Academic interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR) can be traced back to the 1930s. Since then an impressive body of empirical data and theory-building has been amassed, mainly located in the fields of management studies and business ethics. One of the most noteworthy recent conceptual contributions to the scholarship is Midttun’s (Corporate Governance 5(3):159–174, 2005) CSR-oriented embedded relational model of societal governance. It re-conceptualises the relationships between the state, business, and civil society. Other scholars (In Albareda et al. Corporate Governance 6(4):386–400, 2006; Business Ethics: A European Review 17(4):347–363, 2008; Lozano et al., Governments and Corporate Social Responsibility, 2008) have recently successfully used the model as the basis for their analytical framework for researching CSR activities in a large number of western European countries. While this research offers valuable insights into how CSR is operationalised, it also suffers from a number of significant limitations. To develop a stronger analytical framework with which to explore CSR, this article draws more deeply on political science literature concerned with governance and public policy analysis. This represents the main purpose of this article. In addition, this article also addresses a second and more modest aim: to reflect on the ways in which relational governance-inspired frameworks could be adapted and applied to politico-economic systems where state-industry-third sector relations differ from those found in North America and Western Europe. Both lines of argument are illustrated using vignettes from a case study of the Evenkia Hydro-Electric Station building project in the Russian Federation.

This research aims to design a green Pharmaceutical Supply Chain (PSC ) that reduces preventable pharmaceutical waste and effectively disposes of inevitable pharmaceutical waste. The main output of this study is the formulation of an integrated green PSC model involving all critical stakeholders, leading to improved environmental, economic and safety performance in medication management and delivery. The research is based on literature and on secondary resources. To green the PSC, every producer of waste is duty bound to facilitate the safe handling and disposal of waste. A Cross boundary Green PSC (XGPSC) approach is proposed to identify participants’ contribution to the PSC. Peripheral influences are also recognised from professional and regulatory bodies. This study focuses solely on community PSC in the UK where patients receive medication from local community pharmacies and thus may be limited. The proposed XGPSC approach also needs to be tested and validated in practice. It may also be difficult to transfer some of the environmental practices proposed in this research into practice. The environmental practices and actions proposed provide invaluable insight into various PSC activities, including purchasing, product design, prescription patterns and processes, medication use review, and customer relationship management. The proposed environmental actions encourage firm commitment from everyone to reduce, recycle or effectively dispose of pharmaceutical waste, with patients becoming stewards of medication rather than only consumers. A cross boundary approach is developed to green the PSC, and it encourages total involvement and collaboration from all participants in PSC.

Controversial industry sectors, such as alcohol, gambling, and tobacco, though long-established, suffer organizational legitimacy problems. The authors consider various strategies used to seek organizational legitimacy in the U.K. casino gambling market. The findings are based on a detailed, multistakeholder case study pertaining to a failed bid for a regional supercasino. They suggest four generic strategies for seeking organizational legitimacy in this highly complex context: construing, earning, bargaining, and capturing, as well as pathways that combine these strategies. The case analysis and proposed bidimensional model of generic legitimacy-seeking strategies contribute to limited literature on organizational legitimacy in controversial industry sectors. In addition, beyond organizations active in controversial contexts, this study and its implications are useful for individuals and organizations supporting or opposing the organizational legitimacy of organizations in controversial industries.

This paper, using data from 100 UK listed firms, investigates the relationship between audit committee characteristics and intellectual capital (IC) disclosure. We find that overall IC disclosure is positively associated with audit committee characteristics such as the size and frequency of meetings, and negatively associated with audit committee directors’ shareholding. We find no significant relationship between IC disclosure and audit committee independence and financial expertise. We also observe that the association between audit committee characteristics and IC disclosure varies with the IC components (i.e. human capital, structural capital and relational capital), suggesting that the underlying factors that drive various components of IC disclosure are different. These results have important implications for policy-makers in that they confirm that the effectiveness of audit committees in the corporate reporting processes is a function of certain characteristics.

