Water stewardship and corporate sustainability: a case study of reputation management in the food and drinks industry

The aim of this paper is to provide an exploratory review of the extent to which some of the leading companies in the food and drinks industry are publicly addressing water stewardship as part of their corporate sustainability strategies. The paper begins with an introductory outline of the growing importance of water stewardship and a brief discussion of corporate sustainability. The paper draws its empirical material from the most recent information on water stewardship posted by the leading companies in the food and drinks industry's corporate websites. The findings reveal that the vast majority of the selected companies address a number of elements concerning water stewardship as part of their more general approach to corporate sustainability. However, corporate commitments to water stewardship can be interpreted as being driven as much by business imperatives as by any specific concerns for environmental sustainability or a genuine desire to maintain the viability and integrity of natural ecosystems. More critically, the authors suggest that the selected companies' commitments to water stewardship are framed within existing business models focused on technological improvements in eco‐efficiency and continuing economic growth. The paper provides an accessible review of the water stewardship issues being pursued by the leading players in the food and drinks industry, and as such, it will interest academics, students, political commentators and business managers interested in water stewardship and corporate sustainability. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Grasping the Commercial Institutional Peace

While the commercial institutional peace research program provides empirical evidence that international institutions, especially preferential trade arrangements, help reduce the incidence of militarized inter-state conflict, it fails to delineate clearly how such institutions matter. Building from the logic that low opportunity costs for fighting, private information, and commitment problems constitute important causes of war, this article explores three interrelated causal mechanisms. First, the state leaders' increased expectations about future commerce create an incentive for these actors to consider peaceful bargains as an alternative to costly war. Second, security coordination under the umbrella of a commercial institution provides fuller information about state military capabilities, thus making inter-state bargaining for dispute resolution more efficient. Third, in bringing together high-level state leaders on a regular basis, commercial institutions may create the trust necessary to overcome commitment problems in inter-state bargaining. I explore how these mechanisms have operated within the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Economic Community of West African States.     

Gender convergence in crime: Evidence from Canadian adult offense charge data

This study provided some new empirical evidence relating to the hypothesis that there was convergence between certain male and female offenses over time. Using time-series data for adults charged with offenses in Canada over the period 1983 to 2000, several formal statistical tests of this convergence hypothesis were conducted. This study allowed for the particular characteristics of the data, such as various types of structural breaks and changes over time in the process that generated the data. A number of new tests that had not previously been applied to this problem were employed, and the results that were obtained provided the first strong evidence in favor of gender-convergence for a range of offenses in Canada.