435 research outputs found

    Barriers to and Opportunities for Intergovernmental Conflict Resolution: A Case Study of the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion

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    Federalism can exacerbate tensions around the uneven geographical distribution of natural resources. Related conflicts recur in Canada, a federal state with an uneven distribution of petroleum products across its provinces and territories. A salient example of intergovernmental conflict over petroleum products is the dispute over the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project. This research examines the conflict among the Governments of Canada, British Columbia, and Alberta around Trans Mountain, focusing on the barriers to intergovernmental conflict resolution and mitigation in Canada and the requirements any policy options must fulfill to overcome these barriers. A mainly qualitative approach addresses these issues. Specifically, this research combines global energy governance and John L. Campbell’s typology of ideas to create a new approach. Campbell is more central to this research. This approach is applied to a secondary statistical analysis of public opinion polling, a thematic analysis of key actors’ public documents, and an analysis of interviews I conducted with key actors. This research finds that together, competitive federalism and the joint decision trap prevent conflict resolution. Accordingly, this research produces a list of barriers to resolving this intergovernmental conflict and requirements for mitigating this conflict. By identifying these requirements, I create and apply an original approach that future studies can use to test the likelihood of success for policy options to mitigate similar intergovernmental conflicts over natural resources. This research’s evaluation of potential mitigation tools suggests that 1) federal and provincial teams dedicated to large projects help bureaucrats complete these projects; 2) policies protecting the environment decrease tensions among actors; and 3) leveraging communication through partisan affiliations decreases tension

    Management Controls for Sustainable Development: Evidence from a Thai Manufacturing Organisation

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    This thesis aims to empirically investigate the use of management controls in relation to sustainable development within an established manufacturing organisation in Thailand. Situated within the conflicts between formal motivators (e.g., performance measurement and reward systems) which call for economic rationalism and an informally cognitive responsibility for socio-ecological awareness and commitment (Ball and Milne, 2005; Milne, 1996), the existence of formal and informal management controls to support the sustainable development belief and their interplays are examined. An inductive research approach with Laughlin’s (1991) organisational change framework is drawn upon in the analysis of a single case study. The empirical evidence is collected through semi-structured interviews, non-participant observations and document analysis to investigate the organisation's sustainability discourse. This study makes important contributions to the extant social and environmental accounting literature, especially concerning management controls. Little research directs towards how organisations integrate their management controls with the sustainable development concept (Lueg and Radlach, 2016) due to its subjective and disputable nature (Ball and Milne, 2005; Gray, 2010; Milne, 1996). This research goes further to unveil the change journey in quantifiable and religious-based management controls within a Thai manufacturing organisation that encountered complex sustainability challenges. Furthermore, the sustainability concept has been integrated into corporate strategies, organisational culture and key capabilities for value-added activities and innovation. The internal and external disturbances were managed with proper caution and safeguards. The observed formal and informal management controls worked interdependently in line with the organisation’s core values (i.e., interpretive schemes – Laughlin, 1991). These control tools are shown to be built on “measure what can be managed” or achievable-based outcomes with support from multiple specialist work groups

    Business sustainability: understanding the influence of managers and stakeholders on adopting sustainability practices in Nigerian SMEs

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    A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy.The importance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in any economy must be balanced, yet hardly the sector attracts the needed attention for sustainability. This has led to unacceptable high mortality rates for the sector, especially in emerging contexts. Nevertheless, SMEs and sustainability agenda share significant melting pots of disrupting large-scale extreme poverty, among other benefits. Numerous literature supports this and acknowledges SMEs' potential for national employment, investment stimulation and gross domestic growth (GDP). This study aimed to unveil the impacts of managerial characteristics and stakeholders on Nigerian SME sustainability practices to understand SME business sustainability practices in developing countries. To fully investigate these impacts, three research questions enabled the navigation of this project. Firstly, to ascertain the current antecedents influencing SME sustainability practices. Secondly, we quizzed the relationship between the manager's characteristics and Nigerian SME sustainability practices. Furthermore, finally, we sort out how stakeholders influence SMEs' sustainability practices in Nigeria. A qualitative research approach was adopted within an interpretivist philosophical paradigm to construct participants narrated perspectives of sustainability practices. Data were collected from twenty-two (22) Nigerian SME owners/managers and nine (9) stakeholders in semi-structured interviews, virtually. Participants' information was inductively condensed, analysed and thematically framed using the Upper Echelon and Stakeholder concepts. The findings were dimensionally extracted using Gioia's step/order analysis to develop a data structure for each research question. The findings for the current antecedence include the political and governance dimension, the cultural and societal dimension, the economic dimension, and the business orientation dimension. In contrast, the findings for the relationship between managerial characteristics and sustainability practices include observable dimensions and cognitive values. The finding for stakeholder influence on sustainability practices includes the managerial alignment dimension and the dimension of stakeholders’ intervention. Asides from the contribution to knowledge, the result presented national, organisational and managerial practical implications. Diverse organisational and regulatory policy implications were also presented with future research directions

