Determinants of Web-based CSR Disclosure in the Food Industry

Purpose –Web-based CSR disclosure provides a variety of advantages for firms. Determining factors for web-based CSR disclosure have been analyzed in several papers. However, only limited research has been conducted on both, the food industry and small and midsized enterprises. This paper is one contribution to fill this gap as we investigate web-based CSR communication of food processors including SME.Design/methodology/approach – We analyzed corporate communication on the websites of 71 food producers from North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany using dictionary-based content analysis. Based on an ordered logit model the relationship between CSR communication and size, profitability, indebtedness and closeness to market was estimated. Economic data were obtained from the commercial database DAFNE.Findings – Our results reveal that larger firms provide relatively more CSR information than smaller firms. There was no significant relationship between CSR disclosure and profitability or indebtedness of a company and an ambiguous relationship with regard to the determinant ‘closeness to market’. Regarding the different areas of communication we found that social compared to environmental aspects were underrepresented.Practical implications – Social aspects of CSR could be used for differentiation in the market. Furthermore, as smaller firms provide relatively less information on CSR it might be worthwhile to analyze the central impediments for CSR communication for those companies.Originality/Value – This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion about firms’ CSR communication. From a convenience sample of 71 food processing firms, including SME, it provides insight regarding the determinants for CSR disclosure on firms’ websites. With the focus on the food industry and the inclusion of SME we contribute with our study to two under-researched areas

Determinants of Web-based CSR Disclosure in the Food Industry

Purpose –Web-based CSR disclosure bears a variety of advantages for firms. Determining factors for web-based CSR disclosure have been analyzed in several papers. However, only limited research has been conducted on both, the food industry and small and midsized enterprises. This paper is one contribution to fill this gap as we investigate web-based CSR communication of food processors including SME.Design/methodology/approach – We analyzed corporate communication on the websites of N=71 food producers from North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany using dictionary-based content analysis. Based on an ordered logit model the relationship between CSR communication and size, profitability, indebtedness and closeness to market was estimated. Economic data were obtained from the commercial database Dafne.Findings – Our results reveal that larger firms provide relatively more CSR information than smaller firms. There was no significant relationship between CSR disclosure and profitability or indebtedness of a company and ambiguous ones with regard to the determinant ‘closeness to market’. Regarding the different areas of communication we found that social compared to environmental aspects were underrepresented.Practical implications – Social aspects of CSR could be used for differentiation at the market. Furthermore as smaller firms provide relatively fewer information on CSR it might be worthwhile to analyze central impediments for CSR communication for those companies.Originality/Value – This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion about firms’ CSR communication. It provides for a convenience sample of 71 food processing firms’, including SME, insight regarding the determinants for CSR disclosure on firms’ websites. With the focus on the food industry and the inclusion of SMEs we contribute with our study to two under-researched areas

Explaining parent-child (dis)agreement in generic and short stature-specific health-related quality of life reports: do family and social relationships matter?

Background: In the context of health-related quality of life (HrQoL) assessment in pediatric short stature, the present study aimed to examine the levels of agreement/disagreement between parents’ and children’s reports of generic and condition-specific HrQoL, and to identify socio-demographic, clinical and psychosocial variables associated with the extent and direction of parent-child discrepancies. Methods: This study was part of the retest phase of the QoLISSY project, which was a multicenter study conducted simultaneously in France, Germany, Spain, Sweden and UK. The sample comprised 137 dyads of children/adolescents between 8 and 18 years of age, diagnosed with growth hormone deficiency (GHD) or idiopathic short stature (ISS), and one of their parents. The participants completed child- and parent-reported questionnaires on generic (KIDSCREEN-10 Index) and condition-specific HrQoL (QoLISSY Core Module). Children/adolescents also reported on social support (Oslo 3-items Social Support Scale) and parents assessed the parent-child relationships (Parental Role subscale of the Social Adjustment Scale) and burden of short stature on parents (QoLISSY- additional module). Results: The parent-child agreement on reported HrQoL was strong (intraclass correlation coefficients between .59 and .80). The rates of parent-child discrepancies were 61.5 % for generic and 35.2 % for condition-specific HrQoL, with the parents being more prone to report lower generic (42.3 %) and condition-specific HrQoL (23.7 %) than their children. The extent of discrepancies was better explained by family and social relationships than by clinical and socio-demographic variables: poorer parent-child relationships and better children’s social support were associated with larger discrepancies in generic HrQoL, while more parental burden was associated with larger discrepancies in condition-specific HrQoL reports. Regarding the direction of discrepancies, higher parental burden was significantly associated with parents’ underrating, and better children’s social support was significantly associated with parents’ overrating of condition-specific HrQoL. Conclusions: Routine assessment of pediatric HrQoL in healthcare and research contexts should include child- and parent-reported data as complementary sources of information, and also consider the family and social context.This study is part of the “Quality of Life in Short Stature Youth” (QoLISSY) project, a joint initiative between the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf and ©Pfizer Limited

