Corporate Social Responsibility and the Oil Industry in the Russian Arctic: Global Norms and Neo-Paternalism

Examining the oil and gas industry in the Russian Arctic, this article investigates the gap between corporate social responsibility (CSR) as articulated in corporate offices and implemented at the local level. In Russia, global CSR norms interact with weak formal institutions and the strong informal expectations of state officials and local communities that companies bear responsibility for welfare and infrastructure. As a result, the concept of citizens as ‘stakeholders’ is underdeveloped. Instead, local residents remain subjects within a neo-paternalist system of governance that mimics some elements of the Soviet past. Compensation for damages to indigenous peoples has blurred legal obligations and the voluntary nature of CSR. However, the CSR in the region is constantly developing and formal methods of compensation may assist in clarifying the scope and practice of CSR.     

Horizontal mergers and efficiencies; theory and anti trust practice

Horizontal mergers can be challenged by anti trust authorities under both the US and EU Horizontal Merger Guidelines. More horizontal mergers are unconditionally approved in the US than in the EU. EU merger policy toughened after 1998 but became more in line with US practices after 2004. Differences in merger policies between the US and the EU can be explained by a greater scope of the efficiency argument in the US. The paper argues that firms only want to merge in oligopoly, if they expect to realize substantial merger specific efficiency gains, which counterbalances the price increasing effect of merger.      

Runaway Bureaucracy? Exploring the Role of Nordic Regulatory Agencies in the European Union

This article reports a comparative study of the Environmental Regulatory Agencies in Norway, Denmark and Finland. Increasingly and relatively independently these agencies are taking part in transnational networks in the European Union involving the European Commission. An informal penetration, fuelled by faster electronic technology, is taking place between the European Commission and the regulatory agencies, largely outside the control of the domestic politico-administrative leadership. Changes in the character of the states' public administrations serve as an important background for these developments, a distinctive feature being the 'agencification' of the administrative apparatus during the last decades. Due to their relative autonomy, the national regulatory agencies are well placed to work 'double-hatted' in the sense that they interact directly with the European Commission at the same time as they perform traditional tasks as agents of national ministries. This development may challenge the image of integrated administrative apparatus and the notion of transparent and democratic governance.     

Socialization and generational political trajectories: an age,period and cohort analysis of political participation in Britain

The role of political socialization in explaining disengagement from specific modes of activism beyond voting remains largely unexplored, limited to date by available data and methods. While most previous studies have tended to propose explanations for disengagement linked to specific repertoires of political action, we propose a unified theory based on the different socialization experiences of subsequent generations. We test this theory using a new dataset of collated waves of the British Social Attitudes Survey and by applying age–period–cohort models for repeated cross-sectional data and generalized additive models to identify generational effects. We show that generational effects underlie the participatory decline across repertoires. Consistent with our expectations, the results reveal that the generation of “Thatcher’s Children” are much less likely to engage in a range of repertoires of political action than “Wilson/Callaghan’s Children”, who came of age in the more politicized 1960s and 1970s. Significantly, and in line with our theoretical expectations, the “Blair’s Babies” generation is the least politically engaged of all. We reflect on these findings and highlight the concerning implications of falling levels of activism for advanced democracies.     

Designing for equitable civic engagement: Participatory design and discourse in contested spaces

A common theme of research on participatory democracy and citizen engagement centres on the need for empirical studies that conduct a deep exploration of the nuances and complexities of these processes. This article offers a distinct response to this need through an examination of two ethnographic case studies of a participatory budgeting process in a multilingual, highly diverse community in which Spanish-speaking Latino immigrants were involved. By analyzing participants discourse from the case studies, the findings highlight the risks and rewards of reframing participatory processes as design decisions rather than static procedures.