Society Scholars Research Articles

Business as usual: framing labour exploitation in the UN global compact

ABSTRACT International governmental organizations have brought issues of forced labour, child labour, and human trafficking into the realm of corporate social responsibility with voluntary principles and guidelines for businesses to follow. Such efforts have been characterized differently by world society scholars, who see them as mechanisms for the diffusion of global norms, and critical scholars, who seem them as reflections of corporate power. I contribute to this debate by analyze framings of labour exploitation in the United Nations Global Compact’s written and verbal communication, exploring what is being conveyed. I find that the texts emphasize western businesses as the ‘real’ victims, threatened by human traffickers, suppliers, and consumers, while workers themselves are de-centered. The findings lend weight to critical scholars’ views, suggesting that the framings reflect business interests and support a status quo in which the political economy of labour exploitation can continue.

The power of the accused: rights mobilization and gender inequality in school workplaces

AbstractLaw and society scholars have long studied rights mobilization and gender inequality from the vantage point of complainants in private workplaces. This article pursues a new direction in this line of inquiry to explore, for the first time, mobilization from the vantage points of complainants and those accused of violating the rights of others in public-school workplaces in the United States. We conceptualize rights mobilization as legal, quasilegal, and/or extralegal processes. Based on a national random survey of teachers and administrators, and in-depth interviews with educators in California, New York, and North Carolina, we find an integral relationship between gender inequality and experiencing rights violations, choices about rights mobilization, and obstacles to formal mobilization. Compared to complainants, those accused of rights violations – especially male administrators – are more likely to use quasilegal and legal mobilization to defend themselves or to engage in anticipatory mobilization. Actors in less powerful status positions (teachers) most often pursue extralegal mobilization to complain about rights violations during which they engage in rights muting as a means of self-protection; when in more powerful status positions, actors use rights muting as a means of self-protection and to suppress the rights claims of others. This paper concludes with implications for future research on rights mobilization in school workplaces amidst changing political and demographic conditions.

Exploring Public Health Research for Corporate Health Policy: Insights for Business and Society Scholars

Despite the growing interest in societal impact in the business and society literature, there remains a notable gap in research on the impact of health interventions on physical and mental health and social welfare. To address this gap, we shift the unit of analysis to the intervention, akin to the level of analysis used in health research. Drawing on a curated subset of health interventions in the workplace from the public health literature, we argue that management scholars can adopt the methods used by public health scholars to design and assess health interventions. By tapping into the rich insights gained from these studies, management scholars can propose evidence-based interventions and policies that can enhance health outcomes, improve productivity, and cultivate a healthier workplace atmosphere. Collaborating with public health researchers, business and society scholars can help create a new field of research on corporate health policy.

Toward Humanistic Business Ethics

We theorize that, in the current development of business ethics, there is a fruitful evolution that dissolves the dichotomy between the normative and behavioral research approaches developed, respectively, by philosophers and social scientists; this approach avoids many of the limitations originated by such distinction by reconnecting their two separate narratives. We call this emerging research model Humanistic Business Ethics (HBE) as it emphasizes the centrality of the human dimension of business and the importance of adopting a richer concept of humanity in business ethics research. We argue that this specific research model in business ethics emerges when scholars combine a pragmatist philosophical approach with some key ideas coming from stakeholder theory, which we summarize and connect. By leveraging collaboration across ethics, economics, psychology, and entrepreneurship, HBE can help business and society scholars undertake fruitful inquiries into the way business works (and should work) at its best.

Rethinking the Rethinking of Legal Pluralism: Toward a Manifesto for a Pluri-Legal Perspective

AbstractThe paper addresses the perpetual discontent evoked by the concept of legal pluralism, one which, in turn, brings about incessant efforts to “rethink” it. We suggest that one of the sources of this discontent is the erroneous view that legal pluralism is a theory, and the consequent misguided expectations that it should provide scholars of law and society with causal hypotheses and explanations. We argue that legal pluralism is not a theory but a research perspective, and, as such, is not meant to provide us with explanatory propositions, but rather to increase our awareness of the plurality and inter-relationality of socio-legal spheres and of the implications thereof. We further identify—and briefly discuss—the four core principles of a pluri-legal perspective: plurality, relationality, power, and agency. Taken together, these four premises constitute a manifesto of sorts for a pluri-legal perspective.

