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The purpose of this paper is to examine the legitimacy of the Equator Principles as a form of private governance of the investment banking industry.

The project finance industry is first described, followed by a consideration of the theories of private governance and legitimacy. The governance of project finance by the Equator Principles is then examined against the backdrop of private governance and legitimacy theory. Cases regarding project finance and the Equator Principles are discussed.

The moral legitimacy of the governance of the Equator Principles is highly questionable, a serious issue for private governance schemes. There are large gaps in the governance structure, and the processes and content of much of the Principles are left to each bank, with little mandated transparency or accountability, particularly at the level of individual deals.

The Equator Principles have legitimacy problems arising from their governance structure. These issues are examined at some length, and specific suggestions are offered for repairing certain of the flaws in the system.

Private governance is increasingly important in international arenas, attempting to enforce standards that individual governments often leave to the private sector. This paper examines the legitimacy and governance issues in one system, and makes recommendations to increase the value and structure of the Equator Principles.

The study aims to examine the underexplored agenda in organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) through the collectivistic 50-and-older customers' lens when encountering medical-care services by applying stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) theory.

The authors propose an integrative causal model derived from employees OCBs perceived by the collectivistic 50-and-older outpatients in Korean medical-care organizations and test the causal relationships using structural equation modeling (SEM).

The three dimensions of OCBs are external stimuli to the synergistic relationship of both cognitive and affective organisms for enhancing the organization's external outcomes. The customers' organismic processes mediate the relationships between OCBs and the resultant outcomes. Customer satisfaction plays a pivotal role in determining customers' future behavior when converting the business relationship to friendship.

The proposed integrated model provides an overall mechanism of the collectivistic customer decision process in the medical-care service setting. The integrated model helps to understand better how customers proceed mental and emotional states with the encountered services and how frontline employees offer extra-roles beyond in-roles to their customers in touching points to maintain superior organizational performance.

The authors respond to the underexplored agenda in the OCB research discipline. The study is one of the few studies to examine the effect of OCBs from collectivistic customers' perspectives and apply a consumer behavior theory to explain a service organizational performance in an integrative causal model.

The paper is the story of the marginalization of the concept of networks of dyadic exchanges or patronage and clientage by Brazilian intellectuals and Brazilianist academics. I contend that though it is a pervasive pattern in the culture of the nation, Brazilian intellectuals wrote about patronage/clientage as an aspect of politics that is responsible for the country's backwardness and underdevelopment. Anthropologists, for the most part, judged it to be exploitative of the people involved and believed that it should be eliminated. The Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores or PT), as it implemented a highly commended conditional cash transfer program to help the poor, attempted to replace it with an alternative way they believed electoral politics ought to be conducted. I suggest that the pattern continues to be more than exchanges between political office seekers and voters in Brazil as it transcends the political, economic, and religious categories of modernity and may provide the most needy with what the labor market does not.

The chapters in this volume focus on how university partnerships for pre-service and teacher development apply novel ideas to improve teacher quality in global communities. The purpose of these programs is to improve education systems for all participants. Case studies in this volume present a broad and in-depth review of partnerships that apply novel ideas to transform organizations. This chapter provides an overview to this volume by discussing important elements of teacher quality by defining teacher quality characteristics, shared collaboration, and providing ideas for professional development agendas.

Microcredit schemes fashioned after the Grameen Bank model are widely acclaimed for their potential for empowering the poor through access to credit based on social collateral. However, women market vendors in Ibadan refer to microcredit loans as owo komulelanta, a term which translates as “resting the breasts on a hot kerosene lantern,” a plain critique of the stringent conditions of loan repayment. This paper presents the lived experience of borrowers based upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2019. It reflects on the Nigerian state's neoliberal policies of microfinance and the experience of women borrowers. The paper argues that social–emotional vulnerability of women borrowers is exacerbated by the acceptance of a loan due to the rigid system of repayment and harassment from providers.

Wife battering has important impacts on the health of battered women, both in the short and long term. This form of gendered violence has been a significant problem in Vietnam. Recent economic, social, and cultural changes occurring in Vietnam, with a transformation toward a socialist-oriented market economy through the state's doi moi political program, have influenced multiple aspects of wife battering. These include perspectives of wife battering, battered women's access to health care, conceptualizations of the household, and the emergence of new international health programs for battered women. Women's health problems derived from wife battering must be understood as processes that are informed by cultural, political, and economic change, on both a societal level and in the lives of individual women experiencing this form of gendered violence.

We examine what makes urban ethnography unique as a sociological subfield and how to convey this method to aspiring urban ethnographers. As a qualitative research approach, methodological sensibilities about observing, sampling, and data analysis cross boundaries and transcend the urban setting. We suggest a short observational exercise of checking out in a grocery store to stimulate the ethnographic imagination. Next, we turn to three ways to cultivate an ethnographic eye toward the urban: walking the city, paying attention to interactions and institutions, and examining communities and networks. We end with an appeal to engaging with a community of inquiry.

This study aims to examine the relationship and effect of integrated reporting (IR) quality on sustainability performance and explore the relationships and effects of corporate governance mechanisms on IR quality and sustainability performance.

Partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) was used in a longitudinal study by following the steps in Roemer’s Evolutionary Model on a sample of listed companies on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) in South Africa for a period from 2011 to 2016.

This study finds board effectiveness and external audit quality to be important determinants of IR quality. It also observes a strong effect of the IR quality on sustainability performance.

This study contributes by using and analysing a longitudinal data set from JSE, currently the only capital market globally requiring the mandatory IR application since 2010.

Long established and revisionist approaches to European state formation are put to one side in this article and a turn to the imperial domains of early modern states is made. The rise of Atlantic Studies as a new current of history has drawn attention to transatlantic patterns of colonialism. However, historical sociologists and comparativists have yet to grapple with the conclusions of this field of research. This article points to a possible line of argument that could draw historical sociology and Atlantic Studies together. It takes up the argument that early modern polities broke new ground in the formation of territorial institutions when they turned to transcontinental state building. From their inception, the projects of empire produced conflict-driven institutions. Comparative examination of the Spanish, British, Dutch, French and Portuguese empires reveals that, despite the authority accorded to overarching institutions of imperial government, domestic and colonial patterns of institutional formation diverged considerably. The article explores how developments in European territories took one course in each case, while colonial trajectories in the Americas took others and thereby generated distinct kinds of conflict.