Turning around accountability

PurposeThe purpose of the paper is to describe and analyse the nature of accountability for human rights, as enacted by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC), in this time of globalization and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Design/methodology/approachThe authors focus on one case of alleged union-busting and unfair dismissal carried out under the cover of the COVID-19 pandemic. Tracing the action of that case, the authors show how the BHRRC provides a digital platform for dialogues of accountability. The authors use a Latourian theoretical perspective to guide the progress of the study’s analysis.FindingsThe authors find that the dialogues of accountability enacted on the BHRRC platform cannot be satisfactorily characterized in terms of an old politics of hegemony, counterhegemony and counter accounts. The authors find that the accountability enacted on the platform operates in three modes: in a political mode to support the formation of issues and publics and the embedding of norms; in an organizational mode to support the (re)organizing business corporations around scripts of respect for human rights; in a moral mode to keep scruples concerning means and ends and the pursuit of better outcomes, open.Originality/valueThe paper is novel, in that it engages with the part that accounting can play in politics conceived in Latourian terms; in its introduction, a notion of modes of accountability on the foundations of Latour’s exploration of modes of existence; in its challenge to the value of critical accounting conceived in terms of hegemony and counterhegemony.

How Vertical Integration Affects Firm Innovation: Quasi-Experimental Evidence

Although it is well established that vertical integration decisions have important consequences for firms, direct evidence on how vertical integration matters to firm innovation has been scarce. This study draws from seminal research on organizing for innovation and recent synthesis of transaction cost and capabilities theories to examine how vertical integration affects the rate and types of firm innovation pursued. To strengthen identification of causal effects, we exploit a quasi-experimental design to compare firms that announced and completed a vertical merger and acquisition (M&A) with those announcing but not completing the transaction. We show that firms completing vertical M&As experience a growth in their rate of innovation; in addition, such firms witness an increase in systemic innovation but a drop in autonomous innovation. Our study contributes important empirical evidence to bear on the literature on the organization of innovation, highlighting that organizational mode choices are a critical determinant of the rate and direction of inventive activity.

CONSTRUCTION RESEARCH AND APPLICATION OF FUNDAMENTAL GEOGRAPHIC NATIONAL CONDITION MONITORING QUALITY CONTROL SYSTEM

The fundamental geographic national condition monitoring uses high-resolution aerial and aerospace remote sensing images to produce digital orthophoto images, land cover classification, geographical and national conditions, databases, statistical analysis and other results to monitor land changes within China's territory, the cycle is once a year. At present, the achievements have been applied in the fields of natural resource management, environmental protection and governance, people's livelihood guarantee, emergency disaster relief, and so on, it is of great significance to provide integrated, standardized and reliable geographic information products to meet the needs of ecological civilization construction. In view of the actual situation of the geographical conditions of the country, such as the organizational mode of production, the technical methods and the requirements of the results, this paper discusses the innovative development of the quality control method, the quality control content, the results quality evaluation and software development, etc. , having established a basic quality control system for monitoring the geographical conditions of the country, and applied it in the quality control work of monitoring the geographical conditions of the country carried out in the past four years from 2016 to 2019, effectively guaranteeing the quality of the results, it also provides reference and reference for other important engineering quality control work.

Blood’s ontologies-entangled: Qualitative inquiry into the enactment, representation, and organizational modes of coordination of blood’s multiplicity in a Belgian blood establishment

Since British sociologist Titmuss authoritatively conceived blood donation as an altruistic ‘gift relationship’, blood establishments have adopted blood’s highly symbolic status as a core professional belief. However, important developments since the 1970s have resulted in blood’s bio-objectification, making blood a renewed object of concern. Because different versions of this bio-object are simultaneously present and interfere with one another, we ask how the organization renders this multiplicity workable? Studying how ontological versions are enacted in a specific blood establishment and how the organizational model of a blood establishment functions as a mode of coordination, we develop a praxiographic appreciation of blood in the context of a specific Belgian blood establishment. We show how the organizational mode of coordination allocates versions of blood in specific departments along functional and chronological dimensions. Blood remains the object of a gift relationship but is accompanied by blood’s enactment and representation as the object of suspicion, management, research/biology, and a blood economy. Furthermore, the organizational mode of coordination also allocates personalized and depersonalized enactments according to the level of contact with the donor population. This reflects a third dimension: (de)personalization of blood. Whereas the organizational mode of coordination is successful in rendering blood’s multiplicity workable, at times, it causes suboptimal practices. Moreover, we showed how sometimes a focus on intra-departmental modes of coordination is necessary to understand how blood’s multiplicity complicates the practices of the blood establishment.

Community Co-operatives and Co-operatives Providing Public Services

The community co-operatives that are spreading today in many parts of the world are the arrival point of an evolutionary process that has seen the progressive shift of co-operatives’ focus from specific social and professional groups to society as a whole. Since the term ‘community co-operative’ is relatively new and similar institutions are named differently at different times, the first task is to elucidate the concept. Its basic elements are community goods, territory, and citizenship, which are discussed with reference to factual cases. We then discuss differences between new community co-operatives and old ones. In the second part we review some data about them, with a special focus on customer-owned providers of public services. The chapter closes with a discussion of the economic reasons why citizen participation through consumer ownership this organizational mode is more likely to expand today in response to privatization failures than it did in the past.

A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF IMPERIAL JAPAN'S PREDICAMENT IN CHINA AND U.S. QUAGMIRE IN POST-SADDAM IRAQ: SIMILARITIES, LESSONS AND IMPLICATIONS

This study will first present a series of striking similarities between the imperial Japanese predicament in China and the contemporary U.S. quagmire in post-Saddam Iraq. Second, the study will provide a theoretical perspective on why the two cases share such commonalities. Third, the study will explore the implications of the perspective to international politics, with a focus on the future of the U.S. hegemony. The study is based on the basic understanding that the developing world across regions today has continued to suffer the ongoing single macro-historical process consequent upon the breakdowns of empires as the once-predominant organizational mode of human societies. The analysis argues for the central importance of a stable national identity for modernization and development as well as freedom and democracy.