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International humanitarian law (IHL) is struggling to catch up with military technological development. The international community is increasingly alarmed at the prospect of lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) operating without a human interface. The international community’s concern with autonomous enabling technology in weapon systems is whether weapon systems with the ability to identify, select, and attack military targets with little to no human control can comply with existing IHL rules and be morally and ethically acceptable.

This chapter explores an expanded concept of social licence to operate (SLO) to regulate the development of LAWS. The authors believe that it is more efficacious to take a preventative and precautious approach by holding the developers accountable to IHL during the gestation period instead of following a post facto approach. The authors argue that the process involved in issuing or revoking an SLO for the developers of LAWS is already beginning to emerge in IHL. The SLO is only effective during the developmental cycle and would continue as soft law form in regulating the use of LAWS until a more concrete, treaty-based response emerges. In this sense, the SLO can be seen as a catalyst towards a concerted international response to regulate the development, deployment, and use of LAWS.

This article seeks to identify the type of producers most likely to deviate from category-based expectations in the pursuit of profit. I describe circumstances under which a category’s core members are, paradoxically, more likely (than its peripheral members) to deviate. This phenomenon reflects market participants’ default expectations about core members and the resulting bias in information-search processes. I offer empirical evidence of Champagne producers getting involved in “buyer’s own brands” (BOB), a behavior that is not directly observed yet deviates considerably from grape suppliers’ category-based expectations. The econometric analysis leverages an exogenous shock that increased the scrutiny of BOB by grape suppliers. I find that before the shock, BOB products were more likely to be supplied by “traditional” houses – which grape suppliers view as core industry members and hence as being above suspicion in that regard. I discuss the implications of these results for prior work in this area as well as the article’s contribution to extant literature.

This paper seeks to understand how a new elite, known as the cork aristocracy, emerged in the Bordeaux wine field, France, between 1850 and 1929 as wine merchants replaced aristocrats. Classic class and status perspectives, and their distinctive social closure dynamics, are mobilized to illuminate the individual and organizational transformations that affected elite wineries grouped in an emerging classification of the Bordeaux best wines. We build on a wealth of archives and historical ethnography techniques to surface complex status and organizational dynamics that reveal how financiers and industrialists intermediated this transition and how organizations are deeply interwoven into social change.

Drawing on sociolinguistics, this chapter proposes an encoding–decoding perspective on evaluation, conceptualizing codes as interpretive schemas that are encoded by firms and decoded by audiences. A key element in this process is code complexity, denoting combinations of interdependent elements. We demonstrate that the evaluation of code complexity depends on the type of audience (professionals and laypersons) and the type of complexity (technological and aesthetic). We analyze the attribution of awards by professionals and the public in luxury watchmaking, featuring three mechanisms: the social embeddedness of audiences, their motivation for evaluation and supply-and-demand matching. The results attest to significant differences in the evaluation of technological and aesthetic code complexity by professionals and laypersons. There is a premium attributed to aesthetic code complexity by professionals and a premium attributed to technological complexity by laypersons. Finding the right type and level of code complexity to pursue in their offerings is a key strategic challenge for producers.

The aim of this chapter is to take stock of the aspect of the social concertation in the framework of policies of diversity management. It rests in particular on the work of a commission created by the AFMD (French Association of Diversity Managers), in partnership with ORSE (a French Societal Observatory). The commission has involved several larges French companies and organised meetings between the representatives of the different employers’ and workers’ organisations. Another source is the numerous actions led by the Labour Unions in Belgium in the framework of the Consortium Diversité Wallonie, which exists since 2007. This study tries to remind some objectives of social concertation in regards to policies of diversity management, to take stock of the legal constraints on concertation in regards to particular targets, to show the multiple conceptions of this notion of diversity management among social partners, to give an overview of the content of the agreements, and to present the steps of a social concertation sensible to diversity.

Most years, several AIB members are elected as AIB Fellows on account of their excellent international business scholarship, and/or past service as AIB President or Executive Secretary. The Fellows are in charge of electing Eminent Scholars as well as the International Executive and International Educator (formerly, Dean) of the Year, who often provide the focus for Plenary Sessions at AIB Conferences. Their history since 1975 covers over half of the span of the AIB and reflects many issues that dominated that period in terms of research themes, progresses and problems, the internationalization of business education and the role of international business in society and around the globe. Like other organizations, the Fellows Group had their ups and downs, successes and failures – and some fun too!

This chapter analyses the development of oleotourism through the use of local resources in a democratised decision-making process. It explains that the production of olive oil is making a novel contribution to the tourism industry. The authors suggest that oleotourism is also offering opportunities for stakeholder engagement. Therefore, the authors identify key elements that serve as drivers for the development of oleotourism in Jaén. They put forward a framework that can lead to a democratised decision-making process that is intended to support the stakeholders of oleotourism.

Following the ‘Sarkozy’ era (2007–2012), France has engaged in ‘zero-tolerance’ policies, which have brought an increasing number of people into the criminal justice system (CJS). In an already extremely impoverished CJS, these policies have led to serious financial problems and have made an already existing prison overcrowding problem worse. Consequently, the CJS has gradually opted for a McDonald (Ritzer, 2019; Robinson, 2019) type of offender processing, whether in prosecutor-led procedures (representing roughly half of all penal procedures: Ministry of Justice, 2019) or in the sentencing phase (Danet, 2013). A similar trend has been found in probation and in prisoner release (in French: ‘sentences’ management).

The prison and probation services, which merged in 1999, have since then been in a position to benefit from the 1958 French Republic Constitution, which places the executive in a dominant position and notably allows it to draft the bills presented to a rather passive legislative power (Rousseau, 2007) and even to enjoy its own set of normative powers (‘autonomous decrees’ – Hamon & Troper, 2019). By way of law reforming (2009, 2014, and 2019 laws), the prison and probation services have thus embraced the McDonaldisation ethos. Their main obsession has been to early release as many prisoners as possible in order to free space and to accommodate more sentenced people. To do so, the prison services have created a series of so-called ‘simplified’ early release procedures, where prisoners are neither prepared for nor supported through release, where they are deprived of agency and where due process and attorney advice are removed. Behind a pretend rehabilitative discourse, the executive is only interested in efficiently flushing people out of prison; not about re-entry efficacy. As Ritzer (2019) points out, McDonaldisation often leads to counter-productive or absurd consequences. In the case of early release, the stubborn reality is that one cannot bypass actually doing the rehabilitative and re-entry work. I shall additionally argue that not everything truly qualifies as an early release measure (Ostermann, 2013). Only measures which respect prisoners’ agency prepare them for their release, which support them once they are in the community, which address their socio-psychological and criminogenic needs, and which are pronounced in the context of due process and defence rights truly qualify as such. As it is, French ‘simplified’ release procedures amount to McRe-entry and mass nothingness.