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This paper aims to investigate the impacts of a science-based environmental communication campaign at a university dining hall. The impacts are assessed in terms of student attitudes toward sustainability, food consumption choices and perceptions and understanding of the campaign and the information it communicated.

A communication campaign was designed to convey the water footprint of food entrées available at a university dining hall. This campaign was tested during a three-week field experiment in which students at the dining hall were exposed to information about the sustainability of their food. To measure behavior and attitude change, sales and production data were collected before, during and after the campaign, and pre- and post-test surveys were administered. To better understand perceptions, the authors conducted in-depth interviews with undergraduate students who frequented the dining hall.

Consumption patterns did not change significantly as a result of the campaign, and students’ attitude scores actually became slightly less positive toward choosing low water footprint foods. Interview data helped explain these results by showing that the ability and desire of students to choose sustainable food were overwhelmed by convenience and time pressures; other food attributes often outweighed sustainability; limited food source information could not verify the benefits of sustainable food; and the science of water footprints was disconnected from students’ subjective concepts of sustainability.

This paper empirically examines how students understand and interpret an environmental change campaign focused on sustainable food. It addresses an important gap in the literature by augmenting experimental and survey results with in-depth interview data, which help explain the often ineffective outcomes of behavior change campaigns. The research was conducted in the novel setting of a university dining hall.

This paper examines the exercise of Black employee voice in South Africa over the past 53 years. Black workers constitute almost 4 out of every 5 workers in the country and experienced racial oppression from the time of colonisation up to the end of apartheid in 1994. They are still congregated around the lower skilled occupations with low incomes and high unemployment levels.

The paper draws on the theory of voice, exit and loyalty of Albert Hirschman, but extends voice to include sabotage as this encapsulates the nature of employee voice from about 2007 onwards. It reflects a culture of insurgence that entered employment relations from about that time onwards, but was lurking below the surface well before then.

The exercise of employee voice has gone through five phases from 1963 to mid-2016 starting with a silent phase for the first ten years when it was hardly heard at all. However, as a Black trade union movement emerged after extensive strikes in Durban in 1973, employee voice grew stronger and stronger until it reached an insurgent phase.

The phases employee voice went through were heavily influenced by the socio-political situation in the country. The reason for the emergence of an insurgent phase was due to the failure of the ruling African National Congress government to deliver services and to alleviate the plight of the poor in South Africa, most of whom are Black. The failure was due to neo-patrimonialism and corruption practised by the ruling elite and politically connected. Protests by local communities escalated and became increasingly violent. This spilled over into the workplace. As a result many strikes turned violent and destructive, demonstrating voice exercised as sabotage and reflecting a culture of insurgence.

This chapter analyses the evolution of strategic corporate social responsibility (CSR). Despite extensive research on the strategic aspects of CSR, the absence of a well-defined theoretical concept has hindered the development of the field. The authors build on the four mechanisms that conceptually distinguish strategic CSR from CSR in general: enhancing firm reputation, increasing stakeholder reciprocation, mitigating firm risk, and strengthening innovation capacity. By using bibliometric methods, we analyze the main topics, references, and sources of papers, found in the Web of Science Core Collection database. The analysis of the strategic CSR field discusses main topics through three periods (1991–2009, 2010–2014, and 2015–2019). The findings help identify the mapping of conceptual space of the strategic CSR field and suggest grounds for continuing the debates on how to advance the micro-level perspectives on CSR.

Field theory is waxing in the sociology of science, and Pierre Bourdieu’s work is especially influential. His characterization of field structure and dynamics has been especially valuable in drawing attention to hierarchical and center-periphery relations in science and technology, and to the stability and reproduction of science and technology practices. What field theory does less well, however, is to capture the existence of multiple (including marginal) logics around a given sociotechnical object. Nor does it capture the dynamics of a specific logic of neoliberal capitalism in the US: the cultural and economic value of entrepreneurship that emphasizes the continual reconfiguration of social relations, which has its roots in a longer US history of progress-through-reinvention, and is abetted by new technologies designed to continually “update” and remix. Much better at capturing these qualities, we argue, is an institutionalist theory in which dynamism, not stasis, is foregrounded, and there is room for multiple, contradictory, and non-cognitive logics to co-exist. Using the expansion of “alternative nutrition” in the US, we show that its formation took place via the conjunction of parallel streams of social action that encompassed diverse logics and encouraged creativity and hybridity. More generally, variability in field stability and qualities, not static fields, deserve analytic attention.

This chapter examines the association between corporate governance and environmental performance. The purpose of governance mechanisms is to build trust by ensuring that corporate responsibilities, including environmental responsibilities, are met. We obtain corporate governance data from the Investor Responsibility Research Center, Inc’s (IRRC’s) governance and director database and additional corporate governance and environmental performance data from Kinder, Lydenberg, and Domini’s (KLD’s) database. Our analyses document a significant positive association between corporate governance and environmental performance. Moreover, we find that corporate governance is positively related to environmental strengths, and negatively related to environmental concerns. Our findings contribute to and extend our understanding of the relationship between governance and performance and have important implications for policy makers, managers, investors, and others.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between fiscal federalism and accountability in Nigeria. Corruption is a global plague and is endemic in nature. Several policies have been adopted by the Nigerian Government to institutionalize accountability and combat the scourge of corruption that have hindered socio-economic progress but to no avail.

Thus, this study examined fiscal federalism and accountability issues in Nigeria using secondary data and used the auto-regressive distributed lag econometric technique to analyse the data.

The results from this study reveal that fiscal federalism fails to mitigate corruption in the long run in Nigeria because of poor bureaucratic quality (BQ) and ineffective law and order (LOR).

Fiscal decentralization must be accompanied by legislations that will strengthen BQ of fiscal institutions at subnational levels and promote effective LOR.

This study recommends that for fiscal federalism to mitigate corruption in the long run, government must adopt appropriate policies to improve BQ and further strengthen LOR in Nigeria. The finding also suggests that to promote public sector accountability in Nigeria, government should ensure the simultaneous decentralization of expenditure and revenue to lower tiers of government. This study provides detailed empirical evidence that fiscal decentralization without accountability will accentuate public sector corruption, and in the long run, weaken local economic development initiative to boost growth and development.