When Social Norms and Pressures Are Not Enough: Environmental Performance in the Trucking Industry

Why do some business firms and not others work hard to advance regulatory values such as environmental protection and comply with regulations? Previous research indicates that business firms are influenced in that regard by a number of variables—not merely the perceived likelihood of legal punishment but also the risk of negative reactions by societal actors (which we call “social license pressures”) and the intensity of managers' commitment to norms of law‐abidingness and environmentalism. This article reports on a study of control of diesel emissions in the trucking industry, a highly competitive market with many small firms, mobile pollution sources, expensive “best control technologies,” and weak regulatory demands. In contrast to findings in studies of large firms, we found that social license pressures on small trucking firms are minimal. Trucking companies' environmental performance—good and bad—flows from managers' economic choices, which are influenced by their particular market niche. In such highly competitive, small‐firm market contexts, these findings imply, significant improvement in environmental performance is not likely without strong direct regulatory pressures.     

Social License and Environmental Protection: Why Businesses Go Beyond Compliance

This article examines the concept of the corporate "social license," which governs the extent to which a corporation is constrained to meet societal expectations and avoid activities that societies (or influential elements within them) deem unacceptable, whether or not those expectations are embodied in law. It examines the social license empirically, as it relates to one social problem–environmental protection–and as it relates to one particular industry: pulp and paper manufacturing. It shows try the social license is important, the circumstances in which it may encourage companies to go "beyond compliance" with regulation, how its terms are monitored and enforced, and how it interacts with what we term the regulatory and economic licenses. Overall, this research demonstrates that corporate environmental behavior cannot be explained purely in terms of instrumental threats and moral obligations to comply with the law, and that the increasing incidence of "beyond compliance" corporate behavior can be better explained in terms of the interplay between social pressures and economic constraints.     

The effect of social networking sites and absorptive capacity on SMES’ innovation performance

The combination of knowledge and innovation has become a cornerstone among knowledge and labour intensive enterprises. A growing number of enterprises are defined as knowledge intensive entrepreneurship ventures that have been widely studied in relation to their eco-system. However only few research have addressed this phenomenon to enterprises digital eco-system by adopting mainly a qualitatively approach. We point out that the relevance of the digital eco-system focusing on the role of social networking sites in relationship to innovation and knowledge. The use of social networking sites can provide a wealth of information about individuals and their networks, which can be utilised for various business purposes. It enables enterprises to create online communities and share user-created content. Within this context, enterprises actively interact with external actors such as customers, public institutions, and other businesses to acquire and absorb external knowledge, and then generate innovation. To gain insights from the global economy, 215 small to medium enterprises from different sets of global enterprises, both knowledge-intensive (e.g. management consulting, marketing and advertising, ICT and related services, legal and technical services) and labour-intensive (such as high tech and electronics, food and beverage, and consumer durables), were analysed. Via the Partial Least Square-Path Modelling the relationships between social networking sites, absorptive capacity, and innovation performance were measured. Therefore, recommendations are proffered as to what small-medium enterprises should do in order to enhance their innovativeness. The research ends with conclusions and implications to both scholars and practitioners.     

促进中小企业发展 缓解我国就业压力

受金融危机影响,我国经济发展速度趋缓,就业压力不断增大,为此,国家出台了多项政策刺激经济发展,缓解就业压力.但作为解决就业压力主战场的中小企业始终没有得到更多的政策扶持.鉴于此,结合我国目前的实际情况,从政策扶持、法律保障、融资环境改善、服务体系优化等方面来积极促进中小企业的发展,对缓解我国就业压力具有重要意义.     

刍议中小企业融资难的原因及法律对策

中小企业的融资本质上就是通过社会的资金分配制度对其进行社会资金的配给。中小企业融资难问题的解决途径在于从制度的角度型构一种新的社会资金分配制度。我国中小企业融资难既有政府经济职能的因素,又有银行的因素、资本市场的因素及中小企业自身的因素。要建构一个克服中小企业融资难的制度体系,应解决以下四个核心的问题：一是要规范政府在中小企业融资中的功能;二是要构建中小企业的间接融资渠道;三是依法规范资本市场以保障中小企业融资;四是要构建克服中小企业自身局限性的制度体系。     

Social web knowledge sharing and innovation performance in knowledge-intensive manufacturing SMEs

This paper develops an integrative research model to assess the effect of different factors on social web knowledge sharing and its effect on innovation performance in manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In addition, this study analyzes whether social web knowledge sharing may be a mediator in the relationship between human resource (HR) practices and innovation performance. The proposed research model and its associated hypotheses were tested by using partial least squares structural equation modeling on a dataset of manufacturing SMEs. This study contributes to research seeking to understand the factors affecting social web knowledge sharing by demonstrating that technological and organizational factors have greater impact than environmental factors on social web knowledge sharing. It also contributes to research by exploring the indirect effects of the social influence of HR practices on organizational innovation performance by offering evidence on the mediating effect of social web knowledge sharing in the relationship between HR practices and organizational innovation performance in manufacturing SMEs.     

Explaining Corporate Environmental Performance: How Does Regulation Matter?

