Book Review: Money for everyone: why we need a Citizen’s Income

"Money For Everyone: Why we need a Citizen’s Income." Malcolm Torry. Policy Press. June 2013. --- In this book Malcolm Torry considers the social, economic and labour market advantages of introducing a Citizen’s Income in the UK. The author attempts to explore its implications on the economy, social cohesion, families, and the employment market. Though the ideal of a Citizen’s Income, with all its strengths and weaknesses, is a challenging framework to reflect on, the author shows how to make it a reality, writes Aurelie Charles

Event-Cloud Platform to Support Decision- Making in Emergency Management

The challenge of this paper is to underline the capability of an Event-Cloud Platform to support efficiently an emergency situation. We chose to focus on a nuclear crisis use case. The proposed approach consists in modeling the business processes of crisis response on the one hand, and in supporting the orchestration and execution of these processes by using an Event-Cloud Platform on the other hand. This paper shows how the use of Event-Cloud techniques can support crisis management stakeholders by automatizing non-value added tasks and by directing decision- makers on what really requires their capabilities of choice. If Event-Cloud technology is a very interesting and topical subject, very few research works have considered this to improve emergency management. This paper tries to fill this gap by considering and applying these technologies on a nuclear crisis use-case

Identity economics meets financialisation: gender, race and occupational stratification in the US labour market

Throughout his career Geoff Harcourt has constantly and consistently highlighted the role of social norms and collective decisions in his study of modern economies. In doing so he has put a great deal of emphasis on the distribution of income between different social groups, especially so when concerned with the labour market. This paper attempts to celebrate this particular aspect of his numerous contributions to economics by highlighting the role of social norms in influencing earnings across occupations and demographic groups in the US. Social norms generate hierarchy, economic and non-economic inequalities among ascriptively distinguished groups. Drawing on the stratification and identity economics literatures, this paper proposes a novel theoretical and empirical framework for analysing the effects of financialisation on the earnings dynamics of gender and race groups, a framework that is consistent with discrimination as a source of racial and gender inequality. The empirical methodology utilised in the form of long-run cointegrating relationships of groups’ earnings across occupations, assesses whether a pattern of social norms on wage distribution emerges over time. The results of this study show that over the past 30 years social norms have exacerbated the stratification of the US labour market.This is the accepted manuscript. The final version is available from OUP at http://cje.oxfordjournals.org/content/38/6/1471

Mitigating Stakeholder Marginalisation through the Relational Self

Stakeholder theory has been an incredibly powerful tool for understanding and improving organisations, and their relationship with other actors in society. That these critical ideas are now accepted within mainstream business is due in no small part to the influence of stakeholder theory. However, improvements to stakeholder engagement through stakeholder theory have tended to help stakeholders who are already somewhat powerful within organisational settings, while those who are less powerful continue to be marginalised and routinely ignored. In this paper, we argue that one possible obstacle preventing less powerful stakeholders from speaking up and/or being heard by organisations is found at the ontological level, where we have identified an ‘essentialist self’ underpinning the stakeholder concept. By deconstructing the stakeholder concept through how it is defined, discussed and debated, and linking this back to the practical consequences of the theory for the least powerful stakeholders, we are able to make three contributions. One, through our deconstruction, it is clear that at an ontological level, stakeholder theory is underpinned by an implicit, and problematic, assumption of the ‘essentialist self’, where the organisation is treated as the ‘natural, universal self’, and anyone not closely resembling this narrow (and unrealistic) view of self is treated as ‘other’. Two, we build on the work of authors such as Wicks et al. (Bus Ethics Q 4(4):475–497, 1994), who highlight the need for consideration of the self within stakeholder theory. We thus take our findings from contribution one and begin to build a more holistic view of the self within the stakeholder concept, where each self is encouraged to recognise common selves outside and inside the corporation. Third, we link the theoretical discussion to the practical by discussing some imperfect ways in which a more holistic, enriched stakeholder concept might begin to help mitigate marginalisation for some stakeholders

Mitigating Stakeholder Marginalisation through the Relational Self

Stakeholder theory has been an incredibly powerful tool for understanding and improving organisations, and their relationship with other actors in society. That these critical ideas are now accepted within mainstream business is due in no small part to the influence of stakeholder theory. However, improvements to stakeholder engagement through stakeholder theory have tended to help stakeholders who are already somewhat powerful within organisational settings, while those who are less powerful continue to be marginalised and routinely ignored. In this paper, we argue that one possible obstacle preventing less powerful stakeholders from speaking up and/or being heard by organisations is found at the ontological level, where we have identified an ‘essentialist self’ underpinning the stakeholder concept. By deconstructing the stakeholder concept through how it is defined, discussed and debated, and linking this back to the practical consequences of the theory for the least powerful stakeholders, we are able to make three contributions. One, through our deconstruction, it is clear that at an ontological level, stakeholder theory is underpinned by an implicit, and problematic, assumption of the ‘essentialist self’, where the organisation is treated as the ‘natural, universal self’, and anyone not closely resembling this narrow (and unrealistic) view of self is treated as ‘other’. Two, we build on the work of authors such as Wicks et al. (Bus Ethics Q 4(4):475–497, 1994), who highlight the need for consideration of the self within stakeholder theory. We thus take our findings from contribution one and begin to build a more holistic view of the self within the stakeholder concept, where each self is encouraged to recognise common selves outside and inside the corporation. Third, we link the theoretical discussion to the practical by discussing some imperfect ways in which a more holistic, enriched stakeholder concept might begin to help mitigate marginalisation for some stakeholders