of information quality, usefulness, and fit between task and KMS, leading to more effective strategies for KMS adoption.

The purpose of the paper is to explore and analyse the history of the predominantly Malaysian Network of Overseas Students Collectives in Australia (NOSCA), that existed from 1985–1994.

The paper is based on extensive archival research in the State Library of New South Wales, the National Library of Australia and the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Archives. It makes particular use of the UNSW student newspaper Tharunka and the NOSCA publications Truganini and Default. It also draws upon nine oral history interviews with former members of NOSCA.

The NOSCA was particularly prominent at the UNSW, building a base there and engaging substantially in the student union. Informed by anarchism, its activists were interested in an array of issues–especially opposition to student fees and in solidarity with struggles for democracy and national liberation in Southeast Asia, especially around East Timor. Moreover, the group would serve as a training ground for a layer of activists, dissidents and opposition politicians throughout Southeast Asia, with a milieu of ex-NOSCA figures sometimes disparagingly referred to as “the NOSCA Mafia.”

While there has been much research on overseas students, there has been far less on overseas students as protestors and activists. This paper is the first case study to specifically hone in on NOSCA, one of the most substantial and left wing overseas student groups. Tracing the group's history helps us to reframe and rethink the landscape of student activism in Australia, as less white, less middle class and less privileged.

The purpose of this paper is to explore what motivation strategies live-entertainment artistic directors (ADs) use to increase consistency in their employees’ performances.

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore the research question: what motivation strategies do live-entertainment ADs use to improve consistency in employee performance? Semistructured face-to-face interviews with artistic and senior ADs of a large international live-entertainment company’s US division participated in the study. In addition to the interviews, a further analysis of archival records of artists’ evaluations, and written company documents regarding performance evaluation to understand the ADs’ strategies were completed. Finally, self-reported interview data compared to AD evaluations of artists from randomly selected prior years verified the ADs practices.

The finding indicated ADs use multiple techniques geared at improving employee well-being and technical competence, thereby creating an environment conducive to the employees self-determining their consistent behavior in performance.

These findings may offer managers across multiple industries a variety of strategies and techniques to use to improve consistency for their workers.

This study is the one of few that studies manager influence on the motivation of those employees whose job is to entertain others regardless of the employee’s emotional state. From these findings, ADs may determine how to implement workplace safety improvements, expanding employee well-being, which in turn can improve performance consistency.