From corporate social responsibility to the democratic regulation of transnational corporations

This publication examines the role of transnational corporations in governance and critically evaluates the dominant self-regulatory approach of corporate social responsibility (CSR). By placing the onus for change on the corporation, CSR represents an agent-led approach to a systemic problem, and as such it is flawed. After distinguishing between the ideas of CSR and corporate accountability, the latter of which emphasises the answerability of the corporation to public authorities and citizens, the publication then offers an original model for the democratic regulation of the corporation. The model proposes, first, the negotiation of a new corpus of international law to be agreed by states but ratified by those corporations that wish to trade or invest internationally and, second, the reinvigoration of the public charter as an active instrument of public control. The model aims to provide a nested framework within which corporations can trade and compete, while restoring to local communities final decision making authority on the conditions under which corporations may, or may not, operate. Some possible objections to the model are anticipated and addressed

Learning to Identify Ambiguous and Misleading News Headlines

Accuracy is one of the basic principles of journalism. However, it is increasingly hard to manage due to the diversity of news media. Some editors of online news tend to use catchy headlines which trick readers into clicking. These headlines are either ambiguous or misleading, degrading the reading experience of the audience. Thus, identifying inaccurate news headlines is a task worth studying. Previous work names these headlines "clickbaits" and mainly focus on the features extracted from the headlines, which limits the performance since the consistency between headlines and news bodies is underappreciated. In this paper, we clearly redefine the problem and identify ambiguous and misleading headlines separately. We utilize class sequential rules to exploit structure information when detecting ambiguous headlines. For the identification of misleading headlines, we extract features based on the congruence between headlines and bodies. To make use of the large unlabeled data set, we apply a co-training method and gain an increase in performance. The experiment results show the effectiveness of our methods. Then we use our classifiers to detect inaccurate headlines crawled from different sources and conduct a data analysis.Comment: Accepted by IJCAI 201

Corporate social responsibility as cultural meaning management: a critique of the marketing of ‘ethical’ bottled water

To date, the primary focus of research in the field of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been on the strategic implications of CSR for corporations and less on an evaluation of CSR from a wider political, economic and social perspective. In this paper, we aim to address this gap by critically engaging with marketing campaigns of so-called ‘ethical’ bottled water. We especially focus on a major CSR strategy of a range of different companies that promise to provide drinking water for (what they name as) ‘poor African people’ by way of Western consumers purchasing bottled water. Following Fairclough's approach, we unfold a three-step critical discourse analysis of the marketing campaigns of 10 such ‘ethical’ brands. Our results show that bottled water companies try to influence consumers' tastes through the management of the cultural meaning of bottled water, producing a more ‘ethical’ and ‘socially responsible’ perception of their products/brands. Theoretically, we base our analysis on McCracken's model of the cultural meaning of consumer goods, which, we argue, offers a critical perspective of the recent emergence of CSR and business ethics initiatives. We discuss how these marketing campaigns can be framed as historical struggles associated with neo-liberal ideology and hegemony. Our analysis demonstrates how such CSR strategies are part of a general process of the reproduction of capitalist modes of accumulation and legitimation through the usage of cultural categories

RNN Language Model with Word Clustering and Class-based Output Layer

The recurrent neural network language model (RNNLM) has shown significant promise for statistical language modeling. In this work, a new class-based output layer method is introduced to further improve the RNNLM. In this method, word class information is incorporated into the output layer by utilizing the Brown clustering algorithm to estimate a class-based language model. Experimental results show that the new output layer with word clustering not only improves the convergence obviously but also reduces the perplexity and word error rate in large vocabulary continuous speech recognition

Matching Queries to Frequently Asked Questions: Search Functionality for the MRSA Web-Portal

As part of the long-term EUREGIO MRSA-net project a system was developed which enables health care workers and the general public to quickly find answers to their questions regarding the MRSA pathogen. This paper focuses on how these questions can be answered using Information Retrieval (IR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques on a Frequently-Asked-Questions-style (FAQ) database

Heterodox Critiques of Corporate Social Responsibility

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is in vogue in recent times. It has been widely received by socially concerned people in business, academia, and NGOs that CSR would lend support to the improvement in social welfare and the protection of environment. However, the question that whether corporations are socially responsible or corporations should behave responsibly is beside the point from the heterodox economic perspective. The proper question to pose is how corporations manipulate the social by means of CSR. Drawing upon the heterodox theory of the business enterprise along with the social provisioning perspective, I argue that the business corporation has always acted in a socially responsible manner by generating ethical-political-cultural values, norms, and beliefs that legitimize whatever the business corporation does is socially responsible. In this respect, CSR is a market-based means to control the social provisioning process by way of creating an illusionary image of corporations and, thereby, hiding the ruthless acquisitive drive and the exploitation of human beings and nature.Corporate social responsibility, social provisioning process, the business enterprise, social welfare

Giving Around the Globe: 2014 Edition

The Giving Around the Globe report is primarily based on data from 54 of the world's largest companies located outside of the United States from 17 countries, which represent US $3.6 billion in cash and non-cash in 2013. This report is not designed to identify a region as having the "best" method of corporate community engagement. Rather, it is designed to present, explore, and help you and your philanthropy team navigate the regional differences that define our increasingly interconnected world. Companies continually seek what's new or what's next, and learning from businesses far from home is a great way to do just that