Stakeholder engagement disclosures in sustainability reports : evidence from Italian food companies

More businesses are embedding stakeholder engagement (SE) practices in their corporate disclosures. This article explores the extent to which SE practices are featured in the sustainability reports (SRs) of 48 Italian food and beverage businesses, following the latest Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standards. The researchers analyze the content of their SRs dated 2020 and 2021. They utilize a panel regression technique to examine the relationship between stakeholder engagement disclosures (SED) and corporate financial performance (CFP), and to investigate the mediating role of SR assurance. The results show a positive and significant relationship between SED and CFP. They also confirm that there is a moderating effect from SR assurance on this causal path. However, the findings reveal that SED in SRs of Italian food companies is still moderate. This contribution builds on the logic behind the stakeholder theory. It implies that there is scope for food companies to forge relationships with stakeholders. It indicates that it is in their interest to disclose material information about their SE practices in their SR and to organize third party assurance assessments in order to improve their legitimacy with stakeholders.peer-reviewe

Synthesis of a mesoscale ordered 2D-conjugated polymer with semiconducting properties

2D materials with high charge carrier mobility and tunable electronic band gaps have attracted intense research effort for their potential use as active components in nanoelectronics. 2D-conjugated polymers (2DCP) constitute a promising sub-class due to the fact that the electronic band structure can be manipulated by varying the molecular building blocks, while at the same time preserving the key features of 2D materials such as Dirac cones and high charge mobility. The major challenge for their use in technological applications is to fabricate mesoscale ordered 2DCP networks since current synthetic routes yield only small domains with a high density of defects. Here we demonstrate the synthesis of a mesoscale ordered 2DCP with semiconducting properties and Dirac cone structures via Ullmann coupling on Au(111). This material has been obtained by combining rigid azatriangulene precursors and a hot dosing approach which favours molecular diffusion and reduces the formation of voids in the network. These results open opportunities for the synthesis of 2DCP Dirac cone materials and their integration into devices.Comment: 21 pages, 3 figure

A Study of the Learnability of Relational Properties: Model Counting Meets Machine Learning (MCML)

This paper introduces the MCML approach for empirically studying the learnability of relational properties that can be expressed in the well-known software design language Alloy. A key novelty of MCML is quantification of the performance of and semantic differences among trained machine learning (ML) models, specifically decision trees, with respect to entire (bounded) input spaces, and not just for given training and test datasets (as is the common practice). MCML reduces the quantification problems to the classic complexity theory problem of model counting, and employs state-of-the-art model counters. The results show that relatively simple ML models can achieve surprisingly high performance (accuracy and F1-score) when evaluated in the common setting of using training and test datasets - even when the training dataset is much smaller than the test dataset - indicating the seeming simplicity of learning relational properties. However, MCML metrics based on model counting show that the performance can degrade substantially when tested against the entire (bounded) input space, indicating the high complexity of precisely learning these properties, and the usefulness of model counting in quantifying the true performance

Beyond the conflict: religion in the public sphere and deliberative democracy

Traditionally, liberals have confined religion to the sphere of the ‘private’ or ‘non-political’. However, recent debates over the use of religious symbols in public spaces, state financing of faith schools, and tax relief for religious organisations suggest that this distinction is not particularly useful in easing the tension between liberal ideas of equality among citizens and freedom of religion. This article deals with one aspect of this debate, which concerns whether members of religious communities should receive exemptions from regulations that place a distinctively heavy burden on them. For supporters of exemptions, protection for diverse practices and religious beliefs justifies such a special treatment. For others, this is a form of positive discrimination incompatible with equal citizenship. Drawing on Habermas’ understanding of churches as ‘communities of interpretation’ this article explores possible alternative solutions to both the ‘rule-andexemption’ approach and the ‘neutralist’ approach. Our proposal rests on the idea of mutual learning between secular and religious perspectives. On this interpretation, what is required is, firstly, generation and maintenance of public spaces in which there could be discussion and dialogue about particular cases, and, secondly, evaluation of whether the basic conditions of moral discourse are present in these spaces. Thus deliberation becomes a touchstone for the building of a shared democratic etho

Towards a typology of non-state actors in ‘hybrid warfare’: proxy, auxiliary, surrogate and affiliated forces

This article presents a typology of armed non-state actors in hybrid warfare: proxy, auxiliary, surrogate and affiliated forces. By focusing on the kinetic domain of hybrid warfare, the article offers a corrective to a debate that has so far ignored variation in roles and functions of non-state actors and their relationships with states and their regular forces. As a denominator, ‘hybrid’ identifies a combination of battlespaces, types of operations—military or non-kinetic—and a blurring of actors with the scope of achieving strategic objectives by creating exploitable ambiguity. However, there has been a disproportionate focus on what hybrid war supposedly combines across battlespaces and domains (socio-political, economic, informational), at the expense of who and how. Using the Ukrainian crisis as a theory-building exercise, the article suggests a four-category schema that identifies non-state actor functions as a tool to better represent the complex franchise of violence that is found nested next to non-military operations in hybrid activity. In so doing, the article speaks to a call for better conceptualization the role of non-state violent actors in civil war, in general, and in hybrid warfare, in particular

Search for New Particles Decaying to b bbar in p pbar Collisions at sqrt{s}=1.8 TeV

We have used 87 pb^-1 of data collected with the Collider Detector at Fermilab to search for new particles decaying to b bbar. We present model-independent upper limits on the cross section for narrow resonances which excludes the color-octet technirho in the mass interval 350 < M < 440 GeV/c^2. In addition, we exclude topgluons, predicted in models of topcolor-assisted technicolor, of width Gamma = 0.3 M in the mass range 280 < M < 670 GeV/c^2, of width Gamma = 0.5 M in the mass range 340 < M < 640 GeV/c^2, and of width Gamma = 0.7 M in the mass range 375 < M < 560 GeV/c^2.Comment: 17 pages in a LaTex generated postscript file, with one table and four figures. Resubmitted to Physical Review Letters. Minor clarifications were added to the text. The displayed normalization of the resonance models in Figure 2 was modified to correspond to our 95% CL upper limit on the cross section (instead of arbitrary normalization which was used previously). All results are identical to those in the previous submissio