Aura versus Dialogue. Displaying Nazi Objects in the Exhibition "Disposing of Hitler: Out of the Cellar, Into the Museum"

What should we do with the remnants of Nazism? Should we dispose of them? Is it acceptable to sell them at a flea market or on the internet? At what point does memory become nostalgia, or even illegal neo-Nazi activity? Objects related to Nazism get discovered in various places and contexts – whether in one’s own basement, at flea markets or an online portal, in the estate of relatives or even in the trash. Even if one’s own family history is not entangled with the Nazi regime, such finds trigger feelings ranging from shame to detachment and even fascination. The exhibition "Disposing of Hitler. Out of the Cellar, Into the Museum", House of Austrian History ("Hitler entsorgen. Vom Keller ins Museum", Haus der Geschichte Österreich) asks about the social responsibility in dealing with relics of Nazism and explores the question of how these things can strengthen democratic consciousness in the present. What should we do with the remnants of Nazism? Should we dispose of them? Is it acceptable to sell them at a flea market or on the internet? At what point does memory become nostalgia, or even illegal neo-Nazi activity? Objects related to Nazism get discovered in various places and contexts – whether in one’s own basement, at flea markets or an online portal, in the estate of relatives or even in the trash. Even if one’s own family history is not entangled with the Nazi regime, such finds trigger feelings ranging from shame to detachment and even fascination. The exhibition "Disposing of Hitler. Out of the Cellar, Into the Museum", House of Austrian History ("Hitler entsorgen. Vom Keller ins Museum", Haus der Geschichte Österreich) asks about the social responsibility in dealing with relics of Nazism and explores the question of how these things can strengthen democratic consciousness in the present.&nbsp

New Plant breeding Techniques and Organic Farming: scientific, regulatory and consumer issues

The LIVESEED project (Improving the performance and competitiveness of the organic sector by boosting organic seed and plant breeding efforts) will present & discuss the scientific controversies and the regulatory issues related to New Plant Breeding Techniques (NPBTs) as well as the results of a European survey on consumers attitudes and preferences on NPBTs in organic farming

The rTPJ’s overarching cognitive function in networks for attention and theory of mind

Cortical networks underpinning attentional control and mentalizing converge at the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ). It is debated whether the rTPJ is fractionated in neighboring, but separate functional modules underpinning attentional control and mentalizing, or whether one overarching cognitive mechanism explains the rTPJ's role in both domains. Addressing this question, we combined attentional control and mentalizing in a factorial design within one task. We added a social context condition, in which another individual's mental states became apparently task-relevant, to a spatial cueing paradigm. This allowed for assessing cue validity-and context-dependent functional activity and effective connectivity of the rTPJ within corresponding cortical networks. We found two discriminable rTPJ subregions, an anterior and a posterior one. Yet, we did not observe a sharp functional dissociation between these two, as both regions responded to attention cueing and social context manipulation. The results suggest that the rTPJ is part of both the ventral attention and the ToM network and that its function is defined by context-dependent coupling with the respective network. We argue that the rTPJ as a functional unit underpins an overarching cognitive mechanism in attentional control and mentalizing and discuss how the present results help to further specify this mechanism

Evaluation of the American-English Quality of Life in Short Stature Youth (QoLISSY) questionnaire in the United States.

