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The chapter describes the phenomenon of company–community agreements in the mining sector, situates them relative to two veins of responsible investment activity, and assesses whether they might serve as a proxy for the “community relations” expectations of responsible investors.

Based on an evaluation of two recent company–community agreements and surveying of executives from mining firms that have signed agreements with Indigenous communities, it was found that: (1) though imperfect as a proxy for many of the “community relations” expectations of responsible investors, company–community agreements offer benefits and make provisions that exceed current expectations, especially with respect to the recognition of the right of Indigenous communities to offer their free, prior, and informed consent to mine developments; and (2) mining executives recognize the utility of agreement-making with communities, and are comfortable with such efforts being interpreted as recognition of the right of Indigenous communities to consent to development.

The chapter serves to introduce responsible investors to the emergence of company–community agreements in the global mining sector, and calls upon them to advocate for their further use in order to reduce the riskiness of their investments, address social justice concerns, and assist communities to visualize and realize their goals.

For the first time, the growing phenomenon of company–community agreements in the mining sector is situated within responsible investment scholarship. Additionally, drawing on both logic and evidence, the chapter challenges the responsible investment community to rethink its approach to screening and engaging the mining sector in order to advance the interests of Indigenous communities.

This paper considers whether the term patrimonialism can be applied to one racially bifurcated aspect of Australian history: the relations between ‘squatters’ and those with competing civil and property claims. From the perspective of white settlers, the power of pastoralists who acquired use rights over vast stretches of land in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries represented a challenge to rural settlement, economic development, the right to vote, workers’ rights and parliamentary democracy.

From the perspective of Aboriginal peoples who held traditional ownership of pastoral lands, squattocracy began with armed conflict and ended with practices aimed at detailed government of their everyday life. More generally, as white settlers consolidated property rights to land, they expropriated Indigenous peoples’ capacity to govern themselves.

The paper concludes that there have been two distinct histories of patrimonialism in Australia. The Australian colonies were among the pioneers of ‘universal’ male and later female franchise in the nineteenth century; Aborigines gained (de jure) full citizenship only in the late 1960s. While the squatter’s patrimonial rule over white settlers was short-lived, that over some groups of Aboriginal people persisted for more than a century.

This paper argues that creative compliance tactics are an innovative union renewal strategy. Creative compliance involves the observance of the letter of the law while undermining its spirit. This regulatory inconsistency stems from indeterminate legal outcomes and discretion in legal interpretation and application. Drawing on interviews with senior union officials in four case studies in Australia, this paper reveals that two particular types of creative compliance tactics have been used by the unions to achieve positive outcomes: work-to-rule and the exploitation of loopholes. These opportunistic and proactive approaches to ‘anti-union’ legislation at the national level since 1997 represent a sea change in union tactics and a viable union renewal strategy, because they augment the individual ability of unions to shape and advance an agenda and therefore, adapt and transform at an organisational level. Consistent with adaptation theories on organisational-environment relations and strategic choice theory, the findings reinforce that unions ‘own’ strategic choices and that they can, in response to environmental scanning, adjust their tactics accordingly.

How do we understand political polarization around the issue of climate change in the United States? Using a mixed-methods approach, this paper unpacks the components of the debate over climate science and policy between 2015 and 2017 to understand the sources of divisiveness that have come to characterize climate politics in the United States. Data in our analysis include the content of Congressional hearings and open-ended, semi-structured interviews with the most influential climate policy actors at the federal level. We find high levels of polarization around two specific components of this debate: the type of policy instrument and the role of the federal government in regulating carbon dioxide emissions. This paper concludes by exploring how patterns of polarization preceding the 2016 election help us to understand the expected political debate over federal climate policy in the years to come.

We present evidence regarding how a card check recognition process affects the labor relations climate during the period preceding recognition and that which immediately follows. Interviews with managers, interviews with union representatives, and surveys of workers indicate that card check typically results in a less prolonged, costly, and stressful recognition and negotiations process. Although the resulting contracts are often similar to those in other parts of a heavily unionized corporation, sometimes they reflect a different business context – and hence are somewhat more favorable to employers without being substantially less favorable to employees. This reality is reflected in the positive reaction of the U.S. stock markets to union recognition by an employer through a card check process. Employers make card check agreements primarily for business reasons, and investors respect their judgment as to the impact of such agreements on the bottom line.

A variety of problematic administrative, organisational and institutional behaviours exist in the internationalising higher education sector globally. These vexing behaviours need to be addressed to fully realise the desired outcomes of the internationalisation movement. Encapsulating these behaviours under the concept of maladministration, we describe problems with respect to administrative commitment and competence, institutional integrity, academic integrity, abuse of authority and financial control. We then outline a hypothetical educational administration curriculum that could be used to equip higher education administrators to identify and mitigate problems with maladministration in internationalisation processes and contexts. This proposed curriculum has two dimensions: educational governance and institutional, academic and administrative integrity; and human relations, organisational culture and dysfunctional behaviour.

Most publications on the management of diversity in Western countries pay homage to history by referring back to the way regulatory frameworks developed to promote equal treatment and to oppose discrimination. In work on English speaking countries, particular attention has been given to the struggles waged in the USA for civil rights and for gender equality in the 1960s and their impact on the emergence of equal employment opportunity and affirmative action laws and policies. Generally, these developments are depicted as the antecedents to the emergence of diversity management in the USA. This genealogical orientation is usually designed to establish historical foundations. However, as we see it, this approach to history has promoted an impression of linear evolution. Our general aim in this chapter is to show how an historical perspective can help uncover continuities in regard to equal employment opportunity, affirmative action and diversity management policies and strategies in Australia, particularly in relation to the management of cultural diversity in Australian workplaces. Rather than seeing development in linear terms, our aim is to highlight connections and the implications of such connections. Accordingly, this chapter relates each of these policies/strategies to analogous political and legal developments that emerged concurrently, in particular such initiatives as multiculturalism, anti-discrimination laws and what became known in Australia as ‘productive diversity’ policies.

Purpose – To develop a new model of restorative reparation that attempts to capture the dynamic role of shared identity perceptions.

Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on recent advances in restorative justice theory (Wenzel, Okimoto, Feather, & Platow, 2008), we explore the theoretical proposition that a greater understanding of the identity relations between victims, offenders, and the groups in which they are embedded is key to understanding a victim's underlying motives toward justice, and thus, predicting when victims will react favorably to restorative justice processes and prefer them over traditional retributive justice interventions.

Findings – We argue that a perceived shared identity between the victim and the offender determines the extent to which the victim understands the transgression as requiring a revalidation of the rules, values, or morals undermined by the offense. Moreover, we propose that these identity relations are dynamic in that they both affect and are affected by the experience of injustice. Thus, identity is also shaped by the transgression itself through, inter alia, processes associated with positive social identity maintenance. Importantly, these shifts in identity determine how injustice victims are likely to respond to constructive approaches to conflict resolution such as restorative justice.

Originality/value – We offer a series of testable hypotheses aimed at engendering future research in the domain of constructive justice restoration in groups. Moreover, this work suggests that to develop effective resolution strategies, we must consider how an injustice event shapes the relations between the affected parties over time rather than simply assuming identity relations are static.