Material Flows Accounting: A Biophysical Approach to Macroeconomic Sustainability

The increasing dimension of socio-environmental problems make sustainability a macroeconomic issue and new methodological instruments are needed. In this paper, Material Flows Accounting is presented as a new statistical approach for an evaluation of macroeconomic sustainability. Based on the pre-analytic vision that economies are an open system embedded in the environment, it provides an overview in tonnes of annual material inputs and outputs of an economy. It quantifies the physical dimension of societies and analyses the “size” of the human economy in the geo-biosphere. As it provides information about efficiency and material requirements, it is a very important method for analysing whether a nation is moving towards sustainability or away from it. Used in many official statistics, it will become one of the most powerful tools in describing sustainability at the macroeconomic level. In this paper, after the presentation of the Material Flows Accounting approach, an Italian case study is considered.     

Strategic role of public relations in enterprise strategy,governance and sustainability—A normative framework

The purpose of the study was to suggest a normative framework for the development of an organization's enterprise (societal role/stakeholder) strategy, indicating its relationship with governance, sustainability, and CSR. The normative framework contains two dimensions: Enterprise strategy is developed within the context of enterprise governance as well as social and environmental sustainability and responsibility, to achieve the organization's strategic non-financial goals (the sustainability dimension). Corporate strategy is developed within the context of corporate governance as well as economic sustainability and responsibility, to achieve strategic financial/economic goals (the business dimension). PR/communication management plays a strategic role in enterprise strategy development but a support role in corporate strategy development. The development of enterprise strategy necessitates a Triple Bottom Line approach to strategic management.     

BUSINESS RESOURCES AND TAXATION: A CROSS-SECTIONAL EXAMINATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ECONOMIC ORGANIZATION AND PUBLIC POLICY

Many writers have speculated about the connection between economic resources of corporations and their ability to dominate politics in democratic societies with advanced capitalist economies. Using a cross-sectional analysis of business taxes in the American states, this study examines the political impact of four economic resources that are plausibly related to heightened business political influence. With seven factors held constant, I find that states with larger enterprises are most likely to have lower taxes on manufacturing, but concentrated sales do not have any effect on these taxes. The degree to which the organizational efforts of firms are handicapped because industry products are diverse also has an independent relationship with state and local taxes paid by manufacturers, but this relationship does not hold when the least industrial states are excluded from the equations. I also find that where competition between political parties is most intense, tax policies will be less likely to favor business interests. It follows that the evidence in this study is consistent with a hypothesis that firms can translate their formidable economic resources into political influence at the state and local level.     

What is ethnic in an ethnic economy?

This article examines critically the relationship between ethnicity and entrepreneurship in the sociology of immigrant economies. It argues that what is ethnic in an ethnic economy has often been confusingly conceptualised and that several factors now call for re-assessing the ethnic nature of immigrants' business activities. On the basis of a review of recent research, three such factors are outlined: the porosity of ethnic boundaries to cross-group business interactions; the diversity within immigrant economies in terms of status, gender, class and generation; and the political and institutional context in which immigrant economies take place. The conclusion stresses the need for multiple explanations of how and why immigrants become entrepreneurs, which take into account not only the meso-level constituted by ethnicity and social capital, but also micro-individual factors and macro-institutional settings.     

Reflexive Development: A Model for Helping Social Workers Contribute to a Sustainable Global Future

It is difficult for many social work students to grasp the importance they and their traditional client base play in global environmental issues. International development generally focuses on supporting human development through the development of natural resources. However, increased human consumption everywhere in the world is disrupting the global system upon which all life depends. Continued Western consumption habits are simply unsustainable. It is therefore incumbent that any increase in consumption, even in the ‘developing’ world, be considered in terms of global environmental sustainability; change must also occur within the developed world. To address this problem, reflexive processes that support transnational analysis and action must be developed. This paper suggests classroom activities that help students analyze and problem solve around this process of Reflexive Development.     

