Playing in the Gray Area: The role of participatory theatre in shifting cultural narratives

Educating young people about sexual consent aims to help them develop healthy relationships and prevent sexual harm. Yet, there remains no consensus on how to define consent nor the connection between consent and sexual harm. This article discusses findings from qualitative research conducted with young people in England that has explored issues of sexual consent. It engages with tensions around the so-called ‘grey areas’ and oft-critiqued ‘miscommunication model’ of consent and suggests that some form of ‘miscommunication’ may underpin some, albeit not all, experiences of sexual harm among young people. Young people may experience problems articulating and interpreting consent not because of malintent or substandard or disparate communication skills but because of interpersonal and sociocultural power dynamics that constrain the communication and operation of consent. Consent education needs, therefore, to support young people develop the socio-emotional skills and literacy required to navigate gendered and heterosexual (inter)personal pressures, expectations, and sexual scripts. It should involve active participation of young people whereby they identify the conditions in which sexual activity unfolds and the power dynamics that constrain the operation of consent.

Today’s IT service suppliers increasingly need to acquire “cultural intelligence”, or the ability to operate in a culturally-diverse environment. Based on an interview-based, qualitative case study of one of the largest IT service suppliers in China, this study explores how the offshore IT service supplier develops cultural intelligence through interaction with a portfolio of clients with diverse cultural backgrounds. Drawing on the dynamic constructivist view of culture, the study adapts the concept of cultural frame to define a set of shared interpretive schemes and practices that enable the supplier to make sense of and respond to clients from different cultures. During repeated client-supplier interaction, supplier employees’ cultural frames are continuously enacted, aligned and realigned, and eventually institutionalized into a set of cultural structures and artifacts. This emergence and embedding process is both facilitated by, and in turn enhances, the supplier’s firm-level cultural intelligence.

"Revolution in Military Affairs" - Not Without Information and Communication Technology

Despite efforts by feminists to educate people about healthy sexual interactions and to promote the benefits of affirmative consent, a heterogendered imbalance in sexual intimacy persists. Much of the societal and research attention has focused on clear cases of nonconsensual sex, but a wider lens that incorporates social pressures and coercion is needed. (Mostly) cis-men continue to pressure and coerce their partners (mostly people who identify as women) to acquiesce to sexual intimacy. Our heteropatriarchal culture continues to perpetuate the belief that men are owed sex from women in many situations. Feminist scholars have argued that, instead of a stark line between consensual and nonconsensual sex, there is a continuum or spectrum ranging from sexual consent to sexual assault, creating a large “grey area” in which partners must navigate sexual intimacy. This grey area is not gender neutral. Gendered structure, culture, discourse, and practices help to normalize heterogendered dominance in everyday life, undermining women’s sexual agency while also mobilizing rape. Drawing on interviews with university students (N=45) who have navigated this spectrum, we seek to map the grey area, exploring how consent is often hijacked through relentless pressure and coercion. When pressure and coercion are encoded into the gendered order as entitlements granted to men, the line between sexual assault and agentic, “consensual” sex becomes less and less discernible. We conclude that, in order to foster sexual autonomy, gendered power dynamics must be disentangled from sexual intimacy.

ABSTRACTFormalisation of safeguarding in sport occurs in increasingly diverse contexts to address abuse of athletes and promote ‘safe sport’. Moreover, safeguarding policies are occasionally integrated in transnational Sport for Development (SfD) partnerships as a condition for funding. In this article, we draw from social movement theory to explore political mobilisation against abuse in Zambian sport associations that have a Norwegian SfD partner. Using the concept of ‘cultural framing’, we examine how safe sport is captured, presented and understood by coaches and sport leaders involved in Zambian sport. The analysis shows that there was considerable support for formalised safeguarding, even though ambivalence was expressed regarding the extent of abuse in sport. With motivation grounded in resonance with sport priorities and humanistic values, safeguarding seemingly equipped the sport associations with a practicable formula for confronting a morally evocative problem. Coupled with a strong network of local mobilising actors championing this cause and a conducive political climate for connecting sport with broader social responsibilities, we suggest that this cultural framing facilitated political mobilisation against abuse in Zambian sport. Lastly, we outline some implications of our findings for safeguarding in sport and for the politicisation of sport issues.

