This article examines how operational-level grievance mechanisms (OGMs) implemented by transnational mining companies in Africa entrench corporate control over victims’ access to remedy. Although OGMs are central to the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, their deployment in weak governance contexts often transforms them from early-warning tools into the sole avenue for redress. Through a comparative analysis of four different mines that reveal converging mining and business and human rights dynamics unique to Africa, this article considers how OGMs reproduce power asymmetries through opaque procedures, limited consultation, information imbalances, and unpredictable remedies. These dynamics undermine the UNGPs’ effectiveness criteria and reveal structural gaps within Pillar Three’s design. The article argues for alternatives, such as independent grievance mechanisms and additional guidance on implementing the UNGPs that guarantee legal representation, prohibit restrictive waivers, and introduce sector-specific recommendations. Without such changes, OGMs risk legitimising corporate abuses rather than remedying harm.

Multiple job holding (MJH) is linked to mixed experiences, suggesting multiple job holders (MJHers) are not a homogeneous group. Using latent class analysis, in a sample of 507 multiple job holders in New Zealand, we identified multiple job holding types based on situational circumstances, including psychosocial work factors, and examined whether outcomes differed across types. Indicators captured multiple job holding context (choice, financial security, hours, tenure, and motives) and psychosocial work conditions in their main job (COPSOQ III). The four types identified were termed compelled, striver, peripheral, and privileged, with differences in outcomes experienced found across the types. Compelled multiple job holders faced high demands and low resources and reported the poorest health and work outcomes. Strivers had the highest demands but strong resources, combining high strain with high satisfaction. Peripherals reported few symptoms but low engagement. Privileged multiple job holders reported low demands, strong resources, and the most favourable outcomes. This informed typology supports more targeted research, policy and practice.

Malaria imposes societal costs beyond health, including substantial effects on education, yet economic evaluations often overlook these broader impacts. We conducted a cross-sectoral benefit–cost analysis (BCA) of malaria chemoprevention in school-aged children (SAC) across ten high-burden sub-Saharan African countries. Using recent trial data, we estimated impacts on malaria morbidity, mortality, school absenteeism and literacy. The intervention was projected to cost $422 million and generate $5.7 billion in societal net benefits, yielding a benefit–cost ratio (BCR) of 14.3. Country-level BCRs ranged from 3.71 to 39.5, with the highest returns in Nigeria. Results were sensitive to drug choice, discount rate and valuation of education benefits. When using school quality metrics (estimated via learning-adjusted years of schooling (LAYS)), BCRs increased up to 100-fold compared to estimates based on school quantity alone. Probabilistic sensitivity analysis yielded a mean simulated BCR of 11.00 (95 per cent confidence interval (95% CI): 10.89–11.11), with a >95% probability of being cost-beneficial at a BCR threshold of 3. This study advances the evidence base for malaria chemoprevention in SAC, highlighting its dual health and educational benefits. These findings offer policymakers and funders strong evidence to prioritize malaria chemoprevention in SAC as a high-value investment in both health and human capital in malaria-endemic regions.

This article analyzes the privatization of Telecom Italia as part of a broader historical evaluation of public ownership in a high-technology strategic sector. Drawing on archival material from Italian state-owned enterprises as well as national and European institutions, it traces the reorganization of the telecommunications conglomerate in the 1980s and 1990s, the European regulatory framework in which it unfolded, and the company’s post-divestment trajectory, thereby questioning the inevitability of privatization. The evidence shows that, before privatization, Telecom Italia had already become a profitable, technologically advanced, and internationally competitive firm under public ownership. The decision to divest reflected domestic political and fiscal priorities, as the European liberalization of the telecommunications market reshaped the rules while leaving member states a margin of maneuver. By comparing the public and privatized phases of the company’s development, the article contributes to the historical reassessment of state-owned enterprises and challenges the assumption that ownership change was functional to securing efficiency and competitiveness in the late twentieth-century telecommunications industry.

