Input and output legitimacy of multi-stakeholder initiatives

In a globalizing world, governments are not always able or willing to regulate the social and environmental externalities of global business activities. Multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSI), defined as global institutions involving mainly corporations and civil society organizations, are one type of regulatory mechanism that tries to fill this gap by issuing soft law regulation. This conceptual paper examines the conditions of a legitimate transfer of regulatory power from traditional democratic nation-state processes to private regulatory schemes, such as MSIs. Democratic legitimacy is typically concerned with input legitimacy (rule credibility, or the extent to which the regulations are perceived as justified) and output legitimacy (rule effectiveness, or the extent to which the rules effectively solve the issues). In this study, we identify MSI input legitimacy criteria (inclusion, procedural fairness, consensual orientation, and transparency) and those of MSI output legitimacy (rule coverage, efficacy, and enforcement), and discuss their implications for MSI democratic legitimacy

Concentration, pH, and Surface Charge Effects on Cadmium and Lead Sorption in Three Tropical Soils

Reactions of heavy metals with soil are important in determining metal fates in the environment. Sorption characteristics of two heavy metals, Cd and Pb, in three tropical soils (Mollisol, Oxisol, and Ultisol) from Puerto Rico were assessed at varying metal concentrations (0 to 1.2 mM) and pH values (approximately 2 to 7). All soils sorbed more Pb than Cd. Sorption maxima were obtained for each metal for the Oxisol and Ultisol soils, but not the Mollisol. Sorption appeared to depend more on soil mineralogy than organic matter content. Sorption isotherms were linear within the sorption envelope with similar slopes for each soil-metal curve, when plotting metal sorption as a function of pH. Cadmium and Pb isotherms yielded average slopes of approximately 36+/-1 and 28+/-1 units (percent increase in metal sorption per 1-unit increase in pH), respectively. Metal sorption depended more on metal type than soil composition. Cadmium sorption displayed a greater pH dependence than Pb. Cadmium sorption was less than or equal to the amount of negative surface charge except at pH values greater than the point of zero net charge (PZNC). This suggests that Cd was probably sorbed via electrostatic surface reactions and/or possible inner-sphere complexation at pH \u3e 3.7. However, the amount of Pb sorbed by the Oxisol was greater than the amount of negative surface charge, suggesting that Pb participates in inner-sphere surface reactions. Lead was sorbed more strongly than Cd in our soils and poses less of a threat to underlying ground water systems due to its lower mobility and availability

Sex, Gender, and IT: The Lasting Effects of Gender Bias in Information Technology Customer Service

The field of Institutional Technology has been perceived to be primary dominated by white males. As this field has become more diverse, customer expectations and responses to the changes vary. Through content analysis of prominent web logs written by male and female members of the IT community who provide direct support to customers, this research found gender preference for white males in customer service assistance

Prisoners

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The Devaluing of Nurses in Healthcare: Media Portrayals and Their Effect on the Public\u27s Opinion on Nurses

As healthcare related issues continue to rise, an unexplored problem persists beyond the scope of current debate; fueled by ignorance and mainstream media portrayals, nurses worldwide are undervalued for their work, resulting in unrealistic hiring and education expectations. These expectations result in a shortage of some of the most valuable workers in the healthcare industry and leaves everyone at risk. Yet, the public is lax to any call to action because of a misrepresentation of nurses in mainstream media. This study focused on media portrayals of nurses, following a qualitative analysis of several popular medical based television shows from the late 1980’s to 2010. From the research, a model for the mainstream nurse appears; female doctor\u27s assistant. Useful for menial labor, but not for important medical emergencies. By juxtaposing this model against a typical nursing workload, the discrepancy between television fiction and reality becomes clear. This research demonstrated how the inconsistencies between the public understanding of the role of nurses and the actual work performed by nurses has created a system in which nurses are undervalued and underutilized, imposing an artificial shortage within the healthcare industry

A holistic systems approach to international environmental politics and IR theory: A case study of Brazil and Amazonia

Amazonian deforestation in Brazil is arguably the most important environmental issue in international affairs. The Brazilian government, which had been directly and indirectly responsible for a majority of the deforestation in Amazonia, had largely discarded its past doctrine of predatory developmentalism at the end of the 1980s and adopted new strategies geared toward sustainable development and international cooperation. Factors and actors within Brazil and within the international system and the international community at large were all important sources of influence that led to the Brazilian government\u27s broad reversals of policy.The approaches of inquiry traditionally used in the study of international environmental politics and in international relations (IR) theory are found to be inadequate for examining the unusually complex case of the international politics of the Amazonian issue in Brazil. Upon finding each approach only capable of providing partial explanations, this essay introduces a new and more comprehensive means of inquiry that incorporates various approaches and various levels of analysis into a cohesive framework. The new approach, called the holistic systems approach (HSA), was derived from the structural realist framework, originally depicted in The Logic of Anarchy. The HSA, like structural realism, is based on three major levels of analysis--structure, interaction, and unit--as well as various sub-levels. The HSA improves on the structural realist framework in a number of different ways and in particular by illustrating how it can be applied to an actual case of international relations and by illustrating the relationships between levels of analysis (as opposed to distinct impacts from each level of analysis).In applying this framework to the case of Brazil and Amazonia, it was necessary to navigate through the various levels of analysis to discover how the multitude of factors interacted with each other and how they ultimately brought about the fundamental shift in the policies of the Brazilian government. The HSA helped to show, among other things, that the broad structural conditions of the international system (i.e., bipolarity and multipolarity) were far more important to this case than previously understood in earlier essays on this issue