Long-term metabolomic alterations during post-acute sequelae of COVID-19

Abstract A large fraction of COVID-19 patients does not fully recover from the acute infection with SARS-CoV-2 but develops long-term symptoms that persist for several months. The pathobiology of such post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC, “long COVID”) remains largely enigmatic. This project is based on a discovery made by a plasma metabolomics exploration of individuals with acute SARS-CoV-2 infection, post-COVID patients that have fully recovered from the disease, and PASC patients that have persistent manifestations across a wide range of organ systems. We have found key metabolites that are altered by acute SARS-CoV-2 infection and do not recover in individuals with PASC, while returning to normal levels in post-COVID individuals who do not develop long-term symptoms. These metabolites offer a pathway-level hypothesis for a new molecular etiology underlying PASC. We have shown that viral RNA is sufficient to alter these metabolites and suggest that this can explain some of the symptoms reported by patients with long covid. A.C.W. is supported by training grant T32-AI-055400-19. C.T. is a Pew biomedical scholar and a Kathryn W. Davis Aging Brain scholar and is supported by the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (DP2-AG-067492), the Agilent Early Career Professor Award, and grants from the Edward Mallinckrodt Jr Foundation, the IDSA Foundation, the Thyssen Foundation, PennCHOP Microbiome Program, Penn Institute for Immunology, Penn Center for Molecular Studies in Digestive and Liver Diseases (P30-DK-050306), Penn Skin Biology and Diseases Resource-based Center (P30-AR-069589), Penn Diabetes Research Center (P30-DK-019525), Penn Institute on Aging and the Borrelli Family Pilot Grant in Lynch Syndrome. M.L. is supported by the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (DP2-AG-067511), an American Cancer Society Scholar Award, The Pew Scholar Award, the Searle Scholar program, the Edward Mallinckrodt Jr Foundation and grants from the Abramson Cancer Center, The Penn-CHOP microbiome program, Penn Coronavirus Center Pilot, Penn Institute for Immunology, Penn Center for Molecular Studies in Digestive and Liver Diseases, Penn Center for Precision Medicine, Penn Institute on Aging, Penn Center of Excellence in Environmental Toxicology (P30-ES-013508) and the Borrelli Family Pilot Grant in Lynch Syndrome.

Myelodysplastic Syndromes/Neoplasms-Insights Into Pathogenesis Leading to Improved Classification, Risk Stratification, and Treatments.

From the ∗VA Connecticut Cancer Center, West Haven †Section of Hematology, Department of Internal Medicine, Yale School of Medicine and Yale Comprehensive Cancer Center, New Haven, CT. Conflicts of Interest and Source of Funding: A.M.Z. is a Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Scholar in Clinical Research. A.M.Z. received research funding (institutional) from Celgene/BMS, Abbvie, Astex, Pfizer, Medimmune/AstraZeneca, Boehringer-Ingelheim, Cardiff oncology, Incyte, Takeda, Novartis, Shattuck Labs, Geron, Aprea, and ADC Therapeutics. A.M.Z. participated in advisory boards and/or had a consultancy with and received honoraria from AbbVie, Pfizer, Celgene/BMS, Jazz, Incyte, Agios, Servier, Boehringer-Ingelheim, Novartis, Astellas, Daiichi Sankyo, Geron, Taiho, Seattle Genetics, BeyondSpring, Takeda, Ionis, Amgen, Janssen, Genentech, Epizyme, Syndax, Gilead, Kura, Chiesi, ALX Oncology, BioCryst, Notable, Orum, Mendus, Foran, Syros, and Tyme. A.M.Z. served on clinical trial committees for Novartis, Abbvie, Gilead, Syros, BioCryst, Abbvie, ALX Oncology, Geron, and Celgene/BMS. For M.G.R., none were declared. Reprints: Michal G. Rose, MD, VA Connecticut Cancer Center, 950 Campbell Avenue (III-d), West Haven, CT 06516. E-mail: [email protected].