This study examines how managerial competencies shape performance within the Portuguese hairdressing sector, a vital yet under-researched micro–small and medium-sized enterprise context. Grounded in the competing values framework, the research explores how these small structures navigate the persistent tension between internal stability and external flexibility. Our mixed-methods approach combined qualitative insights from industry leaders with a quantitative survey of 361 owner-managers and employees. Results confirm a strong link between competencies and performance, especially in social dimensions. However, profiles lean heavily toward the Human Relations Model, leaving significant gaps in the Rational Goal and Internal Process quadrants. Crucially, a perceptual dissonance emerged, as employees consistently rate managerial competence lower than owner-managers’ self-assessments suggest. By extending the competing values framework theory to fragmented service industries, this research suggests that behavioral complexity is an important factor for operational adaptability. These findings signal an urgent need for hybrid training that bridges the gap between technical craft and strategic management.

This study investigates how remedial voice relates to targets’ workplace interpersonal deviance. Drawing from research on the social sharing of emotional experiences and from goal progress theory, we conceptualize remedial voice as the social sharing about a negative emotional experience that can initiate targets’ rumination. We further posit that an interaction between remedial voice and perceived perpetrator power will be associated with heightened rumination. Furthermore, applying ego depletion theory, we propose that targets’ heightened rumination will be positively associated with their workplace interpersonal deviance. We found remedial voice to be positively related to targets’ rumination. Furthermore, perceived perpetrator power interacted with remedial voice to predict targets’ high rumination, which was associated with targets’ workplace interpersonal deviance. Our findings suggest that remedial voicing is linked to both proximal and distal outcomes for targets, extending research by highlighting its potentially far-reaching consequences. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

This article examines the renewal of Spain's corporate elite between 1920 and 2020 by combining Social Network Analysis with prosopography. Using interlocking directorate data for the two hundred largest Spanish firms, aggregated into three periods (1920–1950, 1960–1980, and 1990–2020), the study identifies the most structurally central directors and reconstructs their social origins, education, and career trajectories. The findings reveal that while the structural core of corporate power remained remarkably stable—between thirty-four and forty individuals per period, less than 1 percent of all directors—its social composition changed substantially. Aristocratic backgrounds and dynastic ties gave way to middle-class origins, public university credentials, and senior civil service careers. Two institutional channels drove this transformation: the state, whose role shifted from direct political overlap to technocratic circulation through public administration; and the public university system, which increasingly replaced inherited status as the basis of elite recruitment. Rather than democratization, renewal took the form of controlled circulation: new actors entered through selective pathways while the underlying power structure remained intact. By adopting an interpersonal perspective over a full century, the article addresses a persistent gap in the literature on interlocking directorates, which has focused mainly on firm-centered networks rather than their most central actors.

How do foreign investors respond to domestic electoral politics? A political investment cycle dynamic predicts investments increase before elections while an uncertainty and delay hypothesis anticipates investment declines in advance of elections. This study adjudicates these competing expectations, arguing that foreign firms locate their investments based, in part, on electoral predictability. We theorize that firms prefer to invest in locations holding clear-winner elections, and avoid close-call elections, where the outcome is uncertain. We test this theory in the context of U.S. congressional elections, arguing that legislators provide access to public resources, policy influence, and coordination across levels of government, and therefore investors benefit from stable representation. Using geolocated data on greenfield foreign direct investment (FDI) announcements in the United States from 2003 to 2017, we find that FDI announcements rise significantly in election years—but only in districts with clear-winner elections. Mediation analysis shows that increased federal appropriations partly explain this pattern, consistent with our argument that electoral predictability enhances firms’ ability to secure political support. These findings reveal a political bias in global capital allocation: politically monopolistic districts attract more investment, while vibrant electoral competition deters it—raising fundamental concerns about the interplay between democracy and money.

We identify a novel pathway that links financial globalization to politics. We emphasize the effect of globalization on the relationship between governments and domestic business owners, who, like all borrowers, are subject to “Global Credit Cycles” originating from the U.S. Downturns in these cycles, stemming from high U.S. interest rates, reduce credit availability, depress asset prices, and broadly worsen the outlook for private sector profits. While politicians have limited power to address the underlying financial conditions, they can adopt business-friendly politics to signal their willingness to compensate firms for the higher borrowing costs driven by higher U.S. interest rates. We support our argument with evidence from party manifestos across 59 countries, covering 1963 to 2017. Our paper documents a new connection between global credit cycles and party positions during an era of largely unrestricted capital mobility.