Mahjong Gambling in the Chinese-Australian Community in Sydney: A Prevalence Study

Mahjong is a popular gambling game played in Chinese communities all over the world (Papineau, China Perspect 28:29–42, 2000) and is sometimes referred to as ‘国赌’ (guodu, the Chinese national gambling game) or ‘修长城’ (xiu changcheng, repairing the Great Wall). Exploratory studies using snowball sampling conducted by Zheng et al. (J Psychol Chin Soc 9(2):241–262, 2008) indicated that Mahjong is not only a popular pastime within the Sydney Chinese community but also problematic for around 3% of players. The current study aimed to extend earlier studies by estimating the prevalence of Mahjong problem gambling in a random sample of Sydney Chinese community members. In addition, due to first-hand gambling experience of the first author with superstitious Mahjong players, the study also investigated the role of superstitious beliefs in Mahjong gambling. The current study involved a series of self-report questionnaires administered to 469 randomly selected Chinese Australians in Sydney. The problem gambling rate, assessed by the Canadian Problem Gambling Index (CPGI), was 3.8%, with Chinese males and older Chinese prominent. Superstitious beliefs were found to play a part in the maintenance of Mahjong gambling behaviour. Information stemming from the current study has helped gain insight into culturally specific forms of gambling, and to identify correlates of problem gamblers. Funding bodies and counselling services should be aware of the existence of this form of gambling, and should devise appropriate treatment plans for Mahjong problem gamblers.     

Green Coffee? The Contradictions of Global Sustainability Initiatives from an Indian Perspective

The ‘Common Code for the Coffee Community’ (4C) was developed as a multi‐stakeholder initiative designed to embed sustainability principles in the mainstream coffee industry. It elicited widespread condemnation from producer countries during its initial ‘testing phase’. Focusing on Indian opposition, this article comes to the conclusion that, unless key issues as defined by producer‐country interests are addressed, any initiatives to advance the economic, social and environmental sustainability of the industry are likely to be seen as vehicles within a neo‐imperialist agenda seeking to establish consumer‐country control over the product supply chain.     

Explaining the Commercialization of the Internet

This paper argues that a neo-Gramscian perspective can provide useful explanatory insights into the recent commercialization of the Internet. Governments, notably in the USA and Europe, have taken action to shape and smooth this transition in response to the desire of business to exploit a new commercial opportunity. A series of measures has been enacted in relatively new international fora whose general aim is to promote the development of international production and trade. There is evidence of concerted efforts aimed at designing an interconnected regulatory framework within which global electronic commerce might evolve. Governmental interests have attempted to promote the ethos of a new liberalized, self-regulatory system that prioritizes commercial and trademark interests of business.     

Multiple business ownership in the farm sector: assessing the enterprise and employment contributions of farmers in Cambridgeshire

Multiple business ownership has become an important theme within the small firms research literature. While early studies emphasised its role in reducing business risk, more recently portfolio entrepreneurship has been recognised as an important growth strategy, particularly in sectors where economies of scale can be achieved at a relatively low level. Research studies specifically examining multiple business ownership are still scarce, but the parallels between portfolio entrepreneurship in non-farm sectors and farm pluriactivity have been noted. Although pluriactivity has been subject to extensive investigation in recent years, analysis has generally focused on farm-centred diversification, rather than the wider entrepreneurial activities of the farmer. Using a survey of nearly 300 farm owners in Cambridgeshire, this exploratory study analyses the incidence of portfolio entrepreneurship in the farm sector and assesses its contribution to enterprise and employment creation. The results demonstrate that a core of farmers have multiple business interests and that these additional business activities make a substantial contribution to both numbers of enterprises and employment creation. While previous studies of pluriactivity have generally used the farm business as the main unit of analysis, it is argued that including the wider business activities of the farm owner enables a more precise estimation of the total contribution of farmers to rural economic development.     

