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The purpose of this paper is to design a case study to explore how a mining and construction company, located in the Zambian Copperbelt, practices corporate social responsibility (CSR), which has a vital role to play in the mining industry because of its importance in a range of areas including: the local economy, avoiding a negative impact on the environment and society and occupational safety. This is especially true in the developing parts of the world. Numerous initiatives, guidelines and tools have been made available for CSR practice but very little is known about the usefulness of the new CSR-standard International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 26000.

A case study was designed to explore how a mining and construction company, located in the Zambian Copperbelt, practices CSR within the health area and to discuss the possible merits of ISO 26000 for CSR development in the mining industry in the developing world.

Our findings show that, despite the fact that ISO 26000 is primarily a series of guidelines, it can be used to evaluate and improve a company’s CSR practice even if that company is already considered as a frontrunner within CSR. The standard can give valuable advice when designing community development programs and allocating the use of charity donations. Further, our study has shown that traditional management systems based on occupational health and safety standard 18001 and ISO 14001 can rather effectively support actions and expectations in ISO 26000.

The research context is Zambia, so there might be limitations when applying the results to other cultural and geographical settings.

The paper is a useful source of information about the practical implementation of CSR within the health area.

Much of the literature within the field of practical implementation of CSR is focusing on the philanthropic activities. This paper brings more information about practical implementation of CSR in core corporate business.

The alignment between the labour market and initial vocational education and training (IVET) is placing always more importance on technical knowledge and skills, whilst metacognitive competences such as critical thinking and media literacy are increasingly neglected. In the context of IVET, this results in authors and practitioners paying always more attention to how to devise possible training interventions, with the double aim of implementing their educational pathways and enhancing students’ critical thinking and media literacy. This paper aims to report the state of the art concerning such processes of enhancement in IVET students.

The study adopted the method of systematic scoping review to address the research questions on how to enhance critical thinking and media literacy in the context of IVET.

The paper presents the analyses of the n = 19 contributions collected. Then, it proposes an initial conceptualization of the dimensions of critical thinking and media literacy. Moreover, by combining evidence from various contributions, the review proposes implications for educational practices and strategies. Around these pieces of knowledge, further avenues of research and practice are proposed.

This study contributes to the literature on critical thinking and media literacy in the context of IVET by advancing initial comprehensive conceptualizations of the two dimensions. Moreover, the study advances initial practical implications for teachers and trainers for the development of training interventions.

The originality of the present review rests in its proposal of definitions of critical thinking and media literacy; moreover, it widens the discussion of practices on how to enhance such metacognitive competences. Indeed, the study identifies the teaching and training practices meant to enhance critical thinking and media literacy and proposes applied implications in the context of IVET.

This study aims to address the issue of practicing information security risk assessment (ISRA) on cloud solutions by studying municipalities and large organizations in Sweden.

Four large organizations and five municipalities that use cloud services and conduct ISRA to adhere to their information security risk management practices were studied. Data were gathered qualitatively to answer the study’s research question: How is ISRA practiced on the cloud? The Coat Hanger model was used as a theoretical lens to study and theorize the practices.

The results showed that the organizations aimed to follow the guidelines, in the form of frameworks or their own experience, to conduct ISRA; furthermore, the frameworks were altered to fit the organizations’ needs. The results further indicated that one of the main concerns with the cloud ISRA was the absence of a culture that integrates risk management. Finally, the findings also stressed the importance of a good understanding and a well-written legal contract between the cloud providers and the organizations using the cloud services.

As opposed to the previous research, which was more inclined to try out and evaluate various cloud ISRA, the study provides insights into the practice of cloud ISRA experienced by the organizations. This study represents the first attempt to investigate cloud ISRA that organizations practice in managing their information security.

An experiment is undertaken to assess how the level of information provided to survey groups impacts upon the decisions they make. In this experiment, a group of experts is surveyed first to determine both the forms and levels of information important to them regarding an obscure environmental resource (remote mountain lakes), as well as their ranking of particular examples of these resources in accordance with their own criteria. Then three different groups of respondents are given different levels of this information to assess how their WTP for the resources responds to varying levels of this information, and how their rankings of the different goods alters with the information provided. The study reports evidence that generally increased levels of information provide significant quantitative changes in aggregate WTP (the enhancement effect), as well as a credible impact on their ranking of the various goods. On closer examination, much of the enhancement effect appears to be attributable to the changes in ranking, and to changes in the WTP for a single lake at each level of information. In addition the ranking does not respond in any consistent or coherent fashion during the experiment until the information provided is complete, including a ranking of subjectively reported importance by the expert group, and then the survey group converges upon the expert's group rankings. In sum, the experiment generates evidence that is both consistent with the anticipated effects of increased levels of information but also consistent with the communication of information-embedded preferences of the expert group. It may not be possible to communicate expert-provided information to survey groups without simultaneously communicating their preferences.

In line with the knowledge-based view of organizations, this paper aims to analyze how supply chain (SC) employees contribute to the creation of competitive advantage through knowledge acquisition and utilization activities. The authors consider SC employees' skills and competencies, their external network of relationships, their job satisfaction and company investments in training and test how they relate to SC-level outcomes (i.e. SC growth).

