Search results

The authors explore the market agora and the shaping of markets as controversies over the meaning and practices related to sustainability evolved. This study aims to explore what happened in a market-oriented policy regime, which aimed to address sustainability in farming and food, to assess the impact of the policy on the vegetable sector in England and to consider whether the market-oriented policy regime created a more sustainable food system for Britain.

The authors examined policy documents – agenda setting reports, policy frameworks and operational plans – and conducted interviews with experts – including policymakers, agronomists and the growers themselves, from across this heterogeneous production sector.

The authors found that while controversy over the meaning of sustainability impacted on the evolution of food policy and grower business practices, market conceptualisations remained in a doxic mode – naturalised and beyond dispute throughout the market agora.

This is a study of a single sub-sector of the fruit and vegetable sector in a single European country and over a particular period of time. It presents a detailed, authentic representation of that sub-sector in context and diverse information sources were used to gain a variety of perspectives. However, it is acknowledged that this is a limited, qualitative study involving relatively few key informant interviews.

The authors’ explanation suggests that market doxa limited how policymakers and market agora understood the economic challenges and the solutions that could be deployed for English vegetable growers, a sector so pivotal for sustainability. The authors propose that ideas from industrial marketing can be used to reignite controversy, challenge market doxa, and in doing so create space for progress in creating sustainable markets.

The authors deploy an approach advocated by Blanchet and Depeyre (2016) and use controversy to explore the evolution of policy for sustainability and market shaping in the English vegetable sector agora. In doing so the authors create a novel explanation of why policy, which aimed to usher in a sustainable market, fell short of its aims and contribute to an under-researched area examining policy for sustainability in a B2B context.

The paper aims to offer an exploration of the Banking Act 1987 which was passed following the failure of Johnson Matthey Bankers (JMB) in 1984. This Act extended the role of auditors in banking supervision by removing traditional confidentiality constraints and created a new role of “reporting accountant”. The paper seeks to examine the origin and development of these new reporting roles. In addition, the paper considers the extent to which the findings of this historical investigation might contribute to current debates on the role of auditors in banking supervision.

The paper draws on official documents, personal accounts of individuals responsible for dealing with the JMB crisis, and semi‐structured interviews conducted with audit partners and banking supervisors who had direct experience of implementing the supervisory reforms instituted under the Banking Act 1987. Power's explanatory schema of controversy, closure and credibility is adopted as a framework for the analysis of documentary sources and interview data.

The failure of JMB generated sufficient controversy so as to require reform of the system of banking supervision. The paper shows that JMB was a controversy since it disturbed what went before and carried with it sufficient allies for change. To achieve closure of the controversy, agreement by key actors about changes to the nature of the role of auditors was required to ensure legitimacy for the reforms. Backstage work undertaken by the auditing profession and the Bank of England provided the necessary credibility to renormalise practice around the new supervisory arrangements.

The paper develops Power's schema which is then employed to analyse the emergence of the new role of reporting accountant and extended role for auditors in UK banking supervision. The paper provides empirical evidence on the processes of controversy, closure and credibility that help to ensure the legitimacy of accounting and auditing change.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss and evaluate the role of hybrid forums as tools to address specific controversies related to sustainable practices in localized agro-food systems (LAFS).

In contrast with other conventional public engagement methods, such as citizen juries, consensus conferences, focus groups or deliberative processes, hybrid forums entail a more dynamic and democratic mechanism to reflect and act together, with the aim of constructing a common project around a defined challenge (Callon et al., 2001, 2009). They can offer an enriching and challenging methodological approach in the context of LAFS, especially in the discussion of controversial issues around food chain sustainability. The authors present here a new generation of hybrid forums: HF 2.0.

HF 2.0. represent both a methodological tool and a real experience of dialogic democracy, two interactive aspects which are closely interlinked and rest upon each other. The authors argue that the attractiveness of HF 2.0. is notable in at least two ways: first, they provide a solid democratic and reflective mechanism to stimulate effective dialogue and knowledge-exchange among different stakeholders; second, they contribute as an important methodological evidence-based tool, which can be used as a launching pad for shaping local action groups and community partnerships’ strategies aimed at fostering local development.

This paper attempts to provide a methodological discussion over the experimental use of HF 2.0. in the context of LAFS and assesses their effectiveness in the co-construction of knowledge. The authors explore their pragmatic validity in addressing controversies over local and sustainable seafood via empirical applications in Norway and the UK.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the different roles and natures of objects in organizational process. Furthermore, the concept of the mediation object is developed to understand how the objects help to structure interactions and collective activities over time.

The paper employs data from a case study (the Pupitre Virtuel) in order to highlight and illustrate the relevance of a process analysis of the roles and natures of objects.

The paper demonstrates that the roles and natures of objects evolve over time through controversies and compromises. On one hand, the evolution of interactions drives the evolution of the roles and natures of objects. On the other, the evolution of objects help the actors to structure their interactions and activities.

