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.     

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.     

History of Abuse and Current Suicidal Ideation: Results from a Population Based Survey

The relationship between a history of physical or sexual abuse and current suicidal ideation was examined in the current study based on data from the Washington state 2002 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS). Out of the total sample of 4081, 1058 indicated they had experienced either physical or sexual abuse before the age of 18, 52 indicated they had experienced physical abuse in the past 12 months, and 210 indicated they had been forced to have sex since the age of 18. Additionally, 106 indicated they had seriously considered committing suicide in the past year. After controlling for such factors as age, gender, income, education, race, employment and marital status and the interactions between different abuse risk factors using multivariate logistic regression, results showed that a history of childhood physical (OR = 2.31, 95% CI = 1.364, 3.90) or sexual (OR = 2.72, 95% CI = 1.58, 4.67) abuse and adult physical (OR = 27.30, 95% CI = 11.64, 64.01) or sexual (OR = 5.87, 95% CI = 3.24, 10.63) abuse all were related to current suicidal ideation. Implications for future research are discussed.     

The sensitivity and specificity of the RSID™-saliva kit for the detection of human salivary amylase in the Forensic Science Laboratory,Dublin, Ireland

We demonstrate here that the RSID?-saliva test can be used as a test for human salivary α-amylase on samples routinely examined in forensic casework. We show that the RSID?-saliva test detects salivary α-amylase at lower concentrations than the Phadebas^® Quantitative test, that the RSID?-saliva test does not cross-react with forensically important human fluids and that the RSID?-saliva test can be successfully integrated into the whole swab semen extraction method.     

Mother Abuse: A Matter of Youth Justice,Child Welfare or Domestic Violence?

International evidence suggests that in advanced welfare states the abuse of parents, most particularly mothers, by their (most frequently male) adolescent children is increasingly prevalent. In the United Kingdom, however, child‐to‐mother abuse remains one of the most under‐acknowledged and under‐researched forms of family violence. Although it is an issue shrouded in silence, stigma, and shame, the authors' work in the youth justice sphere, focusing on interventions to deal with anti‐social behaviour, suggests that adolescent violence toward mothers is a topical and prevalent issue. We identify different ways of conceptualizing it in the policy realms of youth justice, child welfare, and domestic violence. The behaviour of both child/young person and mother is constructed in ways which inform the assignment of blame and responsibility. The paper highlights the silence that surrounds the issue in both the policy and wider academic spheres, hiding the failure of service providers to respond to this very destructive form of intimate interpersonal violence.     

Gating Alleys to Reduce Crime: A Meta-Analysis and Realist Synthesis

Alley gates are designed to limit access to alleys and the crime opportunities they afford. Informed by the acronym EMMIE we sought to: (1) systematically review the evidence on whether alley gates are Effective at reducing crime, (2) identify the causal Mechanisms through which alley gates are expected to work and the conditions that Moderate effectiveness, and (3) collate information on the Implementation and Economic costs of alley gating. The results of our meta-analysis suggest that alley gating is associated with modest but significant reductions in burglary, with little evidence of spatial displacement. We also identified six mechanisms through which alley gates might plausibly reduce crime, and the conditions in which such mechanisms are most likely to be activated.