Public Trust in Computing: Analyzing Trust and Digital Technologies with the Constitutionalism Framework


 
 
 This paper engages the issue of trust in contemporary societies, where data and computing are a defining condition of public life, with the framework of constitutionalism from the field of Science, Technology and Society. The framework of constitutionalism, extending and generalizing from Sheila Jasanoff’s original formulation of “bioconstitutionalism,” says that transformations to understandings of what it means to be human in the age of ubiquitous computing require rethinking of law at the constitutional level – at the level of the most basic relations between states and citizens. These refashionings of the human, however, take place on terrain already steeped in the norms of constitution with a small “c,” that is, the written rules as well as unwritten norms generated by institutional practices that make up the daily hum of a society. The framework draws attention to three aspects of trust in the contemporary sociotechnical condition: 1) trust is not only a narrowly human or social quality separate from the technological systems, but the very condition of the technology’s existence and the specific form that the technology takes; 2) the present day state of trust is the result of a long, gradual, and incomplete process of publics becoming constituted with computing; and 3) trust today is a result and context of “constitutional moments,” moments of rupture in constitutional orders that are the result of interplay between legal, technical, and anthropological factors. These aspects point to sites of intervention that people can activate to shape the current state of trust and they suggest research agendas that scholars of law, society, and technology can pursue to make sense of this crucial area of sociotechnical relations today.
 
 

Integration of Population Health, Social Determinants, and Social Justice in Transcultural Nursing and Culturally Competent Care: White Paper by the Scholars Education Interest Group

As part of its mission to advance Transcultural Nursing worldwide, the Transcultural Nursing Society Scholars upholds the central role of the discipline and cultural competence in advocacy, empowerment, and transformation of the life conditions of disadvantaged populations. This White Paper affirms the Scholars' core belief in the value of Transcultural Nursing and culturally competent care in addressing social determinants to promote health equity. The Scholars Education Interest Group proposes recommendations for changes in education, practice, and research undergirding the discipline and expand cultural competence to directly address social structural and historical forces that perpetuate health vulnerability in diverse populations. Collaborative leadership between the TCNS Scholars, Board of Trustess and members should develop initiatives to foster implementation of the recommendations and promote global dissemination of exemplars in education, research and practice. Collaborative implementation of recommendations will generate evidence of health equity outcomes through TCN and culturally competent care.

Law’s imposition of a heteronormative timeline in a rapidly ageing authoritarian state

This article discusses how China, an authoritarian state with a rapidly ageing population, uses its laws and regulations to impose a heteronormative timeline on its citizens to get married and give birth. I use the pressure felt by China’s ‘leftover’ women to get married according to a heteronormative timeline to discuss law’s role in shaping and reshaping our understanding of age, ageing, and time. These women’s experience reveals law’s seemingly invisible role in imposing and sustaining dominant timelines, especially in authoritarian states that actively use law and media to depict those who are different from the majority as deviants. This article explores and exposes law’s invisibility and hegemonic nature in everyday life, in an effort to explain how different laws work among themselves and with other normative orders to set a timeline that eliminates differences and imposes pressure on those who ‘fall behind’ to catch up with the mainstream. Using legal pluralism as an analytical tool, this article further examines how state laws depend on and work with other normative orders to sustain dominant timelines. It is my hope that this article could invite law and society scholars to rethink how state law violently eliminates diverse ways people organise their everyday lives by imposing dominant timelines on them.

Performative Feelings for Others: The Civil Repair of Organised Competitive Sports

In many western nations, sport is an institutional component of civil society that may be considered from quite different outlooks. From the critical theorists’ viewpoint, sport reproduces social hierarchies through competition and then colonises our democratic life worlds. Scholars of civil society argue that sport actors manoeuvre civic relations and fend off anti-civil pressures to allow integration, belonging and collective decision-making. This article positions sport actors and audiences at the interstice between hierarchies and solidarity, amid competition and friendship. Using Civil Sphere Theory, I present a cultural sociology of performance that highlights how sport actors interpret the democratic character (or lack thereof) of their own and others’ sport actions. Drawing on eight months of participant field observations in Norwegian youth sport, I recreate an ethnographic tale of how coaches, players and spectators activate the civil sphere’s symbolic and affective codes for this purpose. This dramatic sequence of events, played out over the course of the season, shows how sport itself can be shaped by actors who bring the civil sphere to bear and make sport a facilitating input to the discourse of the Nordic civil sphere. This process, I conclude, is contingent on performances of the civil sphere that make sport a stage on which to display performative feelings for others. When sport actors challenge the divisive, hierarchal character of organised competition and carry out a civil repair of sport, they expand the limits of civil inclusion and momentarily create a sporting civil society.

