Think socially but act publicly: refocusing CSR as corporate public responsibility

Current literature has identified many different definitions for the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR). As a result, many organizations fail to implement and measure CSR strategically. This study reviews the different theories and concepts within CSR and suggests that the current scope of CSR activities is too large that organizations are unable to find a tangible link between CSR and their bottom line. Using two case examples, this study proposes refocusing the concept of CSR as corporate public responsibility (CPR) based on which organizations utilize the concept of publics to prioritize the groups to which they must fulfill their responsibilities before attending to society as a whole. Because organizations are constrained by limited resources, the concept of CPR allows them to invest their resources more strategically. The concept also addresses the limitations of existing theories. The practical implications of this concept will be discussed in detail. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

I tweet like a white person tbh! #whitewashed: examining the language of internalized racism and the policing of ethnic identity on Twitter

Using data extracted from Twitter, this study analyzes the English expression whitewashed as it occurs with and without a hashtag (e.g.: #whitewashed vs. whitewashed) through corpus analysis. As whitewashed has evolved to take on racial connotations to mean being too assimilated to a dominant white culture, I investigate whether the presence of a hashtag has an effect on how often this racial meaning of English whitewashed is employed. Based on collocative data, the findings suggest that the use of #whitewashed carries a meaning predominately informed by internalized racism and works to bind ethnic minorities to racial stereotypes. The study explores #whitewashed as a metacomment on human behavior, as #whitewashed serves to characterize beliefs about what actions are considered socially marked when performing an ethnic identity. In contrast to #whitewashed is the colloquial expression fobby, which characterizes an individual as being “too ethnic”; both (#)whitewashed and (#)fobby are discussed in tandem in this paper, for they create a double bind that marks the boundaries of ethnic identity. In this paper, I suggest that Twitter users mediate the demands of internalized racism by using #whitewashed to mark their tweets.     

Racial Minority Women and Criminal Justice Responses to Domestic Violence

Racialized minority women’s experiences with Canadian specialized criminal justice responses to domestic violence have seldom been documented. Informed by an intersectionality framework, this qualitative study presents the struggles of 14 racial minority women from three Canadian cities and their experiences with the police and criminal court’s response to their partner’s acts of domestic violence. The results focus on how well specialized criminal justice responses address the needs of these women and protect them from further violence. Factors that facilitate or deter these women from approaching the criminal justice system for help are highlighted. The implications of these women’s narratives for criminal justice responses to domestic violence are discussed.     

Sample pre-treatment for CO-oximetric determination of carboxyhaemoglobin in putrefied blood and cavity fluid

Blood or blood-containing cavity fluid samples recovered from decomposed bodies in suspected carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning cases often have low total haemoglobin (tHb) levels or contain significant amounts of oily droplets, methaemoglobin (MetHb) and sulphaemoglobin (SHb), all conditions which render the validity of the measurements of carboxyhaemoglobin (HbCO) by commercially available CO-oximeters doubtful. Two sample pre-treatment methods, namely, centrifugal evaporation and addition of a commercially available standard haemoglobin solution containing a known level of HbCO, were developed to render such putrefied samples amenable to analysis by CO-oximeters. The methods developed were validated with samples of various degrees of putrefaction and various HbCO levels. The relative uncertainty of the determined HbCO levels as compared to their corresponding reference levels for the centrifugal evaporation method was approximately 5% and that for the standard addition method was <20%.     

Sequence variation in humans and other primates at six short tandem repeat loci used in forensic identity testing

A large number of alleles from the six different short tandem repeat (STR) loci FGA, D3S1358, vWA, CSF1PO, TPOX and TH01, used in human identity testing were sequenced to provide support for the robustness of fluorescent STR DNA typing by allele size. Sequence information for some of these loci (FGA, vWA, TH01) is an extension of published work, whereas no extensive sequence information is available with respect to the D3S1358, CSF1PO, and TPOX loci. Sequencing of alleles at each locus has provided quantitative data with respect to the true nucleotide length of common alleles, and of alleles that vary in length from the common alleles. All alleles that were identified as "off-ladder" alleles through fluorescent typing at these STR loci have proven to be true length variant alleles. Sequencing at the D3S1358 and CSF1PO loci allowed for the establishment of a common nomenclature for these loci. A correlation between percent stutter and the length of the core tandem repeat is demonstrated at the FGA locus. Alleles in which the core tandem repeat is interrupted by a repeat unit of different sequence have a reduced percent stutter. DNA samples from three non-human primates (chimpanzee, orangutan, and gorilla) were compared to the human sequences, and shown to differ markedly across loci with respect to their homology. The effects of primer binding site mutations on the amplification efficiency at a particular locus, and methods used to interpret amplification imbalance of heterozygous alleles at a locus is also addressed.     

