Realising Potential: Disability Confidence Builds Better Business

[Excerpt] ‘Realising potential’ sets out the latest thinking on how disabled people contribute to business success and how business, in the UK and globally, benefits from disability confidence. It provides the information senior business decision makers need to manage and profit from the disability dimension to key business trends: including an aging population, increasingly individualised customer relations, changing working patterns and enabling technology. Business must address the disability component of these trends and develop disability confidence if it is to compete in an increasingly complex environment and create value from difference. ‘Realising potential’ highlights the strategic, commercial, legal, societal, ethical, and professional benefits of getting it right on disability – the six building blocks of any business case for disability confidence

The New Economy of Corporate Citizenship

This short publication defines and describes the notions of corporate citizenship and of the New Economy. It explores the social and environmental challenges and opportunities posed by the New Economy, and the approaches to corporate citizenship that are enabled or disabled by its emergence, particularly regarding social partnerships

Struggling with the Praxis of Social Accounting: Stakeholders, Accountability, Audits and Procedures

Addresses three related, though not entirely congruent, aims. Seeks, first, to initiate moves towards a "normative theory" - a conceptual framework - for the developing of social accounting by organizations. Second, aims inductively to draw out best practice from a range of social accounting experiments, illustrated, in particular, by reference to two short cases from Traidcraft plc and Traidcraft Exchange. Third, draws from the conclusions reached in the exploration of the first two aims and attempts to identify any clear "social accounting standards" or "generally acceptable social accounting principles" which can be used to guide the new and emerging social accounting practice. Presents a number of subtexts which attempt to link back to the accounting literature's more trenchant critiques of social accounting; to address the tension between academic theorizing and engaging with practice; to synthesize different approaches to social accounting practice; and to respond to the urgency that the recent upsurge in interest in social accounting places on the newly formed Institute of Social and Ethical Accountability. An ambitious paper which means that coverage of issues must be thinner than might typically be expected - exploratory, rather than providing answer, offers a collective view from experience and encourage engagement with the rapidly evolving social accounting agenda

Mockup einer Betriebsleitstelle für automatisierte Shuttlebusse - Konzeption und Design eines universellen, visuellen und auditiven Interfaces

Derzeit sind automatisierte Shuttlebusse beim Einsatz auf einen Operator an Bord angewiesen. Damit sich dies nicht erst beim vollständig autonomen Fahren ändert, bedarf es weiterer Lösungsansätze. Eine Möglichkeit ist die Überwachung der Busse aus einer Betriebsleitstelle. Allerdings können mit den Betriebsleitstellen von Verkehrsgesellschaften nach heutigem technologischem Stand keine Fahrfunktionen übernommen werden. Um diese Forschungslücke zu schließen, wurde im Rahmen dieses Beitrags ein Mockup für eine Betriebsleitstelle von automatisierten Shuttlebussen entwickelt. Das Hauptaugenmerk bei der Konzeption dieses Interfaces liegt in der Anforderungsanalyse. Zu diesem Zweck wurden Experten aus Wirtschaft und Wissenschaft eingebunden. Als Ergebnis ist ein Mockup mit einer interaktiven Karte, einer Ereignisliste und einer Ansicht zur Übernahme der Fahrfunktionen entstanden

Theorization as institutional work: The dynamics of roles and practices

This study unpacks the construct of theorization – the process by which organizational ideas become delocalized and abstracted into theoretical models to support their diffusion across time and space. We adopt an institutional work lens to analyze the key components of theorization in contexts where institutional work is in transition from creating institutions to maintaining them. We build on a longitudinal inductive study of theorization by the Fair Labor Association (FLA), a private regulatory initiative which created and then enforced a code of conduct for working conditions in apparel factories. Our study reveals that when institutional work shifts from creating to maintaining an institutional arrangement of corporate social responsibility, there is a key change in how the FLA theorizes roles and practices related to this arrangement. We observe that theorization on key practices largely remain intact, whereas the roles of different actors are theorized in a dramatically different manner. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the work involved in the aftermath of radical change by demonstrating the relative plasticity of roles over the rigidity of practices