‘We need the money’: how welfare anxiety justifies penal and social reforms in immigration debate

ABSTRACT The response of welfare states to immigration is a topic of concern for scholars of welfare and scholars of crime and society. Yet, debates about immigration, crime and welfare in academic literature often take place in isolation. This paper advances both literatures by studying the mechanisms that drive both welfare chauvinism and penal nationalism in relationship to each other. Rather than assuming an a priori and abstract negative construction of immigration in political debates, this study draws on a large-scale Critical Discourse Analysis of political and media debates in Denmark to show how immigration is constructed in ways that justify welfare and penal policy reforms. The analysis shows that both policy shifts – towards a two-tier exclusionary welfare system, and towards penal nationalism that reserves harsher punishment for immigrants – are driven by a discourse that constructs immigrants as threatening welfare first, and only secondarily as threatening personal safety. Based on the empirical data, the article argues that anxieties about the impact of immigration on the integrity of the welfare state is what drives and justifies the construction of a two-tiered welfare and criminal justice system.

How do Russian National Systems of Institutional Absences Shape Insensitive Corporate Environmental Violence of a Russian Extractive Multinational Corporation?

Aiming to develop normative recommendations for preventing corporate irresponsibility (CiR), business and society scholars have adopted strategic approaches—exploring the causal links between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and profitability—and moral approaches—exploring the moral principles of CSR that guide managers. However, some business ethics scholars have recently argued that these studies are too simplistic as they disregard the systemic logics of broader institutional environments that generate ‘bad apples’ firms and managers. Drawing on literature that sheds light on the systemic origin of CiR (i.e. the comparative institutionalist perspective and the critical management perspective), we conduct an in-depth case study on how Russian systems of institutional absences shape insensitive corporate environmental violence of a Russian extractive multinational corporation. In doing so, we develop a novel cultural approach to the analysis of CiR that advances knowledge about the systemic origin of CiR in two ways. First, this approach allows for identifying how the sources of CiR are located within firms’ home national systems of institutional absences, which shape systemic logics of CiR that make corporate violence less traceable by firms and broader society. Second, this approach allows for identifying how governments can sustain and perpetuate insensitive corporate violence through the deliberate and systemic absenting of national institutions that could pressure firms to be more socially and environmentally responsible, thus making negative consequences of corporate violence invisible to firms and broader society. We propose future research directions and suggest policy changes in Russia and other countries with similar systems of institutional absences.

Career Research Performance Among Radiology Early Career Grant Recipients Compared With National Institutes of Health K Award Recipients

ObjectiveTo compare academic and demographic metrics among recipients of three major early career radiology, interventional radiology, and radiation oncology grants to National Institutes of Health (NIH) K awardees at the time the grants were awarded and then over the course of their careers. MethodsRadiologists who received the RSNA Research Scholar Grant, General Electric Radiology Research Academic Fellowship (GERRAF), American Roentgen Ray Society (ARRS) Scholar Award, or NIH Career Development (K) Award before January 1, 2015, were included. Research metrics at the time of grant award (eg, publications) and subsequent scholarly productivity (eg, academic rank, h-index, NIH funding) were recorded until April 2020. Wilcoxon ranked-sum, χ2, logistic regression, and standard least-square regression were used for data analysis. ResultsThere were 279 recipients: 48 K Award, 115 RSNA Research Scholar Grant, 36 ARRS, and 80 GERRAF. At the time of grant awarding, GERRAF recipients were less likely to have an MD-PhD degree (odds ratio [OR]: 0.36; P = .002) and were more likely to be women (OR: 1.55; P = .042) than K Award recipients. Similarly, recipients of the ARRS (OR: 2.87; P = .010) and GERRAF (OR: 3.19; P = .002) were more likely to have a master’s degree. Academic rank, leadership positions, and R01 funding were significant predictors of h-index and total publications over time. Academic rank and the GERRAF were significant predictors of subsequent NIH funding duration but there were no significant predictors of NIH funding amount. ConclusionsEarly career radiology awards, specifically the GERRAF, provide support for female and non-PhD investigators and result in comparable academic performance metrics to NIH K Award recipients.