This paper argues that the technology life cycle literature is confused and incomplete. This literature is first reviewed with consideration of the related concepts of the life cycles for industries and products. By exploring the inter-relationships between these, an integrated view of the technology life cycle is produced. A new conceptualization of the technology life cycle is then proposed. This is represented as a model that incorporates three different levels for technology application, paradigm and generation. The model shows how separate paradigms emerge over time to achieve a given application. It traces the eras of ferment and incremental change and shows how technology generations evolve within these. It also depicts how the eras are separated by the emergence of a dominant design, and how paradigms are replaced at a technological discontinuity. By adopting this structure, the model can demarcate the evolution of technologies at varying levels of granularity from the specific products in which they may be manifest to the industries in which they are exploited. By taking technology as the unit of analysis the model departs from previous work, which has adopted a product-based perspective predominantly. The paper discusses the managerial and research implications associated with the technology life cycle, and indicates how these inform future research directions. As well as contributing to academic knowledge, the results of this research are of value to those who make decisions about the development, exploitation and use of technology including technology developers, engineers, technologists, R & D managers, and designers.

The paper examines the determinants of stabilization and its impact on the aftermarket prices. We use a unique dataset to relax several assumptions in the stabilization literature. We find that underwriters support IPO prices shortly after listing, particularly in cold markets and when demand is weak. We also show that stabilized IPOs are more common amongst reputable underwriters. This finding suggests that stabilization may be used as a mechanism to protect the underwriter’s reputation. It also implies that reputable underwriters may possess private information and price IPOs closer to their true values (i.e., higher than those indicated by the weak premarket demand). Consistent with the latter view, we show that stabilized IPOs are offered at higher prices and suffer less underpricing than those indicated by the premarket demand, firm characteristics and market-wide conditions. The post-IPO performance results indicate that stabilized IPOs are unlikely to be mispriced as their prices do not exhibit any significant reversal after the initial stabilization period. We conclude that stabilization may be superior to underpricing as it protects investors from purchasing overpriced IPOs, benefits issuers by reducing the total money “left on the table” and enhances the overall profitability of underwriters.

Since mid-2000 a number of important changes to policy, legislation, government guidance and practice directions have been introduced in child-protection practice. These changes have the intention of placing children and families at the heart of decision-making with regard to judgements about their future. Central to these changes is the commitment to reducing delay in the conduct and resolution of cases so that outcomes for children are optimised, and costs and resources are effectively managed. Proposed legislation to impose a six-month time limit for the completion of care cases emphasises the drive to frontload work with children and families pre-proceedings. This paper explores the issues surrounding the boundary of decision-making between the courts and the local authority following the publication of the Family justice review. It considers the implications of making a greater number of highly consequential decisions within administrative rather than judicial settings, and explores the rights of children and parents within such decision-making processes. Whilst the intention of policy changes may be laudable, it is argued, in line with Munro that a number of obstacles may result in less desirable outcomes for children.

We propose a fuller synthesis between two relatively disjointed literatures to create synergy. Union commitment research has a long tradition and a relatively rigorous orientation grounded in industrial psychology. Recently, it has been eclipsed by emerging research on union renewal, and specifically that on union organizing. Renewal research has largely ignored union commitment research even though union renewal literature stresses the importance of activism, and this concept is strongly linked to commitment. A critical synthesis of these literatures yields progress in terms of addressing key qualitative and quantitative aspects of the contemporary crisis of labour unionism. A tentative framework is constructed that stipulates the main components and variables, and offers guidance for future research.

This article examines whether the downward trajectory in strike activity in nine Western European economies has continued over recent years. In doing so, it considers the nature of the dominant forms of extant strike activity and how these relate to systems of collective bargaining and political exchange. The main findings are three-fold. First, while there has been a general decline in aggregate strike activity, this has often been punctuated by sharp peaks. Second, the dominant nature of the strike activity, especially the sharp peaks, has become increasingly concerned with mounting demonstrative collective mobilizations in the political, rather than industrial, arena. Consequently, much strike activity is increasingly being deployed as a tool of political leverage with governments rather than as a tool of industrial leverage with (private sector) employers. Third, official data on strikes are becoming increasingly unreliable as they contain ever more significant exclusions, raising not so much the prospect of an end to quiescence but an over-estimation of the extent of decline.

This study examines the impact of FTSE 100 index revisions on the informational efficiency of the underlying stocks. Our study spans the 1986–2009 period. We estimate the speed of price adjustment and price inefficiency from the partial adjustment with noise model of Amihud and Mendelson (1987). We report a significant improvement (no change) in the informational efficiency of the stocks added to (deleted from) the FTSE 100 index. The asymmetric effect of additions and deletions on informational efficiency can be attributed, at least partly, to certain aspects of liquidity and other fundamental characteristics, which improve following additions but do not diminish after deletions. Cross-sectional analysis also indicates that stocks with low pre-addition market quality benefit more from joining the index.