Organizations and Learning: A Critical Appraisal

Discussions about organizations and learning continue to attract critical interest. Since the emergence in the 1970s of the notion of the “learning organization,” notions of systems’ learning, knowledge management and lifelong learning have progressively entered into the debates. Earlier debates, which drew on education and psychology fields as well as organization and management studies, frequently explored plural objectives for learning occurring within organizational and workplace arenas. They included emphasis on workers’ as well as managerial interests in various forms and objectives of learning. Latter debates on organizational learning appear predominantly shaped by a distinctive economic rationality and management interest. This article, from a sociological vantage point, reviews key thematic issues and critically explores some current questions in regard to organizations and learning. It proposes that a prevailing economic model in accordance with generalized policy objectives evident across the advanced economies for a neo‐liberalized “knowledge‐based economy” and “learning society” poses a particular set of contemporary issues and problems. The current juncture may, however, stimulate further innovation in models of learning organizations that widen agenda and prospects for learning.     

Sociology and the environment: An analysis of journal coverage

Many sociologists have suggested that the dominant paradigm in sociology ignores the environment, which accounts for the fact that environmental sociology is poorly represented in sociology’s mainstream journals. The purpose of this article is to test this assumption empirically by examining the coverage of environmental sociology in nine mainstream sociology journals from 1969 through 1994. The nine journals are separated into two tiers, representing higher and lower prestige journals. Each environmental article is categorized by its area (attitudes and behaviors, environmental movement, political economy, risk, and “new human ecology”) and whether it involves “sociology of the environmental issues” (the application of standard sociological perspectives to environmental issues) or “core environmental sociology” (the examination of societal-environmental relationships). We find that less than two percent of all articles published in the sampled journals in the twenty-five-year period of study were environmental, and that the higher tier journals were less likely to publish environmental articles than were the lower tier journals. Environmental articles were more likely to be part of “core environmental sociology” after 1981 than they were “sociology of the environmental issues,” which suggests a greater recognition among both environmental sociologists and journal reviewers that human societies are ecosystem-dependent. The number of environmental articles increased in the 1990s, portending a fruitful period for sociologists specializing on the environment. We argue that the broader field of sociology can benefit by recognizing the linkages environmental sociology has to other sociological specializations and that, ultimately, sociology needs to be able to address environmental variables in order to understand society. Naomi T. Krogman’s primary interest is in stakeholder framing of environmental disputes and natural resource policy change. She is currently a research sociologist at the Center for Socioeconomic Research at the University of Southwestern Louisiana and adjunct faculty in the Department of Sociology, University of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette, LA 70504-0198. JoAnne DeRouen Darlington is a research sociologist focusing on social change and community sustainability emerging from the disastrous interactions between society and the environment. She is currently employed with the Natural Hazards Research Center, Campus Box 482, Boulder, CO 80309.     

Decoupling: A Key Fantasy of the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda

Abstract

Central to the United Nations’ post-2015 development agenda grounded in the Sustainable Development Goals is the notion of ‘decoupling’: the need to divorce economic growth from its ecological impact. For proponents, decoupling entails increasing the efficiency with which value is derived from natural resources in order to reconcile indefinite economic growth with environmental sustainability. However, even advocates admit that the idea of decoupling remains poorly conceptualized and subject to scant empirical investigation. This persistent commitment to a highly questionable idea suggests the possibility of a deeper psychological dynamic at work here. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, in this article we therefore analyze decoupling as a ‘fantasy’ that functions to obfuscate fundamental tensions among the goals of poverty alleviation, environmental sustainability, and profitable enterprise that it is intended to reconcile. In this way, decoupling serves to sustain faith in the possibility of attaining sustainable development within the context of a neoliberal capitalist economy that necessitates continual growth to confront inherent contradictions.     

