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Credit unions are financial co‐operatives. They provide personal financial services to their members. In Australia they are very small institutions compared to the national banking and financing companies. Credit unions have formed state organisations to pursue common aims. The national peak body is the Australian Federation of Credit Unions Ltd (AFCUL). The structure, strategy for development and growth, and management of the credit union system is discussed.

This chapter offers an anthropological commentary on the work of the Academy of Social Sciences’ Research Ethics Group and the process through which five generic ethical principles for social science research was created. I take an anthropological approach to the subject and, following the structure of Macdonald’s essay Making Research Ethics (2010), I position myself in relation to the process. I discuss various features of the REGs work including the enduring influence of medicine and biomedical research ethics on the ethics and ethics governance of social science research; the absence of philosophers and applied ethicists and their incompatibility with the kind of endeavour pursued by the Research Ethics group; and the antipathy many felt towards the creation of a common code resulting in a preference for generic principles. This chapter offers insight into the work of the Research Ethics Group and the creation of the five ethical principles for social science research, subsequently adopted by the Academy of Social Sciences.

Times are indeed a‐changing. Once, the night‐owl, roistering the hours of darkness away, could claim that he “came home with the milk!”, but not any more.

The British countryman is a well‐known figure; his rugged, obstinate nature, unyielding and tough; his part in the development of the nation, its history, not confined to the valley meadows and pastures and uplands, but nobly played in battles and campaigns of long ago. His “better half”—a term as true of yeoman stock as of any other—is less well known. She is as important a part of country life as her spouse; in some fields, her contribution has been even greater. He may grow the food, but she is the provider of meals, dishes, specialties, the innovating genius to whom most if not all British food products, mostly with regional names and now well‐placed in the advertising armentarium of massive food manufacturers, are due. A few of them are centuries old. Nor does she lack the business acumen of her man; hens, ducks, geese, their eggs, cut flowers, the produce of the kitchen garden, she may do a brisk trade in these at the gate or back door. The recent astronomical price of potatoes brought her a handsome bonus. If the basic needs of the French national dietary are due to the genius of the chef de cuisine, much of the British diet is due to that of the countrywoman.

Statements by Lord Denning, M.R., vividly describing the impact of European Community Legislation are increasingly being used by lawyers and others to express their concern for its effect not only on our legal system but on other sectors of our society, changes which all must accept and to which they must adapt. A popular saying of the noble Lord is “The Treaty is like an incoming tide. It flows into the estuaries and up the rivers. It cannot be held back”. The impact has more recently become impressive in food law but probably less so than in commerce or industry, with scarcely any sector left unmolested. Most of the EEC Directives have been implemented by regulations made under the appropriate sections of the Food and Drugs Act, 1955 and the 1956 Act for Scotland, but regulations proposed for Materials and Articles in Contact with Food (reviewed elsewhere in this issue) will be implemented by use of Section 2 (2) of the European Communities Act, 1972, which because it applies to the whole of the United Kingdom, will not require separate regulations for England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. This is the first time that a food regulation has been made under this statute. S.2 (2) authorises any designated Minister or Department to make regulations as well as Her Majesty Orders in Council for implementing any Community obligation, enabling any right by virtue of the Treaties (of Rome) to be excercised. The authority extends to all forms of subordinate legislation—orders, rules, regulations or other instruments and cannot fail to be of considerable importance in all fields including food law.

The emergence of social media as a corporate disclosure channel has caused significant changes in the production and dissemination of corporate information. This review identifies important themes in recent research on the impact of social media on the corporate information environment and provides suggestions for further explorations of this new but fast-growing area of research. Specifically, we first review the evolution of Internet-based corporate disclosure and related regulations, and then focus on three recent streams of research: 1) companies’ use of social media; 2) information produced by non-corporate users and its impact on capital markets; and 3) the credibility of corporate information on social media platforms.