Short-term effects of restorative justice conferences on post-traumatic stress symptoms among robbery and burglary victims: a randomized controlled trial

Objectives

To examine the impact of face-to-face restorative justice conference (RJC) meetings led by police officers between crime victims and their offenders on victims’ post-traumatic stress symptoms.

Methods

Two trials conducted in London randomly assigned burglary or robbery cases with consenting victims and offenders to either a face-to-face restorative justice conference (RJC) in addition to conventional justice treatment or conventional treatment without a RJC. Post-traumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) were measured with the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R) within 1 month of treatment for 192 victims. We assessed the prevalence and severity of PTSS scores following treatment, using independent sample t tests and chi square statistics. We further measured the magnitude of the differences between the groups, using effect size analyses.

Results

Analyses show that PTSS scores are significantly lower among victims assigned to RJC in addition to criminal justice processing through the courts than to customary criminal justice processing alone. There are overall 49 % fewer victims with clinical levels of PTSS, and possible PTSD (IES-R?≥?25). Main treatment effects are significant (t?=?2.069; p?Conclusions Findings suggest that restorative justice conferences reduce clinical levels of PTSS and possibly PTSD in a short-term follow-up assessment. Future research should include longer follow-up, larger and more stratified samples, and financial data to account for the cost benefit implications of RJ conferences compared to ordinary PTSS treatments.     

Legal challenges to combating cybercrime: An approach from Vietnam

Crime, Law and Social Change - This paper explores the legal challenges of combating cybercrime in Vietnam. We used a legal doctrine method to review the updated Vietnamese legal frameworks,...     

Vietnam’s ‘socialization’ policy and the moral subject in a privatizing economy

Abstract

The Vietnamese term for socialization, xã h?i hóa, is grounded in its history of socialist construction, originally referring to the collectivization of property and resources. Since the country shifted to a market economy, yet remaining under the leadership of the Communist Party, the term has come to imply the individualization of responsibilities and the privatization of public goods. As a policy, however, it continues to evoke the idioms of ‘the whole society’ or ‘all the people’ as the basis of wellbeing and development. This paper examines the practices of socialization as part of broader shifts in welfare provision and local dynamics of exemplarity. I show that socialization concerns not only the mobilization of resources, but also the production of a moral subject that is self-optimized and yet sensitized to helping others, self-governed and yet governable by the party state. In a socialist country that is rapidly marketising, this moral subject plays into governing rationalities that blends new-prudentialist logics with socialist genealogies, privatization with a notion of society within which individual actions can be made morally meaningful. While the tension and contestation induced by people’s greater burdens are immanent, the continued reference to collective idioms appeals to people’s moral sensibilities, and thus makes socialization meaningful to some extent, even as they resent the turn away from broad-based structures of wellbeing.     

Pressure or Information? Lobbying for Binding Renewable Energy Targets in the European Union

This article analyzes the European renewable energy industry's capacity for pressure‐based and information‐based lobbying and its strategies in two lobbying efforts: for a legally binding target of 20 percent renewable energy by 2020 (a proposal adopted by the European Council in March 2007) and for binding interim targets as a means to secure effective implementation of the 2020 target (a proposal that was not adopted). It finds that the industry has the capacity for information‐based lobbying but very limited capacity for pressure‐based lobbying. The article also discusses the effectiveness of the two lobbying types. It argues that information‐based lobbying is particularly effective early in the decision‐making process, and hypothesizes that early information‐based lobbying may compensate for limited capacity for pressure‐based lobbying and for information‐based lobbying that takes place later in the decision‐making process, but concludes that this strategy would have been unlikely to be effective in the second case.