Contesting the neoliberal project for agriculture: Productivist and multifunctional trajectories in the European Union and Australia

The liberalisation of agricultural trade is strongly contested as an international policy project. In the context of the current World Trade Organisation (WTO) Doha trade round, concerns revolve around the implications of freer trade for rural livelihoods and environments. Analysis of this complex and morally charged issue offers important insights into the nature of resistance to the neoliberal agenda. This resistance has been expressed in terms of perceived threats to the ‘multifunctionality’ of agriculture and its ability to provide public environmental and social benefits. We focus specifically on Australia and the European Union (EU), key players in the WTO process but diametrically opposed in their embrace of, or resistance to, agricultural neoliberalisation. While the EU has sought to maintain trade barriers in order to protect both marginal areas and the market advantages derived from a heavily-subsidised, productivist agriculture, Australia relies on ‘competitive productivism’ – unsubsidised, highly productive agriculture – to win markets. There is nevertheless evidence that the compatibility of market rule with agri-environmental (and, to a lesser extent, social) sustainability is being contested in both Australia and the EU, particularly at the regional scale. The nature and terms of this contestation are different, however, given the radically divergent macro-economic and socio-political contexts in which it is being framed. The debate about the socio-environmental implications of market opening within the agriculturally protectionist environment of the EU is largely anticipatory and risk-averting, while in the already market-exposed Australian context it is increasingly compensatory and harm-minimising. In this paper, we argue that neoliberalisation as a policy agenda is reshaped in different states and regions through processes of resistance and accommodation arising from particular geographical, historical, political and institutional contexts, and as a response to crises.     

Community Banks and Loans for Nonmetropolitan Businesses: A Multilevel Analysis from the 2007 Survey of Business Owners

Access to financial capital is vital for the sustainability of the local business sector in nonmetropolitan communities. In this article we develop two hypotheses and examine the impact of financial sector restructuring on the odds of using a bank loan to finance a new business or expand an existing business. Focusing on nonmetropolitan American businesses, we connect restricted tabulations of the 2007 Survey of Business Owners to data on the commuting zones (CZ) in which businesses are located. We use multilevel logistic regression models to predict the effects of community bank presence within the CZ on the odds of using a bank business loan to start or expand a business for nonmetropolitan businesses started or purchased since 2000. Net of important characteristics of the businesses and owners, we find that the greater the proportion of local banks in a nonmetropolitan CZ, the greater the odds that a conventional business loan was used to either help start a new business or expand an existing business.     

Welfare-domination under preference-replacement: A survey and open questions

The objective of this paper is to describe various applications of a requirement of solidarity pertaining to situations in which the preferences of some of the agents may change. It says that the welfares of all agents whose preferences are fixed should be affected in the same direction: they should all weakly gain, or they should all weakly lose. We show how this condition, which we name “welfare-domination under preference-replacement”, can help in evaluating allocation rules. We discuss it in several contexts: private good allocation in classical economies, public good decision, binary choice with quasi-linear preferences, economies with indivisible goods, economies with single-peaked preferences, both in the private good case and in the public good case, and economies with time. For some of these models the implications of the property are well understood. For others, we state a number of open problems. Received: 2 January 1997/Accepted: 26 February 1998     

Corporate social responsibility driven innovation

This study identifies the substantial relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and innovation activities of firms. Using the French Vigeo sustainability rating and the Thomson Reuters, we divided 619 firms into groups by their industry sectors, regions, and firm characteristics such as size and age. We premise that innovative investment is needed to prepare tomorrow's profits not only by considering investments in technology and in R&D, but also by dealing with sustainability to human, social, environmental, technical, and economic investments. Consequently, when the firm manipulates its short- and long-run business strategies, the consideration of the correlation between types of investment and CSR initiatives will lead to more cooperating effect on the outcome of investments. The findings provide a comprehensive understanding on the effect of sustainable management strategies on the innovation and sustainability of firms.     

