Corporate Social Responsibility at Gap: An Interview with Eva Sage-Gavin

Gap Inc. is one of the world\u27s largest specialty retailers, with more than 3,000 stores and fiscal 2005 revenues of $16 billion. They operate four of the most recognized apparel brands in the world — Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy and Forth & Towne. According to the company website “At Gap Inc., social responsibility isn\u27t just a catchphrase or a feel good initiative. It\u27s a reflection of who we are and how we operate as a company. To us, being socially responsible means striving to embed our values and ethics into everything we do — from how we run our business, to how we treat our employees, to how we impact the communities where we do business. In 2003 Gap Inc. was the first retailer to release a social responsibility report, offering a comprehensive overview of their approach to social responsibility. The report was broadly lauded for its willingness to be open and honest about both the successes and failures in this arena. In fact, this report won Business Ethics magazine\u27s Social Reporting Award for unprecedented honesty in reporting on factory conditions. Their 2004 Social Responsibility Report continued that discussion and provided new information on their progress, challenges, and new initiatives. Eva Sage-Gavin is Executive Vice President, Human Resources and Corporate Communications, of Gap Inc. In her role as Chief People Officer, she sets the strategy for the company\u27s communications and human resources operations worldwide, including staffing, diversity, rewards, recognition, employee benefits, learning and development, strategic change, and internal and external communications. She set aside time to provide more specifics to how and why Gap Inc. places so much emphasis on corporate social responsibility

The origins of American resource abundance

American manufacturing exports became increasingly resource-intensive over the very period, roughly 1880-1920, during which the U.S. ascended to the position of world leadership in manufacturing. This paper challenges the simplistic view that the resource-intensity of manufacturing reflected the country''s abundant geological endowment of mineral deposits. Instead, it shows that in the century following 1850 the U.S. exploited its natural resource potentials to a far greater extent than other countries and did so across virtually the entire range of industrial minerals. It argues that "natural resource abundance" was an endogenous. "socially constructed" condition that was not geologically pre-ordained. It examines the complex legal, institutional, technological and organizational adaptations that shaped the U.S. supply-responses to the expanding domestic and international industrial demands for minerals and mineral-products. It suggests that the existence of strong "positive feedbacks"--even in the exploitation of depletable resources--was responsible for the explosive growth of the American minerals economy.economic development an growth ;

Early Twentieth Century Productivity Growth Dynamics: An Inquiry into the Economic History of “Our Ignorance”

A marked acceleration of total factor productivity (TFP) growth in U.S. manufacturing followed World War I. This development contributed substantially to the absolute and relative rise of the domestic economy's aggregate TFP residual, which is observed when the 'growth accounts' for the first quarter of the twentieth century are compared with those for the second half of the nineteenth century. Two visions of the dynamics of productivity growth are germane to an understanding of these developments. One emphasizes the role of forces affecting broad sections of the economy, through spillovers of knowledge and the diffusion of general purpose technologies (GPT's). The second view considers that possible sources of productivity increase are multiple and idiosyncratic. Setting aside possible measurement errors, the latter approach regards sectoral and economy-wide surges of the TFP growth to be simply the result of which carried more weight than others. Although there is room for both views in an analysis of the sources of the industrial TFP acceleration during the 1920's, we find the evidence more compelling in support of the first approach. The proximate source of the TFP surge lay in the switch from declining or stable capital productivity to a rising output-capital ratio, which occurred at this time in many branches of manufacturing, and which was not accompanied by slowed growth in labor productivity. The 1920's saw critical advances in the electrification industry, the diffusion of a GTP that brought significant fixed capital-savings. But the same era also witnessed profound transformations in the American industrial labor market, followed the stoppage of mass immigration from Europe; rising real wages provided strong impetus to changes in workforce recruitment and management practices that were underway in some branches of the economy before the War. The productivity surge reflected the confluence of these two forces. This historical study has direct relevance for policies intended to increase the rate of productivity growth. In many respects, the decade of the 1920's launched the US economy on a high-growth path that lasted until the 1970's. If we hope to return to the growth performance of that era, we would be well advised to understand how it began.

General Purpose Technologies and Productivity Surges: Historical Reflections on the Future of the ICT Revolution

