Materiality in corporate sustainability reporting within UK retailing

The concept of materiality is attracting increasing attention in corporate sustainability reporting. This paper offers a preliminary examination of the extent to which the UK's leading retailers are currently addressing materiality in their sustainability reports and offers some wider reflections on the ways retailers are embracing materiality. The paper begins with a short discussion of the concept of materiality and on its determination and the paper draws its empirical material from the most recent sustainability reports posted on the Internet by the UK's top ten retailers. The findings reveal that there are significant variations in the extent to which the UK's leading retailers are embracing materiality and that there is no evidence of a sector specific approach to materiality within the UK retail community. More generally the authors argue that the methods currently being used to determine materiality are flawed and that retailers seem likely to continue to face challenges in looking to reconcile the relationships between executive management teams, investors and a wide range of stakeholders in operationalising the concept of materiality. The paper provides an accessible review of the extent to which the UK's leading retailers are currently embracing materiality as part of the sustainability reporting process and as such it will interest academics, students and practitioners interested in retailing and corporate sustainability. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The conscience of a fugitive: sheldon wolin and the prospects for radical democracy

Amidst increasing and seemingly intransigent inequalities, unresponsive institutions, and illegible patterns of social change, political theorists are increasingly faced with questions about the viability of democracy in the contemporary age. One of the most prominent voices within this conversation has been that of Sheldon Wolin. Wolin has famously argued that democracy is a ‘fugitive’ experience with an inherently temporary character. Critics have pounced on this concept, rejecting it as an admission of defeat or despair that is at odds with the formation of democratic counter-power. In this article, I push back against this view of fugitive democracy. I do so by contextualizing the idea within Wolin’s broader democratic theory, and especially his idea of the ‘multiple civic self’, in order to give a more coherent form to a conception of citizenship often concealed by the attention given to the supposedly momentary nature of democracy. This all too common misreading of fugitive democracy has significant stakes, because it shapes not only how we approach Wolin’s impact as a political theorist, but also how we approach practices of democratic citizenship and how we think about political theory and political science’s relationship to those practices.     

Norm Diffusion and Reputation: The Rise of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative

Transparency in the extractives sector is widely seen as an important tool for improving accountability and deterring corruption. Yet for those very reasons, it is a puzzle that so many governments in corruption‐prone countries have voluntarily signed up to greater scrutiny in this area by joining the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). We argue that EITI serves as a reputational intermediary, whereby reformers can signal good intentions and international actors can reward achievement. International and domestic actors thus utilize EITI to diffuse the norm of resource transparency and to advance reformist aims in a highly problematic policy area.     

Settling the Office: The Australian Prime Ministership from Federation to Reconstruction

Settling the Office: The Australian Prime Ministership from Federation to Reconstruction. By Paul Strangio, Paul ‘t Hart and James Walter (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2016), pp. vi + 312. Thirty‐two illustrations. AU$49.99 (cloth).     

Who needed the October 1973 war?

Scholars and pundits believe that Anwar Sadat went to war in October 1973 because Israel left him no choice. The Israeli government rejected his peace proposals during 1971–73, and Sadat initiated the war in order to demonstrate his refusal to agree to the status quo and to the continuation of the Israeli occupation of the territories it occupied in June 1967. However, when the peace treaty signed between Israel and Egypt in March 1979 is carefully studied, it appears the terms of the treaty were in fact much closer to the Israeli position and terms as presented before the 1973 war than to those set by Sadat. Careful reading of the relevant documents in general and Sadat's claims and arguments in particular will show that it was actually Sadat who needed the war, and he needed it not in order to force Israel into a political process, but for himself, so as to accept terms he could not accept without a war.     

South Africa's bilateral relationships in the evolving foreign policy of an emerging middle power

This article introduces the special issue on ‘South African Foreign Policy: identity, directions, and intentions’. Here we seek to summarize key insights from the contributions to this special issue to deepen understanding of South Africa’s evolving post-apartheid foreign policy through an exploration of the nature and trajectory of key bilateral relationships from both the global ‘South’ (Brazil, China, Iran, the AU) and ‘North’ (Japan and the UK). This window on the country’s international relations enriches understanding of the normative and structural factors that influence not only South African foreign policy, but those of what Edouard Jordaan calls emerging middle powers as they seek to position themselves as influential actors in international affairs. We sketch the contours of these key South African relationships in four areas where the tendencies and tensions of emerging middle power foreign policies are apparent: regionalism, multilateralism, reform of global governance, and approach to moral leadership.     

Ethnographic filmmaking as narrative capital enhancement among Atauro diverwomen: a theoretical exploration

This article reports on a project involving the development and release of an ethnographic film about the women divers of Atauro Island, Timor-Leste, and suggests a theoretical framework to interpret its outcomes. It describes the project aims and the filmmaking process, and reports on its results. In doing so, the paper explores the potential use of an agent-based concept of narrative capital focused on collective agents. The article suggests that the ideas of narrative capital and transformations of capital by collective agents can provide a valuable interpretative framework for the design, implementation, and analyses of results of development interventions involving filmmaking.     

The influence of interest: Real US interest rates and bilateral investment treaties

Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) present developing countries with a trade-off. BITs plausibly increase access to international capital in the form of foreign direct investment (FDI), but at the cost of substantially curtailing a government’s policy autonomy. Nearly 3000 BITs have been entered into, suggesting that many countries have found this trade-off acceptable. But governments’ enthusiasm for signing and ratifying BITs has varied considerably across countries and across time. Why are BITs more popular in some places and times than others? We argue that capital scarcity is an important driver of BIT signings: The trade-off inherent in BITs becomes more attractive to governments as the need to secure access to international capital increases. More specifically, we argue that the coincidence of high US interest rates and net external financial liabilities heightens governments’ incentives to secure access to foreign capital, and therefore results in BIT signings. Empirical evidence is consistent with our theory.