BACKGROUND: The European Quality of Life in Short Stature Youth (QoLISSY) is a novel condition-specific instrument developed to assess health related quality of life (HrQoL) in children/adolescents with short stature from patient and parent perspectives. Study objective was to linguistically validate and psychometrically test the American-English version of the QoLISSY instrument. METHODS: Upon conversion of the British-English version to American-English, content validity and acceptance of the questionnaire were examined through focus group discussions with cognitive debriefing in 28 children/adolescents with growth hormone deficiency (GHD) or idiopathic short stature (ISS) and their parents. In the subsequent field test with 51 families and a re-test with 25 families the psychometric performance of the American-English version was examined and compared with the original European dataset. RESULTS: Pilot test results supported the suitability of the American-English version. Good internal consistency with Cronbach\u27s Alpha ranging from 0.84 to 0.97 and high test-re-test reliabilities were observed in the field test. The QoLISSY was able to detect significant differences according to the degree of short stature with higher HrQoL for taller children. Correlations with a generic HrQoL tool support the QoLISSY\u27s concurrent validity. The scale\u27s operating characteristics were comparable to the original European data. CONCLUSION: Results support that the QoLISSY American-English version is a psychometrically sound short stature-specific instrument to assess the patient- and parent- perceived impact of short stature. The QoLISSY instrument is fit for use in clinical studies and health services research in the American-English speaking population

Aura versus Dialogue. Displaying Nazi Objects in the Exhibition "Disposing of Hitler: Out of the Cellar, Into the Museum"

What should we do with the remnants of Nazism? Should we dispose of them? Is it acceptable to sell them at a flea market or on the internet? At what point does memory become nostalgia, or even illegal neo-Nazi activity? Objects related to Nazism get discovered in various places and contexts – whether in one’s own basement, at flea markets or an online portal, in the estate of relatives or even in the trash. Even if one’s own family history is not entangled with the Nazi regime, such finds trigger feelings ranging from shame to detachment and even fascination. The exhibition "Disposing of Hitler. Out of the Cellar, Into the Museum", House of Austrian History ("Hitler entsorgen. Vom Keller ins Museum", Haus der Geschichte Österreich) asks about the social responsibility in dealing with relics of Nazism and explores the question of how these things can strengthen democratic consciousness in the present.

The annual cycles of phytoplankton biomass

Terrestrial plants are powerful climate sentinels because their annual cycles of growth, reproduction and senescence are finely tuned to the annual climate cycle having a period of one year. Consistency in the seasonal phasing of terrestrial plant activity provides a relatively low-noise background from which phenological shifts can be detected and attributed to climate change. Here, we ask whether phytoplankton biomass also fluctuates over a consistent annual cycle in lake, estuarine–coastal and ocean ecosystems and whether there is a characteristic phenology of phytoplankton as a consistent phase and amplitude of variability. We compiled 125 time series of phytoplankton biomass (chlorophyll a concentration) from temperate and subtropical zones and used wavelet analysis to extract their dominant periods of variability and the recurrence strength at those periods. Fewer than half (48%) of the series had a dominant 12-month period of variability, commonly expressed as the canonical spring-bloom pattern. About 20 per cent had a dominant six-month period of variability, commonly expressed as the spring and autumn or winter and summer blooms of temperate lakes and oceans. These annual patterns varied in recurrence strength across sites, and did not persist over the full series duration at some sites. About a third of the series had no component of variability at either the six- or 12-month period, reflecting a series of irregular pulses of biomass. These findings show that there is high variability of annual phytoplankton cycles across ecosystems, and that climate-driven annual cycles can be obscured by other drivers of population variability, including human disturbance, aperiodic weather events and strong trophic coupling between phytoplankton and their consumers. Regulation of phytoplankton biomass by multiple processes operating at multiple time scales adds complexity to the challenge of detecting climate-driven trends in aquatic ecosystems where the noise to signal ratio is high