    Socio-Political Context as a Driver of Corporate Governance Practices in a Society: A Case Study of the Nigerian Banks

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    The global increase in failures and scandals in the financial services sector, especially banking institutions, has renewed the call for a more robust corporate governance in the industry. This has necessitated the need to investigate the impact of corporate governance on bank performance, and this study focuses on the case of Nigeria. Previous research has investigated the impact of corporate governance practices mostly in the developed world, to the neglect of vulnerable and poor economies such as Nigeria. This study therefore investigates the impact of corporate governance on the performance of Nigerian banks in the pre- and post-colonial period, using quantitative and qualitative methodological approaches. While various different theoretical perspectives have been adopted to study the impact of corporate governance in specific social contexts, the appropriateness of these theories to the socio-political context of poor countries has become contested. Considering the integration of the Nigerian economy into the global neoliberal capitalist economic system, this thesis adopts neoliberal global capitalism to understand the activities of the Nigerian banking institutions. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection, adopting qualitative semi-structured interviews and questionnaires, within the framework of neoliberal capitalism, the quantitative results suggest that board size, frequency of board meetings, frequency of audit committee meetings and managerial share ownership have a negative relationship with bank performance. Most of the respondents did not believe that neoliberal corporate governance practices were practical in Nigerian banking institutions. In sum, the study identifies a number of factors leading to failure of banks in Nigeria: the impact of the Nigerian socio-political context of overbearing family domination, ineffective boards, dual and pseudo-dual CEOs, flagrant disobedience and poor application of corporate governance codes. These factors have resulted in poor risk management, excessive risk taking and other unethical behaviours. This study contributes to the body of knowledge by providing an understanding of the connection between corporate governance principles and the performance of banks, looking at the peculiarities of each society in the application of corporate governance principles and introducing a balanced score card to the application of corporate governance. Keywords: Corporate governance, profitability, board size, neoliberalism, Central Bank of Nigeria, political economy, audit committe

    Decisioning 2022 : Collaboration in knowledge discovery and decision making: Applications to sustainable agriculture

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    Sustainable agriculture is one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) proposed by UN (United Nations), but little systematic work on Knowledge Discovery and Decision Making has been applied to it. Knowledge discovery and decision making are becoming active research areas in the last years. The era of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data science, in which linked data with a high degree of variety and different degrees of veracity can be easily correlated and put in perspective to have an empirical and scientific perception of best practices in sustainable agricultural domain. This requires combining multiple methods such as elicitation, specification, validation, technologies from semantic web, information retrieval, formal concept analysis, collaborative work, semantic interoperability, ontological matching, specification, smart contracts, and multiple decision making. Decisioning 2022 is the first workshop on Collaboration in knowledge discovery and decision making: Applications to sustainable agriculture. It has been organized by six research teams from France, Argentina, Colombia and Chile, to explore the current frontier of knowledge and applications in different areas related to knowledge discovery and decision making. The format of this workshop aims at the discussion and knowledge exchange between the academy and industry members.Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzad

    Rethinking consumer agency in the global economy

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    For the average British consumer, even the most mundane commodities they encounter depend on raw materials and labour sourced from across the globe. Consumers are at the heart of modern globalisation as participants in a complex tangle of globe-spanning social relations, yet International Political Economy lacks a compelling account of their role in generating, sustaining and resisting the unequal relations of global trade. Instead, the consumer remains trapped within the black box of statistical aggregates. This can obscure more granular questions of how and why consumers make the choices that they do. In place of the empirical study of consumers themselves lie axiomatic assumptions about the nature and extent of their agency. This thesis sets out to a richer, sociological account of consumption to IPE’s global perspective. To do so, it develops a dataset that studies the everyday consumption practices of 34 South Yorkshire households, recorded through consumption diaries and interviews. This provides the basis for an account of consumer agency located in a Pragmatic understanding of human agency, which can better account for the balance of habit, deliberation and creativity that shape people’s encounters with the material commodities they consume. In particular, by focusing on how the act of valuation is shaped by these different dimensions of agency, a new, bottom-up perspective on the consumer’s role in the global economy can be developed. This is grounded in two conceptual devices, regimes of everyday valuation and the social standard of living, that help unpick the complex relationship between consumer behaviour and the contingent conditions of the global economy in which it takes place. This reveals the role played by consumers in sustaining the unequal relationships of global trade, whilst also highlighting potentially transformative avenues for change
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