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The purpose of this paper is to examine a model of corporate and civic communities as it relates to change in rural Atlantic Canada. The aim is to frame questions relevant to what appears to be a situation of changing paradigms.

This paper is largely conceptual. An exploration of Lyson's model of corporate and civic communities, review of selected Atlantic Canada historiography, and preliminary findings of a research consultation offer understanding of the historical and changing paradigmatic terrain of rural communities and agriculture in Atlantic Canada. Selected issues, emerging from the literature as well as from a series of consultations held with farmers, rural non‐profits, policy makers, businesses, agricultural groups and others, are examined in the context of the region's past and the corporate and civic models outlined by Lyson. Atlantic historiography is discussed in view of contemporary challenges, and questions relevant to change in the region are raised and framed.

Increasingly vulnerable to a number of provincially, regionally, nationally and globally formulated challenges, Atlantic Canada's rural communities have been and are being reshaped, as is the agriculture being practiced within them. In the midst of these upheavals, a practice‐policy “dis‐connect” is making it unclear how alternative agricultural and rural community developmental paradigms might be actualized in the region. But some of these challenges are not new.

The research consultation is at the beginning stages, and thus results reported are speculative.

Lessons from the Atlantic past, and Lyson's civic model, may provide guideposts toward a more ecologically‐sound and economically‐viable way for the future of rural communities and agriculture in the region.

This paper raises key questions that take into account the region's rural past and changing paradigms pertaining to agriculture and rural communities.

Drawing upon a systematic literature review in new technology, innovation transfer and diffusion theories, and from interviews with technology leaders in digital transformation programs in the US Oil & Gas (O&G) industry, the authors explore the relationships among O&G industry dynamics, organization's absorptive capacity and resource commitment for new digital technology adoption-implementation process.

The authors employed the empirical survey method to gather the data (a sample size of 172) in the US O&G industry and used structural equation modeling (SEM) to test the measurement model for validity and reliability and the conceptual model for hypothesized structural relationships.

The results provide support for the study’s causal model of adoption and implementation with positive and direct relationships between the initiation and trial stages, between the trial stages and the evaluation of effective outcomes and between the effective outcomes and the effective implementation stages of digital technologies. The results also reveal partial mediating relationships of industry dynamics, absorptive capacity and resource commitment between respective stages.

Based on the current study's findings, managers are recommended to pay attention to the evolving industry dynamics during the initiation stage of new digital technology adoption, to utilize the organization's knowledge-based absorptive capacity during digital technology trial and selection stages and to support the digital technology implementation project when the adoption decision of a particular digital technology has been made.

The empirical research contributes literature on digital technology adoption and implementation by identifying and demonstrating the importance of industry dynamics, absorptive capacity and resource commitment factors as mediating variables at various stages of the adoption-implementation process and empirically validating a process-based causal model of digital technology adoption and a successful implementation project that has been missing in the current body of literature on digital transformation.

Cultural criminologists have long been interested in the politics of crime and deviance, whether that be in relation to youth subculture resistance or the social reaction to transgression evident in the media construction of folk devils and moral panics. While contemporary ‘new’ cultural criminology continues to be focused on the situated experience of deviant ‘edgeworkers’, this chapter argues cultural criminology’s concern with the crime-media nexus provides particularly fertile ground for exploring insights provided by activists, academics, professional journalists and citizen journalists around informal interventions on formal criminal justice processes using social media and digital technologies. Drawing on examples from a burgeoning body of crime-media research, the chapter makes a case for ‘cultural criminology activism’, which, like activist criminology, is consciously disengaged from mainstream criminology’s alignment with the neoliberal-carceral state and its reformist agenda.

Gregory Ashley is a Ph.D. student at the University of Nebraska at Omaha in the area of Industrial/Organizational (I/O) Psychology. Greg holds undergraduate degrees in Psychology and telecommunications, and Masters degrees in Business and Economics. His research has been published in both economic and psychology-related publications. Prior to entering academia, Greg accrued over 20 years of hands-on business experience working in a variety of management positions in the telecommunications industry.

McJobs in the fast‐food sector are a major area of youth employment. This paper explores young people's perceptions of work in this industry.

The paper discusses the results of a survey of students' experiences of McJobs in Australia.

Fast‐food workers were generally dissatisfied with the industrial relations and work organisation aspects of their jobs. Nonetheless, they were generally much more satisfied with the human resource management and social relations aspects of their jobs.

Our research has implications for understanding the human capital development practices adopted by employers in the fast‐food industry and in other sectors, especially those that employ young people. Much of the context for work and employment relations in Australia is comparable with those in most English‐speaking countries. Therefore, our findings have implications for work in similar sectors in other countries, in particular, other English‐speaking countries.

This paper has implications for people who devise recruitment policies and design of jobs. It is a useful reminder that it is no longer appropriate for people to talk in simple terms of satisfaction at work per se; it is vital to differentiate between various aspects and contexts of job satisfaction, or the of the lack of it.

Earlier studies of fast‐food work have tended to be polemical and polarized: either apologias or very critical. This paper adopts a more balanced approach and it puts the findings into context.

Since the mid-1990s most Australian jurisdictions have adopted, either through subordinate legislation or through internal government directives, rules regarding how government agencies should behave when participating in litigation. While these rules met an immediate need associated with the outsourcing of legal work to private law firms, this chapter argues that they are unsuited for enduring use: they lack a proper rationale, they are poorly worded and uncertain in their meaning; it is unclear whether and how courts should enforce them, and they have not been reviewed to take account of the more recent developments in civil procedure.

This study aims to compare the content of the codes of ethics of the top 50 corporations in the UK and Australia.

The code of each of the 50 top companies listed on the London Stock Exchange and the 50 top companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange based on market capitalization was read against an updated version of a previous code content classification system.

This research provides valuable insights into the similarities and differences that exist between the expected ethical standards in corporations based in two historically linked and culturally related countries: corporate approaches that are worthy of comment.

This paper does provide a sound basis for further investigation and cross-country comparisons of corporate codes of ethics.

The instrument used for classifying code content gives an insight into the top companies operating in the UK and Australia and what they consider important to cover within a code of ethics.

In light of increasing societal expectations of corporate ethical standards, this research study offers improved understanding of/insight into the development of codes of ethics as a means to guide organizational behaviours/conduct.

This study proposes a contemporary instrument for the analysis of codes of ethics that has built upon the work of others over the past 30 years.