The paper argues that, rather than a static analysis, human‐object interaction needs to be understood and observed through a process analysis, taking into account the evolution of objects and interactions. This paper shows that mediation objects can play three roles – as carriers of controversies, of compromises, and of prescriptions – and that it can appear in one of three aspects – interpretable, modifiable, and non‐interpretable/non‐modifiable.

Recent years have witnessed a national policy shift towards involving state and local police in enforcing US federal immigration laws. Critics argue that involving local police in enforcing immigration law will decrease Latino(a) and immigrant residents' willingness to report crime and their cooperation with the police, and will also increase racial profiling and negatively impact documented and undocumented residents. This paper aims to examine Latino(a) residents' perceptions of the police before and after an extended local controversy about involving police in enforcing immigration laws in Costa Mesa, California.

The paper reports findings of a before‐and‐after study in the Westside area of the City of Costa Mesa, California. Methods include Spanish and English language telephone surveys of Latino(a) and non‐Latino(a) residents in the Westside (n=169 respondents before and n=91 respondents after), conducted in 2002 and in 2007.

In survey responses, Latino(a) residents report that they are more likely to be stopped by the police in 2007 compared to 2002. Latino(a) respondents also have more negative perceptions of the police, find the police less helpful, feel less accepted in the community, and say that they are less likely to report crimes after the controversy, compared to before.

The findings show the importance of policies that encourage cooperation with and trust of the police. These results can help inform cities about the potential impacts of involving local police in immigration enforcement.

Corporate foundations – entities established to regularize corporate giving at an arm’s length removed from the firm – command substantial resources, root companies in the nonprofit sectors of their host communities, indirectly augment perceptions of corporate responsibility, and help firms to deflect controversies in an attentive global media environment. Despite these important roles, relatively little research has examined the institutional and strategic factors that influence such proximate charitable giving by firms. Using systematic data on foundations linked to S&P 3000 firms in the health sector – a growing domain in which public trust in high-stakes products and services is critical – fixed-effects models illustrate the primary role of network influences on giving: corporate foundations give substantially more in years following higher contributions by other (noncorporate) foundations in the health sector in a firm’s headquarters locality and also following increased contributions by industry peers through their corporate foundations. Giving also appears to reflect strategic reputational concerns, in that foundation contributions increase significantly following controversies associated with the corporate parent’s products and/or services. By contrast, giving tends to decline as the presence of outside directors on a firm’s board increases, as well as when firms carry heavier debt loads. Combined, these findings suggest that corporate foundations serve as a strategic proxy for the firm, reflecting both a company's position in community and interfirm networks while also mitigating the threat of reputational challenges.

Based on the agency and resource dependence theories, this study aims to investigate whether nomination committee (NC) characteristics could serve as key attributes for reducing environmental, social and governance (ESG) disputes and whether NC composition affects the appointment of ESG-friendly directors to the board.

This study focuses on a sample of 30 global systemically important banks from 2015 to 2021. The authors estimate panel data models with fixed effects, clustering heteroskedastic standard errors at the bank level to account for the serial correlation of the dependent variables for each bank.

Banks’ exposure to ESG controversies can be reduced when NC members have specific skills, in particular when at least one member of this committee also belongs to the sustainability committee and is a foreign director. Moreover, banks’ ESG disputes decrease when the NC members are younger, while the share of independent NC members has a negative impact. Finally, a positive influence of NC composition and its members’ features as well as the appointment of ESG-friendly directors on the board is found.

The findings are particularly useful during periods such as the current one, when there is growing attention to both banks’ corporate governance, the subcommittees’ role and functioning and social and environmental issues. This study shows that the NC is important in reducing the likelihood of banks incurring ESG disputes and in appointing more ESG-friendly directors. NC effective functioning and its members’ qualities serve as a key attribute for fulfilling objective assessment and improving board effectiveness.

This article explores the ways in which actor‐network theory (ANT) invites an alternative account of democratic process, namely in terms of issue‐formation, which is particularly well suited to the study of democratic practices facilitated by information and communication technologies (ICT). Engaging with arguments that have been made in political theory in favor of the re‐invigoration of institutional and extra‐institutional forms of democratic debate, this article argues that a re‐valuation of issue‐politics is more than timely. In this respect, actor‐network theory is a particularly fruitful approach, since it provides the conceptual and methodological equipment to account for democracy in terms of processes of issue formation. Such an account of democracy, it is argued, is particularly appropriate to the study of ICT‐based democratic processes, since in the context of ICT distributed networks that configure around particular issues can be seen to emerge as the carriers of democratic process. Moreover, ANT provides the conceptual and methodological tools for the development of a research practice of tracing public controversies as they are enacted in such networks on the Web. In tracing a particular controversy on the Web, around the Development Gateway, a portal for development information set up by the World Bank, one begins to articulate an alternative understanding of the significance of ICT for institutional as well as extra‐institutional forms of democracy. A number of requirements on effective democratic action, as facilitated by ICT, are derived from the case study, which move beyond the requirement of social networking, i.e. the building of partnerships, and informational networking, i.e. the exchange of knowledge and opinion. Issue‐networking here comes to the fore as indispensable to democratic politics.