The main aim of this study is to develop a forensic accounting system that will help in reducing financial statement fraud through not only its predictive properties; but also, the recommended forensic accounting procedures and policies which the accounting profession should adopt. This study through a neo-empiricist inductive approach, that is premised on an objective collection of qualitative empirical data, has developed a forensic accounting system by exploring the perception of Accounting Academics, Forensic Accountants, External Auditors and Finance Directors using a purposive sampling method. The findings revealed that the training of professional accountants’, particularly external auditors, in forensic accounting skills, ethics, principles and procedures can increase their fraud detection capabilities which can, in turn, increase the chances of fraud detection in the financial statements and equally serve as a fraud deterrence mechanism. The main output from this study was developed into a model called the "Forensic Accounting system". This model has three elements; Audit Concerns, Education, Accounting Standards and Regulations. These three elements are not mutually exclusive, but one element can be addressed per time. This new system stipulates that in order to reduce financial statement fraud, audit concerns (agency concern, role and responsibility of auditors, management responsibility and odd agency situation) need to be addressed. Of importance in the audit concerns element is the mandate of the auditors. The mandate of external auditors needs to include the detection of fraud in the financial statement. Once the audit concerns have been addressed how auditors are educated will need to change. The changes that are required are some elements of forensic accounting to be incorporated into the curriculum and professional development of auditors. The last element of the new system is the accounting standard and regulations. Those grey areas that allow for the manipulation of the financial statements will need to be closed down by the standard setters. Two key issues here are the concept of materiality and auditors’ responsibility. This study has implication for standard setters on the need to make accounting and auditing standards fit for purpose to complement the corporate governance codes. Higher education and professional bodies should work along the changes in accounting standards and integrate some elements of forensic accounting into the education curriculum of professional accountants in order to increase their chances

Despite the dominance of organizations in contemporary social life, law is desperately short of techniques, doctrines and institutions that adequately respond to the social features of organizational entities, their impacts on stakeholders, their internal capacity for self-management, their capacity for diffusion and avoidance of accountability (see Dan-Cohen 1986: 13-14). Lack of corporate social and legal responsibility is not just a failure of corporate management. It is also a failure of legal regulatory institutions to interact with corporate organizations to make them open and permeable. Similarly, Community action often fails to permeate the corporate shell and engage with corporation's self-governance capacity. Corporate responsibility, or citizenship, is constituted in interaction between formal regulation (through the State), informal social action (the penumbra of democracy and institutions of civil society) and corporate self-regulation. The role of corporate Citizens is to use permeable, responsible self-regulatory mechanisms (which meet all the requirements of Chapter 8) in order to determine for themselves how to instantiate regulatory responsibilities, and what values to follow within the grey areas where sufficient consensus has not yet been reached in the broader polity. The role of legal and regulatory strategies is to add the ‘triple loop’ that forces companies to evaluate and report on their own self-regulation strategies so that regulatory agencies can determine whether the ultimate Substantive objectives of regulation are being met (safe workplaces, equal opportunity, improved natural environments, sustainable development, market strength, and so on) (see Figure 9.3 for a diagrammatic representation of the triple loop).

Situating EMI policy and planning within the mainstream school in Kazakhstan, this study probes how STEM (sciences, technology, engineering, mathematics) teachers manage the policy, what challenges they confront, and how they respond to the challenges. Employing ‘agency’ as a conceptual frame, the study analyzed 58 teachers’ interviews representing six regions of the country. Findings suggest that teachers’ lower-level English proficiency and lack of English teaching experience challenge them to cope with the policy. However, teachers do demonstrate signs of what we describe as ‘responsive agency’, referring to teachers’ employment of available resources to make up for their language deficiencies. The policy apparently suffers from ‘policy dumping’ and disjunction because the traditional policymakers/actors put the burden of policy implementation mainly on teachers without providing them the required support and resources they need. Policy dumping renders local teachers eliminated from decision-making processes. The way forward is a non-traditional and non-technocratic participation framework.

