Modern slavery in business: The sad and sorry state of a non-field

“Modern slavery,” a term used to describe severe forms of labor exploitation, is beginning to spark growing interest within business and society research. As a novel phenomenon, it offers potential for innovative theoretical and empirical pathways to a range of business and management research questions. And yet, development into what we might call a “field” of modern slavery research in business and management remains significantly, and disappointingly, underdeveloped. To explore this, we elaborate on the developments to date, the potential drawbacks, and the possible future deviations that might evolve within six subdisciplinary areas of business and management. We also examine the value that nonmanagement disciplines can bring to research on modern slavery and business, examining the connections, critiques, and catalysts evident in research from political science, law, and history. These, we suggest, offer significant potential for building toward a more substantial subfield of research

The ineffectiveness of CSR : understanding garment company commitments to living wages in global supply chains

In the face of pressure from civil society, unions and consumers to improve labour standards for the workers producing their goods, companies at the helm of global garment supply chains have made commitments to pay living wages within their supply chains. Harnessing insights from the critical political economy literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR), we investigate the actions of garment companies to meet these commitments. We do so through analysis of original data from a survey of 20 leading garment companies, which we co-developed in 2018-2019, as well as publicly available information for garment companies and relevant multi-stakeholder initiatives. Based on this data, we argue there is very little evidence to suggest companies have made meaningful progress towards achieving commitments to pay living wages in their supply chains, challenging widespread assumptions about CSR’s benefits to workers. We argue that in the face of mounting evidence of CSR ineffectiveness, including our own, there is a need for new political economy research into the benefits that companies derive from CSR commitments that deflect attention from their core business models and the uneven value distribution within global supply chains

Impact of Investor's Varying Risk Aversion on the Dynamics of Asset Price Fluctuations

While the investors' responses to price changes and their price forecasts are well accepted major factors contributing to large price fluctuations in financial markets, our study shows that investors' heterogeneous and dynamic risk aversion (DRA) preferences may play a more critical role in the dynamics of asset price fluctuations. We propose and study a model of an artificial stock market consisting of heterogeneous agents with DRA, and we find that DRA is the main driving force for excess price fluctuations and the associated volatility clustering. We employ a popular power utility function, $U(c,\gamma)=\frac{c^{1-\gamma}-1}{1-\gamma}$ with agent specific and time-dependent risk aversion index, $\gamma_i(t)$, and we derive an approximate formula for the demand function and aggregate price setting equation. The dynamics of each agent's risk aversion index, $\gamma_i(t)$ (i=1,2,...,N), is modeled by a bounded random walk with a constant variance $\delta^2$. We show numerically that our model reproduces most of the ``stylized'' facts observed in the real data, suggesting that dynamic risk aversion is a key mechanism for the emergence of these stylized facts.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figure

Emerging properties of financial time series in the “Game of Life”

We explore the spatial complexity of Conway’s “Game of Life,” a prototypical cellular automaton by means of a geometrical procedure generating a two-dimensional random walk from a bidimensional lattice with periodical boundaries. The one-dimensional projection of this process is analyzed and it turns out that some of its statistical properties resemble the so-called stylized facts observed in financial time series. The scope and meaning of this result are discussed from the viewpoint of complex systems. In particular, we stress how the supposed peculiarities of financial time series are, often, overrated in their importance

Artificial economic life: a simple model of a stockmarket

We describe a model of a stockmarket in which independent adaptive agents can buy and sell stock on a central market. The overall market behavior, such as the stock price time series, is an emergent property of the agents' behavior. This approach to modelling a market is contrasted with conventional rational expectations approaches. Our model does not necessarily converge to an equilibrium, and can show bubbles, crashes, and continued high trading volume.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/31402/1/0000319.pd

