The chapter examines the link between upper echelons gender composition and firm sustainability performance. Gender composition is considered as the level of women on TMTs and boards. Specifically, it is considered whether presence of three or more women on company boards as well as TMTs influence sustainability performance. Thereby, the study incorporates new theoretical developments by conceptualizing gender level using critical mass concept. The sample also consists of top performing 100 firms in Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE) known as BIST 100. A dataset containing information of BIST 100 companies’ TMT members, board of directors, CEOs, as well as firm size, profitability, sustainability performance, and industry among others were constructed by using the data provided in PDP (Public Disclosure Platform). The findings of the study indicate that critical mass of women on board of directors is important for sustainability performance. In line with token theory and critical mass proposition, in the present sample, having three or more women directors on boards of directors improves the sustainability performance of companies.

Offshoring has become a popular practice for multinational corporations (MNCs), with emerging markets being regarded as attractive locations. Although offshore outsourcing has economic benefits, it also involves several ethical issues, such as poor working conditions, child labour and environmental pollution. To identify implications for how to establish ethical practices in MNCs’ offshoring operations, we discuss theoretical perspectives (i.e., institutional, instrumental and normative) on MNCs’ motivations for being socially and environmentally responsible. Based on a review of these perspectives, this chapter provides practical guidelines for both MNCs and policymakers, including (1) re-designing governance, (2) establishing industry-level action and (3) developing institutional capacity. Developing both public (e.g., government regulation) and private (e.g., corporate code of conduct) governance mechanisms is important. Also, MNCs should take collective action at the industry level. Lastly, MNCs should provide resources and capacity to outsourcing companies and local communities to contribute to alleviating ethical concerns in emerging markets.

This is a book about working in a particular place, a place ‘built around enjoyment and entertainment’2 as well as exploitation and excess. It is about how that place ‘works’ to shape the experiences and identities of those based there. Occupying less than a square mile, London’s Soho is something of a simultaneously global and local space. With its golden squares, red lights, black markets, pink neon, blue films and, most recently, rainbow flags, Soho has, throughout its history, been a colourful place in which to live, work and consume. Described rather affectionately by cultural historian Judith Walkowitz as a ‘land of lost causes’,3 and by author Nigel Richardson, who experienced Soho bohemianism in the 1950s first-hand, as both ‘bad and beautiful’, it is a place of ‘backstreet industry and below-stairs debauchery’, where those who want to stand out can and those who want to blend in can become invisible.

As a consequence of the meanings attached to the setting and sector, and to the landscaping of the spaces within and around Soho’s sex shops, a high level of discretion as well as presumed intimacy characterizes the sales-service relationship. As discussed in Chapter 3, encounters with customers are neither a direct sexual exchange nor a simple sexual aestheticization of the service interaction. Sitting somewhere between the two extremes of sex work and sexualized labour, retail sales work in a Soho sex shop is a kind of abject labour, in an abject work place. As will be discussed here, it is experienced and perceived as both compelling and unsettling by those who perform it.

Given the accelerating pace of information available in today’s world, our ability to be able to reflect critically on this information is more important today than ever before; but with the growth of social media and its unfortunate consequences – “fake news,” “post-truth,” and “truth decay” – critical reflection has become harder and harder to do. This apparent paradox, why “facts” and “evidence” seem to have so little effect on rational behavior, is explored, along with the research evidence on the self-reinforcing nature of confirmation bias and its sequelae, belief persistence, polarization, and tribalism.

The chapter considers the role of Islamic finance in promoting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in developing countries. The SDGs require unprecedented mobilization of funds to support their implementation. Given the social and moral ethos and emphasis on prohibition of riba (interest) and asset-backed financing, Islamic finance offers an effective non-traditional means of financing for sustainable development activities and projects in developing countries. This chapter demonstrates that the ideology of Islamic finance, its attributes, principles, products, instruments and institutions all tend to be well-suited to boosting the SDGs. It also shows that Islamic finance has great potential in supporting developing countries’ efforts to finance the SDGs agenda. Divided into seven sections, the chapter outlines sustainable development from an Islamic perspective, and the principles of Islamic finance, before assessing the role of Islamic financial institutions, sukuk (Islamic bonds), and Islamic social finance (zakat and waqf) in promoting the SDGs.

The chapter summarizes the contributions to the book. It identifies suggestions on how to design and implement more effective CSR strategies and models for the institutional contexts of the developing and emerging countries. While it reiterates the importance of stakeholder engagement in sustainable development and the usefulness of CSR as a public governance and inclusive and sustainable development tool in the developing and emerging economies, the chapter highlights some gaps and challenges for future research and resolution.

Michael, one of the many participants in the study on which this book is based, described how, on a rainy Monday morning, he had spent time explaining the relative merits of a small selection of soft-porn DVDs to a recently widowed elderly man who had never been in a sex shop before but who was in need of some ‘company’; he had been asked to model a pair of leather chaps for a gay couple looking for party wear (finding out only some way into his modelling session that the party they had planned was for three, if Michael was interested?); and he had been invited to try on the newly delivered store-branded T-shirts designed to convey the sexual eclecticism and corporate identity of the store in which he worked on Soho’s Old Compton Street, known as the United Kingdom’s ‘gay capital’.1 And a ‘local’ (the term used to describe regular customers rather than people who necessarily live or work in Soho) had asked Michael if he would let him have the socks he was wearing, as the customer said he wanted to smell them while he masturbated. For reasons unknown to me at the time, and seemingly to Michael, this was not an uncommon request.