The authors design a research model including the aforementioned variables, and the authors apply structural equation modeling (SEM) to survey data collected from 246 SC professionals in Latin America. The authors also use multi-group analysis to evaluate how the relationships between these variables change with different levels of company investment in training.

The results show that a broad professional network of relationships contributes to increasing the skills and competencies of SC professionals, which, in turn, impact job satisfaction and SC performance. This reinforces the value of investing in skilled human talent, who can contribute to knowledge acquisition, utilization, and, ultimately, to SC competitiveness. Companies that invest more in training to develop their SC employees benefit from stronger SC outcomes.

This study contributes to broadening the understanding of the impact of human resource management (HRM) on supply chain management (SCM). One of the added original foci of this research is the emphasis on developing countries where these HRM-to-SCM performance relationships have not been studied before.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a state of the art description of open air markets (OAM), a little-known phenomenon that is indispensable in Africa’s consumer packaged goods industry.

A qualitative methodology comprising in-depth semi-structured interviews and direct observation was employed.

Analysis of data from Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy and most populous country, reveals that channel members have roles that are different from that of their Western counterparts. For example, distributors often do not distribute and principals are expected to actively sell on behalf of their distributors to empty the latter’s warehouse. Also, while many end-users in developing countries expect credit sales and opportunity to bargain, extant literature does not include these demands in the formal list of service output demands. Another major finding is the surprising order underlying OAM. It is the bedrock of commercial activities: for most consumer packaged goods manufacturers, sales through OAM account for over 90 percent of revenue.

The focus on one industry and country limits the generalizability of the above findings.

Africa is the next growth frontier. Tapping into this growth requires a deep understanding and appreciation of the important role played by its unique marketing channels.

Given the dearth of documented knowledge about marketing channels in emerging markets, this study addresses an important gap. Its findings could inform theory development and encourage more research on marketing channels in developing countries.

The paper focuses on the question of the extent to which individual preference-based values are suitable in guiding environmental policy and damage assessment decisions. Three criteria for “suitableness” are reviewed: conceptual, moral and legal. Their discussion suggests that: (i) the concept of economic value as applied to environmental resources is a meaningful concept based on the notion of trade-off; (ii) the limitations of the moral foundations of cost-benefit analysis do not invalidate its use as a procedure for guiding environmental decision making; (iii) the input of individual preferences into damage assessment is compatible with the basic foundations of tort law; (iv) using individual preference-based methods provides incentives for efficient levels of due care; (v) determining standing is still very contentious for various categories of users as well as for aggregating non-use values. Overall, the discussion suggests that the use of preference-based approaches in both the policy and legal arenas is warranted provided that they are accurately applied, their limitations are openly acknowledged and they assume an information-providing rather than a determinative role.

Professional journalism has recently been studied through the lens of audience participation in the production of news online. While initial enthusiasm for democratisation and community reinforcement was significant, empirical evidence points towards unwillingness for fundamental reconstruction of journalistic practices. This chapter aims to map participatory journalism in Greece through the synthesis of accumulated research on the adoption of participatory features and practices in online news media and on audience perspectives of engaging in new roles during news process. Professionals seem hesitant to support a different but the traditional relationship with the users, while even users themselves get involved in activities that require little time and effort, not challenging journalistic norms via creative content production. However, both journalists and audience are positive towards a new collaborative way of managing and exploiting user-generated content, which can support participatory environments that reshape the incorporation of users' contributions in the daily workflows.

Under the impetus of federal law, each state is required to develop Guidelines by which to determine presumptive child support awards following divorce. The key federal requirement is that during the specified quadrennial reviews of each state’s Guidelines, “a state must consider economic data on the cost of raising children.” Our purpose here is to compare presumptive child support awards provided in typical state Guidelines with the actual monetary costs of raising children.

To this end, we estimate these monetary costs from government data on consumer outlays in households with children as compared with substantially similar childless households. We review and reject current methods for determining child costs: both from income equivalence methods and those offered in annual government surveys; and provide quite different results despite using the same data employed by others.

Our econometric results indicate much lower monetary costs than reported for either of the two alternatives. Since presumptive child support awards in most states rely on current methods, these findings suggest that existing award structures should be re-evaluated.

Current award structures create a financial asset resulting from the gap between presumptive awards and monetary costs for custodial parents. This factor engenders resentment by support payers since it is his or her payments that fund this asset. And this resentment harms relationships between the parents. Increased willingness of non-custodial parents to make their assessed payments is an outcome promoted when payment amounts reflect the actual monetary costs of raising children.

This paper aims to investigate how home-based telework (HBT) affects job stress. The authors argue that an intrinsic effect of telework like work extension mediates this relationship. Work extension is reflected in two employee behaviours: working in free time and presentism.

The proposed model has been estimated using the Preacher and Hayes bootstrap method for multiple mediation analysis, with 1,000 repetitions. The data used come from the sixth European Working Conditions Survey.

The analysis indicates that HBT does not pose an inherent risk for job stress but causes a change in the employees' behaviour, increasing working in free time and presenteeism and thus job stress. The mediation model indicates that once these behaviours are controlled, the effect of HBT is to reduce stress.

The authors argue that companies should focus on human resource practices to control workers' behaviours that have a detrimental effect on job stress while institutions should regulate HBT.

The analysis deepens the unclear relationship between HBT and job stress by introducing employees' behaviours concerning work extension into the equation.