The official whistleblowing channels are the first stop for most employees who speak out about wrongdoing. The channels often work. But sometimes, when a whistleblowing disclosure highlights serious and system-level wrongdoing, official channels can prove useless for preventing it. Worse, these channels can be actively used against a whistleblower who has been targeted for retaliation. The case of a whistleblower at a large electricity company shows how a manager speaking up on behalf of his staff can end up as a public whistleblower targeted for attack. Uniquely, this chapter also takes the perspective of the senior leaders in the organization who are doing the targeting. Large and complex organizations by their very nature give rise to anxiety, defensiveness and a need to scapegoat someone when things go wrong. When official channels fail, public whistleblowers need to look elsewhere to defend themselves and disclose wrongdoing.

While there have always been high levels of philanthropic giving in the Global South, the urgency and unexpectedness of COVID-19 transformed the parameters within which philanthropy operates. Reimagining Philanthropy in the Global South examines how newer models of philanthropy are tackling development challenges, including poverty, inequality, and access to health care and education, and questions how organisations are coping with structural changes in donor-driven philanthropy; how changes in traditional grant-making are impacting the imperatives of recipient organisations; and how indigenous philanthropy is making a difference. The chapters provide frank assessments of the priorities, challenges, and opportunities of emerging market philanthropy, and the lessons learned from the pandemic. The authors highlight the deeper issues at play, as well as offering ideas and positive examples of how diverse stakeholders are coming together to solve social challenges in creative and practical ways. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This chapter introduces the concept of CPR and gives a high-level overview of the chapters to follow. It also defines key terms, presents some background statistics on political spending over time, and offers an initial discussion of the extent to which business has captured the political process.

Globalisation has placed democratic institutions under severe pressure as economic actors seek to take advantage of the disjuncture between national political governance and transnational economic activity. This chapter provides an introduction and overview as to the key themes to be addressed in the book. In particular, we highlight the debate between different approaches to democratic representation and associational democracy which is the theoretical framing for the remainder of the book: representation as claim versus representation as structure.

This chapter introduces a theory of Green Market Transformation, where emergent energy and environmental technologies gain widespread adoption in the marketplace. It articulatea a number of mechanisms that reduce transaction costs and disseminate information across the marketplace, such as building supply chains and improving demand for nascent technologies. Further, it reviews the global, European, and US uptake of ecolabeled buildings, providing evidence of the impact of the Green Building Movement. By providing examples of prominent ecolabeled buildings, it explores the motivations for ecolabel adoption and argues that firms and organizations compete to build ever-greener buildings. This competitive dynamic is evident across sports stadiums, where the authors detail a series of incremental improvements to stadiums over time.

This chapter introduces the reader to the volume. It presents our conviction that there is a bias toward pro-market, pro-capitalist (which we call “neoliberal”) solutions in how people solve problems nowadays, and how people learn to solve problems in universities. We explain what these default neoliberal biases are, and why they are often harmful. We also explain how the case chapters in this book comparatively lay out a series of alternatives to these neoliberal ways of solving problems.

Climate activists across generations and borders demonstrate in the streets, while people also take climate actions via everyday professional efforts at work. In this dispersal of climate actions, the pursuit of personal politics is merging with civic, state and corporate commitment to the point where we are witnessing a rebirth of togetherness and alternative ways of collective organising, from employee activism, activist entrepreneurship, to insider activism, shareholder activism and prosumer activism. By empirically investigating this diffuse configuration of the environmental movement with focus on renewable energy technology, the commercial footing of climate activism is uncovered. The book ethnographically illustrates how activism goes into business, and how business goes into activism, to further trace how an ‘epistemic community’ emerges through co-creation of lay knowledge, not only about renewables, but political action itself. No longer tied to a specific geographical spot, organisation, group or even shared political identity, many politicians and business leaders applaud this affluent climate ‘action’, in their efforts to reach beyond mere climate ‘adaptation’ and speed up the energy transition. Conclusively, climate activism is no longer a civic phenomenon defined by struggles, pursued by the activist as we knew it, but testament of feral proximity and horizontal organising.