A policy of surveillance which interferes with the fundamental right to a private life requires credible justification and a supportive evidence base. The authority for such interference should be clearly detailed in law, overseen by a transparent process and not left to the vagaries of administrative discretion. If a state surveils those it governs and claims the interference to be in the public interest, then the evidence base on which that claim stands and the operative conception of public interest should be subject to critical examination. Unfortunately, there is an inconsistency in the regulatory burden associated with access to confidential patient information for non-health-related surveillance purposes and access for health-related surveillance or research purposes. This inconsistency represents a systemic weakness to inform or challenge an evidence-based policy of non-health-related surveillance. This inconsistency is unjustified and undermines the qualities recognised to be necessary to maintain a trustworthy confidential public health service. Taking the withdrawn Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between NHS Digital and the Home Office as a worked example, this chapter demonstrates how the capacity of the law to constrain the arbitrary or unwarranted exercise of power through judicial review is not sufficient to level the playing field. The authors recommend ‘levelling up’ in procedural oversight, and adopting independent mechanisms equivalent to those adopted for establishing the operative conceptions of public interest in the context of health research to non-health-related surveillance purposes.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the value of university social responsibility (USR) by investigating its impact on student–university identification and student loyalty. It also examines the mediating effect of student–university identification and the moderating effect of the perceived importance of USR. A comparative study is also conducted between students from two diverse cultural backgrounds.

An online questionnaire was administered to students of universities in two different emerging markets economies (Lebanon and Colombia). The collected data were tested by applying descriptive techniques, cluster analysis and partial least square structural equation modeling with multi-group analysis using SmartPLS3.0 software.

The findings revealed that USR affects student loyalty both directly and indirectly through student–university identification.

Assessing the model through a more varied sample population from different cultural backgrounds would entail more universal results and the ability to generalize the causality relationship between USR and student identification and loyalty.

This study is a valuable addition to the scarce literature on USR and its interplay with student–university identification. It presents USR as a vital marketing tool to achieve student identification and loyalty, being key factors that impact student enrollment and retention. It also translates into a competitive advantage for higher education institutions to overcome the fierce competition in the educational market. Additionally, this research can be considered a laboratory for theory testing and theory building due to its unique context and original primary data.

It is important to understand how recent regulation allowing small businesses to issue equity through crowdfunding can impact investors' decision-making. One unique feature of crowdfunding presented to investors is an issuer's fundraising goal (i.e., minimum target) and how much money has currently been pledged toward that goal by other investors. However, it is unknown whether investors are sensitive to the level at which the minimum target is set, which can influence the perception of the level of support an investment has received from other investors. While holding the amount of capital pledged to an issuer constant, we conduct an experiment to examine how the minimum level of an issuer's fundraising goal impacts the likelihood of investment by investors. We predict that lower minimum goals will facilitate a perception that an issuer has strong support from other investors and will lead to a change in how investors perceive that issuer. We find that, regardless of the financial strength of the issuer, lower minimum fundraising goals lead to greater investment likelihood compared to higher minimum fundraising goals. We also find that issuers with weak financial strength tend to benefit from this effect more than stronger firms. Finally, this effect is mediated by investors' perceptions of the support of other investors in the company. The results of our study have both practical and theoretical contributions.

The critical issue in the debate over the pollution haven hypothesis (PHH) is whether the location choice of international investment is influenced by the stringency of environmental regulation. So far previous empirical studies focused on the outward investment from developed countries, while little work has been done on the issue from developing countries. To fill the gap, this paper selects data from China enterprises, using a Logit estimation to determine whether there is a pollution haven effect in the location choice of developing countries’ outward investment. Our results show that Chinese enterprises are attracted by countries with lax environmental regulations; resource-intensive enterprises from China are more sensitive to the stringency of regulation than are technology-intensive enterprises. We contribute to the literature in two ways. First, we provide new evidence in support of the PHH by analyzing investment from developing countries. Further, we show that differences exist in the FDI behavior between resource-intensive and technology-intensive enterprises. Based on this finding, we explain why some previous studies have not found robust evidence of the PHH.