<p><strong><em>The purpose</em></strong><em> of the study is to characterize the features of the application of social responsibility toolkit of communication agencies during the Russian-Ukrainian war.</em></p><p><strong><em>Research methodology. </em></strong><em>During the development and systematization of the theoretical and methodological base on the implementation of social responsibility of communication agencies, the descriptive and systematic method was used for the detailed description of examples of application of the social responsibility toolkit of communication agencies; grouping and comparativist when identifying common or different (original) types of tools.</em></p><p><strong><em>The results. </em></strong><em>Compliance with the principles of social responsibility by communication agencies during the Russian-Ukrainian war takes place on the foundations of transparency, openness and democracy. The main toolkit of social responsibility of communication agencies are the generation and launch of social communication campaigns, charity meetings, volunteer initiatives, creation of social advertising, provision of own informational resources for placing communication appeals for the needs of combating the aggressor, participation and support of social projects, collaboration with brands, involvement foreign partners for the purpose of propaganda, educational and explanatory work, etc. The use of measures and projects by communication agencies within the framework of social responsibility in the conditions of the Russian-Ukrainian war is extremely important from all points of view – supporting one’s own state, building the reputation of a strong brand of Ukraine on the world stage, rallying one’s own employees for the sake of qualitatively meeting the needs of clients and caring for their well-being, economic stability and loyalty to the communication agencies themselves.</em></p><p><strong><em>Novelty. </em></strong><em>The novelty of the researched question lies in the understanding of the peculiarities of the application of the toolkit of social responsibility of communication agencies during the Russian-Ukrainian war, the determination of its role in the general strategy of the enterprise’s development.</em></p><p><strong><em>Practical significance. </em></strong><em>The conducted scientific research makes it possible to use the developed materials in teaching practical courses on advertising management, advertising, advertising business, organizing the work of advertising and PR agencies, conducting trainings for employees of communication, advertising, digital agencies, etc.</em></p><p><strong><em>Key words: </em></strong><em>communication agency, social responsibility, social advertising, social direction communication campaign, responsibility to society, corporate responsibility.</em></p>

This paper examines how Serbia’s anti-lithium environmental protests, centred on opposition to Rio Tinto’s Jadar lithium mine, are situated within the country’s broader history of civic mobilisation and democratic struggle for change. As part of the methodology, this study draws upon social movement theory (particularly the concepts of political opportunity structures and cultural framing) alongside cultural resistance scholarship, which explores the relationship between protest music and contemporary socio-political events. It also engages with environmental democracy frameworks, focusing on public participation rights. Together, these theoretical perspectives are useful in demonstrating how protest music operates as both a cultural and political resource in processes of social and political transformation. Furthermore, drawing on qualitative discourse analysis of news reports, non-governmental organisations’ (NGO) statements, activist interviews, and two popular protest songs, “Fire in Darkness” and “March Out of My Yard” (Vatra u mraku and Marš iz moje avlije), the study investigates the role of cultural expression, such as music, in sustaining activism. It also considers the fusing impact of the November 2024 Novi Sad railway station tragedy, which catalysed a broader pro-democracy coalition by linking environmental grievances to systemic governance failures. The paper argues that the Serbian case illustrates how environmental movements in post-socialist contexts can evolve into multi-issue campaigns for democratic accountability, with protest music and popular cultural production acting as a unifying force across social divides.

There appear to be widespread misunderstandings and disagreement regarding the definition and execution of sexual consent among postsecondary students. Without a clear understanding of what constitutes sexual consent, navigating consent-related situations can be challenging for individuals. Sexual script theory may explain gaps in consent knowledge by highlighting the social normative references, or sexual scripts, individuals may rely on when knowledge of consent is insufficient or challenging to apply. The goal of the current study was to qualitatively explore Canadian undergraduate students’ perceptions and experiences of sexual consent within the framework of sexual script theory. Using focus groups, N = 56 undergraduates discussed perceptions of sexual consent, under what circumstances they perceive it to be required, potential “grey areas” of sexual consent and how they are navigated, and how gender may intersect with sexual consent. Transcripts were analyzed within a framework of sexual script theory using inductive coding and thematic analysis. Although participants understood Canadian legally codified scripts well, they seemed to rely on socio-cultural and gendered sexual consent scripts when legal scripts were insufficient or challenging to apply, particularly in ambiguous consent scenarios. The findings suggest that beyond providing educational opportunities and interventions within formal school settings that encompass a wider range of sexual consent scenarios, there is a need to address socio-cultural norms/sexual scripts regarding consent within the broader population.