Building on Its Past: The Future of Business and Society Scholarship

This Special Issue commemorates the 60th anniversary of Business & Society with nine rigorous literature reviews that address important societal problems and provide opportunities for theory development in the business and society field; in this introduction we present an overview of the Special Issue. With the theme “Building on Its Past,” the nine articles address a host of contemporary issues, including climate change, wicked problems, business and human rights, human health, certifications standards, the governance of artificial intelligence, stakeholder engagement, stakeholder theory, and corporate political activity. Together, these reviews offer a wealth of suggested themes, theories and approaches that can drive our research forward for the next decades in business and society research and practice. Using the lens of a miner-prospector continuum to categorize the diversity of articles within this special issue, a common theme emerges across the portfolio of reviews: they all call for a more systemic and integrative perspective toward studying the complex interactions that link business and society actors and issues. Building on these findings, we encourage future scholars to fill long-standing researched gaps through a more open systems approach, which supports both contextually sensitive and multi-level and multi-disciplinary approaches to address grand societal challenges. We conclude with specific suggestions as to how business and society scholars might use an open systems approach, including embracing methodologies to address complex causal pathways, theorizing with a view towards spanning external and internal elements of an organization, and reflecting on the temporal and spatial dynamics of complex systems.

Business and health: A research agenda post‐Covid‐19

Despite some work dealing with occupational health and marketing unhealthy products, the business and society largely ignores the impacts of business on health. Focusing on employees and consumers, the literature does not take into account the impacts of business on the health of community members in general. Given work in such fields as public health, geography, and history, there is an ample basis upon which to construct a new line of research for business and society scholars—business and health. This essay develops ideas on how such a line of inquiry might proceed.

A Praxis Gap: A Review of Practitioner Research on Female Genital Cutting/Mutilation (FGC/M) in Muslim Context

AbstractThis essay explores the problem of the “praxis gap,” which can be understood as the epistemological space between academic and practitioner discourses engaged in the study and practice of issues along the aid and development spectrum. It does so by discussing the way practitioners approach the topic of Islam and Muslim practices vis‐à‐vis the problem of Female Genital Cutting or Mutilation (FGC/M) and in light of the geopolitical context surrounding gender, development, and Islam. Through a review of practitioner‐oriented studies, the essay demonstrates that the praxis gap–between scholars of religion and Muslim society on the one hand and aid/development practitioners on the other–generates significant problems in the study and practice of aid/development in Muslim contexts. After this analysis, the essay closes by arguing that the patterns and paradigms governing the production of knowledge surrounding the aid/development in Muslim societies are closely related to similar problems of mistranslation found across the subject of religion and development more broadly.

Who is Being Served? How Competing Norms and Values Shape the Transitional Justice Agenda in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT Any transitional justice process involves a multiplicity of actors and competing norms and values that shape the transitional justice agenda. This article is concerned with the ways competing norms and values have shaped the transitional justice agenda in Zimbabwe. It makes the argument that the privileging of a neoliberalist perspective, as well as a human rights discourse in dealing with the concerns of post-conflict societies, has posed challenges for meaningful transitional justice interventions in Zimbabwe and on the African continent and suggests a nuanced approach to transitional justice that captures the history, culture and other dynamics that shape a country’s politics. This article draws from interviews with four civil society activists and scholars on transitional justice in Zimbabwe, as well as narratives are drawn from a categorical content analysis of the reports and other publications of four civil society organisations – Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum (ZHRNGOF), Zimbabwe Peace Project (ZPP), Amnesty International (Zimbabwe) and Zimbabwe Human Rights Association (ZIMRIGHTS). The civil society organisations and activists were purposively sampled based on the work they have done in the area under study, as well as their understanding of the context and its nuanced complexities.