Human-induced climate disruption is the most pressing issue facing our species, yet the ineffectiveness of the political response becomes ever more apparent in the face of the escalating crisis. Even as scientific projections re-emphasise the magnitude of the problem, the world’s addiction to economic growth and the fossil energy that fuels it continues to expand – and, as a result, so do carbon emissions.

Chapter 1 immerses the reader into the Za'atari refugee camp. Situated in Jordan just seven and a half miles south of the Syrian border, the camp – a two-square-mile rectangle divided into twelve districts – is nestled in the very heart of the Middle East. Here, in the desert heat, a community was born in the swell of crisis. The reader is immediately introduced to the book's three featured Syrian women entrepreneurs – Yasmina, Asma, and Malak – in their elements. Yasmina, a salon and wedding dress shop owner, is relaxing in the salon with her family as her client celebrates a beautiful wedding a couple of districts away. Asma, a social entrepreneur and teacher, is reading a story to a group of children – including three of her own – in her trailer, which she has converted into a magical hideout for the children. Malak, an artist, is putting the finishing touches on a series of drawings for an event at a youth center that is meant to encourage the girls in Za'atari to push against the harmful practice of child marriage.

This introductory chapter outlines the goals of our book and details the importance of the need for business to adapt to nature adversity and natural disasters exacerbated by climate change. the core questions of our book. The core questions addressed by our book are: How do firms adapt to natural disasters exacerbated by climate change? How do businesses adapt to chronic slow-onset nature adversity conditions linked to climate change?

This opening chapter to Community Disaster Recovery: Moving from Vulnerability to Resilience introduces readers to the increasing importance of disasters in the context of climate change. The chapter draws upon examples of various disasters to illustrate the topical importance and to motivate the specific analyses to follow. The discussion articulates the necessity of governments at all scales to cope with preparing for extreme events and provides an overview of what governments go through after a disaster. In particular, whether governments learn lessons in the aftermath of disaster can determine how they choose to rebuild. These decisions can lead to greater resilience for communities, but prior studies have rarely found this observed outcome. This chapter ends by motivating the question that structures the rest of the book – what factors lead a community to learn, make changes, and move towards a more resilient state after it is struck by a disaster?

The introduction identifies the book’s two main contributions – i.e. the explication of the megacorporate concept and of the infinite times ideology – and situates the work with reference to current discussions of Big Tech. In doing so, it is first emphasized that whereas current discussions of Big Tech often adopt a critical, and even a moralizing, tone, the present work strives to comply with an ideal of amoral analysis. The following sections then detail two supplementary contributions that the book makes to the scholarly fields of business and society and organization studies. The first of these domain-specific contributions relates to the book advancing a philosophical perspective, and the second to its demonstrating that corporations can shape social considerations of much broader importance than is commonly recognized. After this, the book’s very simple method of construction, and its three-part structure, are described. The chapter concludes with a brief summary.

A radically new understanding of the ethics of business enterprises, or “corporate responsibility,” in the global context is offered that combines wealth creation in a comprehensive sense with the respect for human rights by strengthening the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. The chapter provides an introduction to this new understanding and an overview of the following chapters. After delineating the global context with globalization, sustainability and financialization, Part One explicates the seven features of wealth creation: the substantive contents of natural, economic, human and social capital; public and private wealth; the productive and distributive dimensions of the process of creating wealth; material and spiritual aspects; sustainability in terms of human capabilities; creating as making something new and better; and self- and other-regarding motivations. Part Two conceives human rights as public goods in wealth creation; it accounts for all 30 internationally recognized human rights based on the UN Framework and Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, defines them as minimal ethical requirements needed in the global and pluralistic context and offers cost-benefit considerations about human rights. Part Three develops the implications of Part One and Two for the conception of “corporate responsibility.”

This chapter develops definitions of the main concepts in this research monograph by drawing on extant literature and distinguishing corporate environmental sustainability as the strategies, actions and practices undertaken by a firm with regard to its interace with the natural environment from related concepts such as corporate philanthropy, impact investing, corporate social responsibility, corporate citizenship and corporate greening. Definitions of patient capital, corporate governance, family firms, family versus non-family control and proactive environmental strrategy (PES) that constitute the core concepts in this monograph are developed.