Presented to the International Symposium on ECONOMIC CHALLENGES OF THE 21ST CENTURY IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE, Oxford, England, 2nd-4th July, 1999 Celebrating the Scholarly Career of Charles H. Feinstein, FBA. Re- examination of early twentieth century American productivity growth experience sheds light on the general phenomenon of recurring prolonged swings in total factor productivity (TFP) growth rate experienced in the advanced industrial economies. After a “productivity slowdown” lasting more than a quarter of a century (during which TFP for in the manufacturing sector grew at less than 1 percent per annum, industrial TFP surged to average 6 percent per annum during 1919-29. This contributed substantially to the absolute and relative rise of the US domestic economy’s TFP residual, and in many respects it may be seen as the opening of the high-growth era that persisted into the 1970s. The productivity surge marked the culminating phase in the diffusion of “the dynamo” as a general purpose technology (GPT); that saw a shift in the underlying technological regime brought about by the implementation of critical engineering and organizational advances originating in some two decades earlier. Closer analysis reveals the significant concurrence of the factory electrification movement in this period with important structural changes that were taking place in US labor markets; in addition, there were significant complementarities between managerial and organizational innovations and the new dynamo-based factory technology, on the one hand, and, and the reinforcement of both kinds of innovation by the macroeconomic conditions of the 1920s. This more complicated, historical view of the dynamics of GPT diffusion is supported by comparisons of the US experience of factory electrification with the developments taking place in Japanese industry during the 1920’s, and in the UK manufacturing sector during the 1930’s. Concluding sections of the paper reflect on the analogies and contrasts between the historical case of a socio-economic regime transition involving the electric dynamo and the modern experience of the information and communications technology (ICT) revolution. Our formulation the GPT concept in explicitly historical terms contributes to explaining the paradoxical phenomenon of the late twentieth century productivity slowdown in the US. It also points to some contemporary portents of a future phase of more rapid ICT-based growth in total factor productivity.

Flush Times & Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson

Assessing Slavery and Society From the appearance of the word “capitalism in the subtitle, readers might infer that Joshua Rothman’s Flush Times & Fever Dreams concentrates on financial or economic aspects of slavery during the boom years of 1830s Mississippi. This expectation ...

Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction

Rethinking the Politics of Reconstruction: The Republican Party Finds Unity in the Politics of Sectionalism Nicolas Barreyre, who teaches American history at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, has published a new interpretation of the politics of Reconstruction, emp...

‘This is England, speak English!’:A corpus-assisted critical study of language ideologies in the right-leaning British press

This article examines right-leaning press representations of people living in the UK who can’t speak English, or at least speak English well, following the 2011 Census, which was the first to ask respondents about their main language and proficiency in English. The analysis takes a corpus-assisted approach to critical discourse analysis, based on a 1.8 million-word corpus of right-leaning newspaper articles about ‘speak(ing) English’ in the years following this historic Census (2011 to 2016). The analysis reveals the tendency for the press to focus on immigrants – particularly in the contexts of education and health – who are represented with recourse to a series of argumentation strategies, or ‘topoi’. Over the course of this paper, we argue that these topoi are problematic, as they present paradoxes, obscure the role of the Government in ensuring integration, overlook the difficulties of language learning and cultural assimilation, and generally contribute to a broader anti-immigrant UK media narrative which serves to legitimise exclusionary and discriminatory practices against people from minority linguistic and ethnic backgrounds

High-Content Imaging for Large-Scale Detection of Low-Affinity Extracellular Protein Interactions.

Extracellular protein interactions coordinate cellular responses with their local environment and have important roles in pathogen invasion and disease. Due to technical challenges associated with studying binding events at the cell surface, the systematic and reliable identification of novel ligand-receptor pairs remains difficult. Here, we describe the development of a cell-based assay using large-scale transient transfections and high-content imaging (HCI) to detect extracellular binding events. We optimized the parameters for efficient transfection of human cells with cDNA plasmids encoding full-length cell surface receptors in 384-well plates. Using a range of well-characterized structurally diverse low-affinity cell surface interactions, we show that transfected cells probed with highly avid ligands can be used to successfully identify ligand-receptor pairs using an HCI platform and automated image analysis software. To establish the high-throughput potential of this approach, we also screened a pool of ligands against a collection of 2455 cell surface expression clones and found that known ligand-receptor interactions could be robustly and consistently detected across the library using this technology

Rapid and sensitive large-scale screening of low affinity extracellular receptor protein interactions by using reaction induced inhibition of Gaussia luciferase.

Extracellular protein interactions mediated by cell surface receptors are essential for intercellular communication in multicellular organisms. Assays to detect extracellular interactions must account for their often weak binding affinities and also the biochemical challenges in solubilising membrane-embedded receptors in an active form. Methods based on detecting direct binding of soluble recombinant receptor ectodomains have been successful, but genome-scale screening is limited by the usual requirement of producing sufficient amounts of each protein in two different forms, usually a "bait" and "prey". Here, we show that oligomeric receptor ectodomains coupled to concatenated units of the light-generating Gaussia luciferase enzyme robustly detected low affinity interactions and reduced the amount of protein required by several orders of magnitude compared to other reporter enzymes. Importantly, we discovered that this flash-type luciferase exhibited a reaction-induced inhibition that permitted the use of a single protein preparation as both bait and prey thereby halving the number of expression plasmids and recombinant proteins required for screening. This approach was tested against a benchmarked set of quantified extracellular interactions and shown to detect extremely weak interactions (KDs ≥ μM). This method will facilitate large-scale receptor interaction screening and contribute to the goal of mapping networks of cellular communication