How and to what extent does regulation matter in shaping corporate behavior? How important is it compared to other incentives and mechanisms of social control, and how does it interact with those mechanisms? How might we explain variation in corporate responses to law and other external pressures? This article addresses these questions through an study of environmental performance in 14 pulp and paper manufacturing mills in Australia, New Zealand, British Columbia, and the states of Washington and Georgia in the United States. Over the last three decades, we find tightening regulatory requirements and intensifying political pressures have brought about large improvements and considerable convergence in environmental performance by pulp manufacturers, most of which have gone “beyond compliance” in several ways. But regulation does not account for remaining differences in environmental performance across facilities. Rather, “social license” pressures (particularly from local communities and environmental activists) and corporate environmental management style prod some firms toward better performance compliance than others. At the same time, economic pressures impose limits on “beyond performance” investments. In producing large gains in environmental performance, however, regulation still matters greatly, but less as a system of hierarchically imposed, uniformly enforced rules than as a coordinative mechanism, routinely interacting with market pressures, local and national environmental activists, and the culture of corporate management in generating environmental improvement while narrowing the spread between corporate leaders and laggards.     

A Structural Modelling Approach to Predict Adolescent Offending Behaviour from Family,School and Community Factors

It seems undeniable that immediate social contexts exert an important influential role on adolescent behavioural adjustment. Research thus far has found that certain family, school and community/neighbourhood environment characteristics may influence a youth’s involvement in risk activities such as antisocial behaviour and drug use, and even delinquent behaviour. However, the mechanisms that link these characteristics to such behaviours have not yet been thoroughly analysed and prior research has focused mainly on adult populations. The objective of this study was to analyse the joint contribution of specific factors, deriving from family, school and society, which have an effect on levels of drug consumption, antisocial and offending behaviour, in a sample of 2528 youths (aged 10 to 16). In particular, in accounting for involvement in risk activities and ultimately in offending behaviour, we examined interactions among the following variables: living in a disadvantaged community, quality of relationship with parents, distrust in local police, attitude to social norms, and rejection of and from school (truancy, suspension and expulsion). A structural equation model was calculated to account for these interactions, which revealed patterns of influence with important practical implications related to social policies on risk behaviours in adolescence.     

治理现代化视阈下吉林省小微企业纾困问题探析

治理现代化视阈下小微企业纾困问题具有诸多结构性特征,涉及国家治理、政府治理和社会治理.从规模类型上看,小微企业包括小型企业和微型企业、家庭作坊式企业,其在税收、经济、技术创新和就业等方面均发挥着重要作用.本文通过对吉林省小微企业、中型企业和大型企业的相关比较,分析了目前吉林省小微企业存在的主要问题,并在相关问题的基础上...     

行政许可自由裁量权的表现与防控

行政许可是行政机关管理社会公共事务的重要手段,行政许可自由裁量权是现代行政权的重要组成部分,在行政许可中普遍存在.从分析行政许可自由裁量权入手,有针对性地构建行政许可自由裁量权的防范与控制体系,可以有效规范行政许可行为,预防和根除腐败现象的发生.     

Motivating Management: Corporate Compliance in Environmental Protection*

Based on interviews with facility managers in the electroplating and chemical industries, this study examines regulated firms’ perceptions of how various instrumental, normative, and social factors motivated their firms’ environmental actions. We found that “implicit general deterrence” (the overall effect of sustained inspection and enforcement activity) was far more important than either specific or general deterrence, and that deterrence in any form was of far greater concern to small and medium‐sized enterprises than it was to large ones. Most reputation‐sensitive firms in the environmentally sensitive chemical industry chose to go substantially beyond compliance for reasons that related to risk management and to the perceived need to protect their social license to operate. Almost half our respondents also provided normative explanations for why they complied. Overall, we conclude that there are various, often interwoven, strands that must be taken into account in understanding what motivates corporate environmental behavior, and how they play out depends very much on the size and sophistication of companies themselves and on the characteristics of the industry sector within which they are located.     

Is Law Unbounded? Property Rights and Control of Social Groupings

This review essay follows up on a suggested model for resolving problems of neighborhood externalities and exclusionary associational patterns in metropolitan areas. The model is based on a property rights regime of “alienable entitlements,” as articulated by Lee Anne Fennell in The Unbounded Home (2009). The essay frames this model as promoting a groundbreaking approach to the fundamental quandary over the role of law as a tool for broad-based social change and asks if legal rules can fully absorb the multiple types of societal effects that influence the nature of contemporary homeownership. It assesses the normative desirability and practical feasibility of controlling social exclusion through property rights.     

The role of economic and psychological variables in parking violations

Abstract

This study explored some of the factors involved in parking violations, using as a framework the model of tax evasion developed by Weigel, et al. (1987). Two groups of parkers were observed, offenders (N = 121) and non-offenders (N =128). Two questionnaires were employed. An initial questionnaire was used at the time of the observed behaviour to ascertain situation-specific factors followed by the main questionnaire which measured attitudes, moral beliefs, social norms and controls, perceived risk and severity of punishment and personal characteristics. Results revealed that the Weigel et al. model was a good predictor of parking violation with both economic and psychological factors being important determinants. There was also a significant correlation between observed and self-reported behaviour. Implications for understanding rule-breaking behaviour in general are also discussed.     