An introduction to video methods in organizational research

Video has become a methodological tool of choice for many researchers in social science, but video methods are relatively new to the field of organization studies. This article is an introduction to video methods. First, we situate video methods relative to other kinds of research, suggesting that video recordings and analyses can be used to replace or supplement other approaches, not only observational studies but also retrospective methods such as interviews and surveys. Second, we describe and discuss various features of video data in relation to ontological assumptions that researchers may bring to their research design. Video involves both opportunities and pitfalls for researchers, who ought to use video methods in ways that are consistent with their assumptions about the world and human activity. Third, we take a critical look at video methods by reporting progress that has been made while acknowledging gaps and work that remains to be done. Our critical considerations point repeatedly at articles in this special issue, which represent recent and important advances in video method

Mutations in two global regulators lower individual mortality in Escherichia coli

There has been considerable investigation into the survival of bacterial cells under stress conditions, but little is known about the causes of mortality in the absence of exogenous stress. That there is a basal frequency of cell death in such populations may reflect that it is either impossible to avoid all lethal events, or alternatively, that it is too costly. Here, through a genetic screen in the model organism Escherichia coli, we identify two mutants with lower frequencies of mortality: rssB and fliA. Intriguingly, these two genes both affect the levels of different sigma factors within the cell. The rssB mutant displays enhanced resistance to multiple external stresses, possibly indicating that the cell gains its increased vitality through elevated resistance to spontaneous, endogenous stresses. The loss of fliA does not result in elevated stress resistance; rather, its survival is apparently due to a decreased physical stress linked to the insertion of the flagellum through the membrane and energy saved through the loss of the motor proteins. The identification of these two mutants implies that reducing mortality is not impossible; rather, due to its cost, it is subject to trade-offs with other traits that contribute to the competitive success of the organism

Strategies used as spectroscopy of financial markets reveal new stylized facts

We propose a new set of stylized facts quantifying the structure of financial markets. The key idea is to study the combined structure of both investment strategies and prices in order to open a qualitatively new level of understanding of financial and economic markets. We study the detailed order flow on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange of China for the whole year of 2003. This enormous dataset allows us to compare (i) a closed national market (A-shares) with an international market (B-shares), (ii) individuals and institutions and (iii) real investors to random strategies with respect to timing that share otherwise all other characteristics. We find that more trading results in smaller net return due to trading frictions. We unveiled quantitative power laws with non-trivial exponents, that quantify the deterioration of performance with frequency and with holding period of the strategies used by investors. Random strategies are found to perform much better than real ones, both for winners and losers. Surprising large arbitrage opportunities exist, especially when using zero-intelligence strategies. This is a diagnostic of possible inefficiencies of these financial markets.Comment: 13 pages including 5 figures and 1 tabl

Assessing Communities of Practice in health policy : A conceptual framework as a first step towards empirical research

Peer reviewe

Early-time Spectropolarimetry of the Asymmetric Type II Supernova SN 2023ixf

We present six epochs of optical spectropolarimetry of the Type II supernova (SN) 2023ixf ranging from $\sim$ 2 to 15 days after the explosion. Polarimetry was obtained with the Kast double spectrograph on the Shane 3 m telescope at Lick Observatory, representing the earliest such observations ever captured for an SN. We observe a high continuum polarization $p_{\text{cont}} \approx 1$ % on days +1.4 and +2.5 before dropping to 0.5 % on day +3.5, persisting at that level up to day +14.5. Remarkably, this change coincides temporally with the disappearance of highly ionized "flash" features. The decrease of the continuum polarization is accompanied by a $\sim 70^\circ$ rotation of the polarization position angle ($PA$) as seen across the continuum. The early evolution of the polarization may indicate different geometric configurations of the electron-scattering atmosphere as seen before and after the disappearance of the emission lines associated with highly-ionized species (e.g., He II, C IV, N III), which are likely produced by elevated mass loss shortly prior to the SN explosion. We interpret the rapid change of polarization and $PA$ from days +2.5 to +4.5 as the time when the SN ejecta emerge from the dense asymmetric circumstellar material (CSM). The temporal evolution of the continuum polarization and the $PA$ is consistent with an aspherical SN explosion that exhibits a distinct geometry compared to the CSM. The rapid follow-up spectropolarimetry of SN 2023ixf during the shock ionization phase reveals an exceptionally asymmetric mass-loss process leading up to the explosion.Comment: Submitted to Ap