With or Without You: Qing, Li, Fa, and Legal Pluralism in China

Abstract The concept of legal pluralism was introduced to China in the mid-1990s to address the conflict between state law and local norms and customs. More than two decades after its introduction, the scope of legal pluralism in China has shifted to the coexistence and interaction between state law and nonstate orders. In this article, I review theoretical discussions and empirical studies on legal pluralism in China. The existing studies on legal pluralism focus mostly on rural villages, which marginalizes the lived experience of urban residents who are also caught in China’s rapid legal transplantation in recent decades. At the same time, law and society scholars who study labor dispute resolution in urban China tend to frame the questions as legal mobilization, rather than legal pluralism. The term qingli 情理[commonsense feelings of justice] is a common theme underlying the scholarship of legal pluralism and legal mobilization in China, and thus it has the potential to bring them together and bridge the findings of the two bodies of scholarship. This article contributes to the literature on Chinese law and society by demonstrating the role that qingli plays in bridging different areas of sociolegal studies.

Upon the Altar of Work: Child Labor and the Rise of a New American Sectionalism by Betsy Wood

Reviewed by: Upon the Altar of Work: Child Labor and the Rise of a New American Sectionalism by Betsy Wood Kevin A. Murphy (bio) Upon the Altar of Work: Child Labor and the Rise of a New American Sectionalism. By Betsy Wood. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2020. Pp. 266. Cloth, $110.00; paper, $28.00.) The U.S. Civil War engendered the abolition of chattel slavery but left unaddressed the status of the youngest members of the republic. In this slim, engaging book, Betsy Wood explores how debates over child labor changed between the 1850s and the 1930s. In so doing, she suggests that the continued fight over the presence of children in the workplace underscores not only the legacies of abolitionism and antislavery activism, but also continued sectional tensions between the North and the South. Previous scholarship on the decline of child labor attributes the decreasing numbers of children forced to toil in unsafe factories to mass industrialization at the end of the nineteenth century and the growing emotional value of children within increasingly smaller family units. Upon the Altar of Work offers a new interpretation by highlighting postbellum reformers' discursive invocations of free and unfree labor, concepts that heretofore have occupied the attention of scholars of slavery, abolition, Reconstruction, and postemancipation society and culture. Rather than conceptualizing the era of antebellum reform and the Progressive Era as two distinct periods separated by secession, war, and reunion, Wood sees a bridge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries constructed out of clashing interpretations over the need for and value of juvenile work. Readers learn about the fight over child labor from five chapters. Wood first analyzes the placing out movement of the 1850s, during which the Children's Aid Society (CAS) sent primarily male children to live in the developing West. The transportation of children siphoned off the labor surplus from northeastern cities, such as New York and Boston, while simultaneously instilling free labor ideology in the emigrant children. As southern fire-eaters called for the dissolution of the Union, reformers such as Charles Loring Brace, head of the CAS, touted the value of free labor, which contrasted [End Page 571] with both wage working and, more importantly, slavery. In chapter 2, Wood presents case studies of the northern padrone system and child apprenticeship laws in the South in the contexts of the expansion of child labor within northern factories and Reconstruction. While northern reformers labeled the Italian immigrant children who performed street music as a new generation of slaves, freedpeople asserted their right to control their own progeny and to benefit from their labor in the face of planters' underhanded actions to retain control over and profit from young Black bodies. The third chapter focuses on the industrializing South during the 1880s and 1890s. Wood contends that southern manufacturers' reliance on poor, rural white children ended northern reformers' appeals to free labor ideology. In its place, advocates against child labor framed their efforts in racial terms as the United States turned its imperial ambitions abroad. Within the New South Montgomery, Alabama, minister Edgar Gardner Murphy began a campaign to eradicate child labor across the former Confederacy. While northerners pushed for national legislation, Murphy insisted on a parochial approach, one committed to white supremacy. He argued that impoverished white children could not assume their rightful place atop the South's racial hierarchy if work supplanted education. Despite his growing notoriety, including a leadership position within the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), Murphy never wavered in his insistence that states, not the federal government, should regulate child labor. Although a similar outrage against manufacturers who relied on child labor united Murphy and northerners, a common solution to the problem failed to materialize. Chapter 4 traces southerners' vigorous defense of the use of child labor through appeals to the free market, states' rights, and the danger of outside interference in their affairs, while northern progressives sought the liberation of so-called enslaved child laborers with a religious zeal that befit the Social Gospel movement of the time. Despite southern resistance, the NCLC lobbied for a unitary, national law that prohibited child labor. The organization's leadership was pleased when Congress passed...