Animal protection and legislators in Britain and the United States

This article considers the reaction of legislators to the emergence of animal protection as a political issue. A quantitative analysis of legislative behaviour in the House of Commons and the House of Representatives in the late 1980s and early 1990s reveals (mainly through the identification of a small but significant group of legislators willing to promote concern for animal welfare) that the growing societal concern for animals has permeated into the political institutions of Britain and the United States. Examining the characteristics of these legislators suggests, moreover, that the most significant variable is party label, with concern for animals being associated with parties of the centre‐left. It is further suggested that there are good reasons to suppose that this association is no accident and that ideologically, there is a fit between animal protection and the ideals of the left.     

Karl Polanyi and the Problem of Corporate Social Responsibility

This article considers Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as part of the projects in ‘new governance and decentred regulation’, which draw social forces towards the regulation of economic behaviour. It uses Karl Polanyi to open up pertinent interfaces between society and economy for observation, and Gunther Teubner to substantiate a ‘regulatory’ view of the company's social relationships. The article finds that CSR combines movements for the recognition of social relationships, on an unprecedented scale, with rigorous simultaneous movements for market building and social abstraction. Twenty‐first‐century market economy is defined by a capacity to contain ‘the social,’ which is thrown between the two movements, creating opportunities for companies to void the market's social limits. The article counterposes that the social that ‘returns’ after marketization needs to find its way past market‐building CSR, to constructively unshackle and redefine the framing of social conflicts that concern the corporation.     

Natural population movement and marriage restrictions and hindrances in Styria in the 17th to 19th centuries

To marry has never been an egalitarian option or everybody's wish. There have always been calculations or considerations, structural or individual hindrances and even societal restrictions for individuals to get married despite wishing to do so. Without any doubt and apart from the debate on determination or love and free choice in former times, to marry has always been a societal event, a mutual relationship between personal wishes and societal environmental expectations.

And apart from all the debates on paradoxes in modernization processes, it is clear that in pre-modern times societal marriage restrictions were widespread.

It is very unlikely that people should have been forbidden to marry because they should not have sexual contacts, just for morality reasons. The keys have been considerations and calculations on reproductivity, economic and social resources, social and human capital. This paper deals with aggregated vital data from four parishes in Styria, Austria, covering the outgoing 17th century until the end of the 19th century, in order to detect hints of marriage restrictions.

The paper proves the well-known variety of marriage systems in pre-industrial and pre-modern times. It supports the idea that the presence of marriage restrictions hindered population growth, but the absence of such restrictions did not automatically foster more societal transparency and developmental chances in a modern sense, as mortality and inequality were very strong factors in pre-modern agrarian societies. In the end, the question of marriage restrictions was apparently posed and answered by privileged groups.     

Corporate social responsibility as new challenge for the IT industry

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a relevant topic for enterprises offering products and services on a global scale. International organizations provide for guidelines and private associations publish codes of conduct requiring businesses to integrate social, environmental and ethical aspects, human rights as well as consumer concerns into their operations. Not at least the EU is promoting CSR through an Agenda for Action 2011–14. The implementation of CSR is a multidimensional ethical process and gains particular importance for the IT industry which by its nature is global. Therefore, IT enterprises are invited to conduct a CSR assessment, to develop a CSR strategy and to implement CSR commitments. These tasks are to be done by introducing specific CSR processes and compliance measures for risk assessment and risk mitigation.     

中小企业融资困局的经济法对策

直接融资适合于具有较高成长性的高新技术企业,而众多劳动密集性中小企业由于自身性质形成的信息不对称也难以成为银行等金融机构间接融资的对象.中小企业的融资困局是市场缺陷造成的,政府干预是弥补市场缺陷的主要方式,政府在解决中小企业融资困局中所形成的经济关系是经济法的调整对象.在借助"政府-社会中间层-市场"三元框架分析政府、与中小企业融资有关的社会中间层和中小企业的定位的基础上,应从经济法的主体角度进行相关的制度设计,探索长效机制解决中小企业的融资困局.     

The stop and think group: Changing sexually aggressive behaviour in young children

Abstract

Until recently, relatively little attention has been paid to young children who are sexually aggressive to other children. In this paper, cognitive-behavioural group techniques which have been used in the treatment of aggressive, impulsive behaviour in young children were applied in a small group setting to the sexually aggressive behaviour of pre-pubescent boys. The boys initially learned a ‘Stop and Think” model for general interpersonal problem-solving, which was then used to work on their difficulties with verbal and physical sexual aggression. Observation of the children's behaviour, reports from carers, school staff and social workers indicated that the group programme increased the children's ability to inhibit impulsive, aggressive behaviour. In the nine months after the group finished there were no known incidents of sexual aggression. In the context of certain limitations discussed in the paper, this positive outcome suggests that these methods have potential for reducing the likelihood of sexually aggressive behaviour becoming habitual.