scholarly journals Turning the world on its head: The virus that disrupted “business as usual”

2022 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-154
Author(s):  
Fadwa El Guindi
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Peter Dauvergne

This chapter analyzes the turn within mainstream environmentalism toward business partnerships, cause marketing, professional fundraising, and the co-branding of products. The chapter further examines the role of nongovernmental organizations in setting up and running eco-labeling and eco-certification organizations. WWF, also known as the World Wildlife Fund and the World Wide Fund for Nature, is a leader in the nongovernmental embrace of business, markets, and certification as ways to conserve nature and improve environmental conditions. Certification standards, such as those of the Marine Stewardship Council and the Round Table on Responsible Soy, are creating some modest reforms to business practices. NGO-business partnerships, such as the one between WWF and Coca-Cola, are also producing some small-scale benefits. But partnering with business and relying on market solutions risks legitimizing business as usual as well as shifting responsibility for global environmental problems onto consumers, a weak global force of change compared to the forces of unsustainability.


Author(s):  
Yukiko Inoue ◽  
Suzanne Bell

The 21st century brings the Pacific islands unwelcome currents. Global economic integration will strip Pacific islands of trade preferences. Radical weather change, reef damage, and sea level rise will push natural resources toward extinction. To buck the tide, we do not need business-as-usual leaders. We need mould-breaking, heroic leadership. Education is key. We had better start teaching our kids political science from the cradle. In the next century, social ills rooted in economic injustice and flourishing in ethnic and religious strife will continue to generate desperation in the world’s poverty pockets. Instead of stirring clouds of human rights allegations, we must learn to live with the migrants and refugees fleeing to our shores. Television, the great leveller, homogenises cultural values in every corner of the world. Indigenous language erodes. Island cultures are swamped. The heroic leader will need a worldly education and a “bend-your-back for others” apprenticeship in traditional island service. (Bruce, 1998, p. 126)


2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross Fergusson ◽  
Nicola Yeates

This article undertakes a detailed analysis of the formative role of the World Bank in the framing of youth unemployment. It charts the World Bank's emergence as a powerful political actor in this policy field and identifies the ideational content of its policy discourses on the causes of youth unemployment and responses to it. Four principal themes are identified: skills deficits; wage regulation; the “demographication” of explanations for burgeoning youth unemployment; and connections between youth unemployment, criminal activity and social disorder. The discussion highlights significant evidence of neo-liberal continuity and reinvention in World Bank discourses as its normative and ideational frameworks are extended to new terrains of analysis in ways that infer links between youth unemployment and individual deficits of the unemployed.


2009 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aline Gubrium

Technology…is not simply an adjunct to business-as-usual; it becomes a defining quality of our culture as researchers. As such, we might do well to devote more of our energies to studying ourselves as we study others (Tedlock 2005). In other words, we need to turn our observational skills on the encounters we ourselves create; we must observe not only what happens when "we" encounter "them," but also what happens to us when we mediate those encounters via a particular kind of technology that has the capacity to transform both our way of seeing and our way of understanding the world (Angrosino 2007:119).


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Malou Juelskjær

This paper considers how feminist new materialist thinking may offer a resource for re-orienting pedagogy and didactics in light of pressing global issues. In this respect, the paper applies feminist new materialist thinking in a somewhat normative agenda. However, pedagogy and didactics are always already normative, or are engaged in practices that play a role in as well doing ‘business as usual’ or in assisting in opening up to various, yet more un-usual ways of relating and being of the world. Pedagogy is a worlding practice, specifically, as it facilitates ways of relating, thinking, sensing, acting, and is involved in the shaping of a ’collective intelligence’. I argue that one fruitful approach may be to focus on entanglements and affects and on finding ways of facilitating a sensing living/being of such entanglements. The paper concludes by introducing affective geology to suggest possible steps towards a transformation of our ways of knowing, sensing, and relating.


Author(s):  
Alan H. Lockwood

Sea levels are rising as a result of thermal expansion of oceanic water and the melting of the ice that covers Greenland and in glaciers all over the world. This added to the effect of storm surges that are likely to be higher as storm intensity increases poses threats to coastal cities around the world. Lessons learned from Superstorm Sandy and Typhoon Bhola, which killed around 500,000, are two of the most important disasters of the past century. Business-as-usual emissions will worsen these effects.


Author(s):  
Lucas Stanczyk

Given the accompanying sacrifices, how quickly should the present generation reduce its greenhouse gas emissions? The dominant framework for thinking about this question continues to be normative welfare economics. This chapter explains why the dominant approach should be rejected, and outlines the structure of what the author has come to think is the correct one. On this approach, requirements of intergenerational justice are understood, not as the means to, but as the most important constraints on maximizing intertemporal welfare. The chapter explains why the main content of these constraints can be given by the theories of social and international justice. Finally, it explains why the non-identity problem does not undermine the recommended way of thinking about intergenerational justice. Even if the business-as-usual baseline in greenhouse gas emissions will never harm any unborn future people, we can still say that humanity is forever subject to a suitably high environmental conservation standard.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. p1
Author(s):  
Peter Stallinga ◽  
Igor Khmelinskii

The effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and governmental countermeasures are described in this work by putting it in the framework of the Energy Theory of Value. It is found that the downturn in economy is not accompanied by an equal downturn in energy consumption nor of carbon emissions. Moreover, not even the empirical fifth-power law linking the former two is any longer sustained, more so proving the state of virtualization of our economy (disconnecting it from a physical reality). It is also found that the reduction of carbon emissions had no impact on the dynamics of carbon in the atmosphere, which goes on business as usual. All these results undermine the planned policies of the world agenda.


Daedalus ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 149 (4) ◽  
pp. 118-124
Author(s):  
Rebecca Henderson

How does one witness to businesspeople about climate change? Climate change is a problem for the collective and the long term, whereas business often requires a ruthless focus on the individual and the quarter. Climate change is an ethical catastrophe whose solution almost certainly requires a profoundly moral response, but talk of morality in the boardroom is often regarded with profound suspicion. Reconciling these tensions has forced me to navigate between worlds in an ongoing attempt to persuade businesspeople that solving climate change is both an economic and a moral necessity, and that the purpose of business is not only to make money but also to support the institutions that will enable us to build a sustainable world. This has not always been easy.


2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 443-458
Author(s):  
Wanda Alberts

AbstractThis article discusses the challenge of criticisms of the world religions paradigm to the design of teaching programmes in the academic Study of Religions, in general and with a particular focus on didactics-related courses as part of teacher training programmes. It uses the design of a particular Bachelor programme at a German university as an example for the general challenge of teaching about religion in an emancipatory framework that critically reflects its own presuppositions, both at university and school levels. Taking seriously recent criticisms of the world religions paradigm, it is argued, involves a shift of focus from the communication of supposedly given knowledge about religions to the communication of critical competences in analysing different types of discourse about religion, religions or “world religions.”


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