This article sheds light on the diversity of meanings and connotations that tend to be lost or hidden in translations between different conceptualizations of nature in East and South-East Asia. It reviews the idea of “nature” in Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Filipino, Tagalog, Cebuano, Lumad, Indonesian, Burmese, Nepali, Khmer, and Mongolian. It shows that the conceptual subtleties in the conceptualization of nature often hide wider and deeper cosmological mismatches. It concludes by suggesting that these diverse voices need to be represented in global reports on sustainability, which can be fostered by the direct involvement of experts from diverse traditions of thought who have access and interpretative knowledge of sources in languages other than English. To take into consideration the diversity of conceptualizations of nature can lead to better decisions about sustainability and improve the acceptability and efficiency of environmental policies in each local context, as well as internationally. Solutions and policies on the ground must be designed based on the local conceptual and cultural frames.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to consider corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) within the supply chain. The discussion focuses on the social component of social responsibility and explores its effects on end-users. Moreover, this paper presents moral intensity, a construct introduced in the ethics literature, as a potential guide to managers who struggle to navigate the gray area between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and CSI.Design/methodology/approachThis paper conceptualizes CSI within the supply chain and offers a framework and propositions for understanding and preventing irresponsible behavior from a moral intensity perspective.FindingsThe moral intensity framework provides a normative approach with the potential to guide managers who face choices involving decisions that might lead to irresponsible behavior in interorganizational settings.Originality/valueThis paper draws attention to business-to-business CSI and the limited research that focuses on the social aspects of CSR, rather than the environmental and economic factors emphasized in prior research. It also introduces the moral intensity framework to the supply chain literature and highlights the end-user’s (i.e. consumer’s) role in influencing the performance of the overall value chain.

The criminal regulation of sexual crimes in Spain has recently been modified in order to include a consent-based definition of rape. From a feminist framework, this socio-legal research calls this criminal reform into question. Specifically, the main objective is to study the potentialities and constraints of the legal element of sexual consent to meet women's lived experiences and their ways of performing gender. Drawing on the works of feminism and legal feminism of the last century that dismantled heteropatriarchal sexual politics, as well as relying on current feminist approaches to consent, I expose the shadows, grey areas, and deep-rooted assumptions that underlie the political-legal construction of this hackneyed concept. To do so, I primarily use Carol Bacchi's critical policy analysis in order to explore the Spanish criminal policy discourse concerning this penal modification. In my analysis I examine the preparatory works of the legislative amendment as well as selected oral debates held in the Congress of Deputies and in the Equality Commission. The main findings show how this policy contradicts and collides head-on with many foundational contributions of feminist theory in relation to sexual violence. Nonetheless, relying on broader historical discourses of human rights and international law and repeatedly alluding to the feminist social movement, as well as due to the functionality of the modern notion of consent in a neoliberal system, this legislative amendment enjoys a high level of acceptance.

Sexual violence has predominantly been discursively constructed as bounded and binary, leaving little room for ambiguous or uncertain experiences. The #MeToo movement, however, saw some highly contested cases enter into mainstream news coverage that challenged these dominant understandings, including the divisive case of Aziz Ansari. This research uses a post-structural feminist framework to examine Australian news media reporting of this case in order to understand how discourses around sexual violence and sexual consent are (re)produced by news media following the #MeToo movement. The study found that whilst some discourse was more nuanced, the majority of reporting still perpetuated limited and binary understandings of sexual violence. Much reporting constructed pressure and coercion as the normal and acceptable “reality” of (hetero)sex, failing to acknowledge coercion as potentially harmful and problematic, as well as failing to consider the possibilities for doing consent differently. Reporting also (re)produced narrow and stereotypical understandings of gender roles, with women primarily seen as bearing the onus of gatekeeping sexual experiences, and men seen as “naturally” aggressive pursuers of sex. Ultimately, we argue that news media works as a site of erasure for particular forms and experiences of sexual violence.