Any Difference? An Analysis of Gender and Divisional Management Styles in a Large Airline

There has been much debate as to whether women manage differently from men and whether this may constitute a reason for women's lack of progress to the top echelons of organizations (Tanton 1994; Coyle 1993; Still 1994; Wajcman 1998). This article locates the sameness/difference debate in a wider analysis of management styles, with particular attention paid to the business function. It is also suggested that any debate on styles must take place within a feminist theoretical framework which acknowledges inequalities of power, economic and patriarchal interests. Management skills are socially constructed (Phillips and Taylor 1980) and change according to social and economic conditions. The article shows that business function is the most important influence on management style. The author contends, like others, that even in times of great change, men seem to be able to hold on to the most powerful positions in organizations (Cockburn 1986; Savage and Witz 1992; Collinson et al. 1990). The convergence of patriarchal interests with business interests ultimately determines what style is valued. The much vaunted feminization of management (Rosener 1990) does not mean that more women are to be found in senior positions in organizations. Nor do large numbers of women managers necessarily lead to a more feminized management style (Kanter 1977). Stereotypes of women still act against their acceptance into positions of power while men's ability to adopt some of traditionally feminine skills of communication means that women's supposed advantage (Rosener 1990) may have been leapfrogged.     

Social and Psychological Challenges of Poker

Poker is a competitive, social game of skill and luck, which presents players with numerous challenging strategic and interpersonal decisions. The adaptation of poker into a game played over the internet provides the unprecedented opportunity to quantitatively analyze extremely large numbers of hands and players. This paper analyzes roughly twenty-seven million hands played online in small-stakes, medium-stakes and high-stakes games. Using PokerTracker software, statistics are generated to (a) gauge the types of strategies utilized by players (i.e. the ‘strategic demography’) at each level and (b) examine the various payoffs associated with different strategies at varying levels of play. The results show that competitive edges attenuate as one moves up levels, and tight-aggressive strategies––which tend to be the most remunerative––become more prevalent. Further, payoffs for different combinations of cards, varies between levels, showing how strategic payoffs are derived from competitive interactions. Smaller-stakes players also have more difficulty appropriately weighting incentive structures with frequent small gains and occasional large losses. Consequently, the relationship between winning a large proportion of hands and profitability is negative, and is strongest in small-stakes games. These variations reveal a meta-game of rationality and psychology which underlies the card game. Adopting risk-neutrality to maximize expected value, aggression and appropriate mental accounting, are cognitive burdens on players, and underpin the rationality work––reconfiguring of personal preferences and goals––players engage into be competitive, and maximize their winning and profit chances.     

Surviving and thriving: Bringing back sociology at the University of San Francisco

This article provides a case study of successful departmental revitalization at the University of San Francisco. We examine the current crisis in the field of sociology and others’ recommendations for addressing it. Reforms are outlined that transformed USF Sociology from a nearly extinct program to a model department on campus. Jennifer Turpin’s research focuses on violence, militarism, gender, and war; Mike Webber’s research examines the relationship between business and politics; Anne Roschelle’s research concentrates on racial, ethnic, and underclass family networks; William Edwards studies urban development, globalization, and social inequality; and Joseph Angilella’s interests include religion and society and complex organizations.     

Bridging the divide in urban sustainability: from human exemptionalism to the new ecological paradigm

This paper reviews the main bodies of contemporary urban sustainability theory. From this analysis, two underpinning paradigms of urban sustainability are identified: (1) The ‘Human Exemptionalism Paradigm’ (HEP), which emphasizes the ability of humans to overcome environmental problems—see Urban Sociology, Urban Ecology, Urban Geography, Urban Psychology and Political Economy; and (2) The ‘New Ecological Paradigm’ (NEP), which emphasizes the criticality of ecological limits to human progress—see Urban Metabolism, Energy/Emergy Analysis and Ecological Footprinting. Each of these approaches is critically reviewed, highlighting their main assumptions, theoretical and practical foci. It is argued in the paper that if the related issues of urban sustainability and development are to be progressed, there needs to be: (1) a greater maturation of the NEP approaches, which are ‘relative newcomers’ to the area of urban theory; and (2) greater integration and dialogue between the HEP and NEP approaches to urban sustainability than has hitherto been the case.