Partners for Progress? The Role of Business in Transcending Business as Usual

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Audun Ruud
Keyword(s):  
Business As Usual

scholarly journals The Role of Biophilic Agents in Building a Green Resilient City; the Case of Birmingham, UK

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (9) ◽  
pp. 5033
Author(s):  
Linda Novosadová ◽  
Wim van der Knaap
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Urban Governance ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Climate Resilience ◽  
Natural Land ◽  
Negative Impacts ◽  
Community Projects ◽  
Business As Usual ◽  
The City

The present research offers an exploration into the biophilic approach and the role of its agents in urban planning in questions of building a green, resilient urban environment. Biophilia, the innate need of humans to connect with nature, coined by Edgar O. Wilson in 1984, is a concept that has been used in urban governance through institutions, agents’ behaviours, activities and systems to make the environment nature-inclusive. Therefore, it leads to green, resilient environments and to making cities more sustainable. Due to an increasing population, space within and around cities keeps on being urbanised, replacing natural land cover with concrete surfaces. These changes to land use influence and stress the environment, its components, and consequently impact the overall resilience of the space. To understand the interactions and address the adverse impacts these changes might have, it is necessary to identify and define the environment’s components: the institutions, systems, and agents. This paper exemplifies the biophilic approach through a case study in the city of Birmingham, United Kingdom and its biophilic agents. Using the categorisation of agents, the data obtained through in-situ interviews with local professionals provided details on the agent fabric and their dynamics with the other two environments’ components within the climate resilience framework. The qualitative analysis demonstrates the ways biophilic agents act upon and interact within the environment in the realm of urban planning and influence building a climate-resilient city. Their activities range from small-scale community projects for improving their neighbourhood to public administration programs focusing on regenerating and regreening the city. From individuals advocating for and educating on biophilic approach, to private organisations challenging the business-as-usual regulations, it appeared that in Birmingham the biophilic approach has found its representatives in every agent category. Overall, the activities they perform in the environment define their role in building resilience. Nonetheless, the role of biophilic agents appears to be one of the major challengers to the urban design’s status quo and the business-as-usual of urban governance. Researching the environment, focused on agents and their behaviour and activities based on nature as inspiration in addressing climate change on a city level, is an opposite approach to searching and addressing the negative impacts of human activity on the environment. This focus can provide visibility of the local human activities that enhance resilience, while these are becoming a valuable input to city governance and planning, with the potential of scaling it up to other cities and on to regional, national, and global levels.

scholarly journals A legal paradigm shift towards climate justice in the Anthropocene

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-68
Author(s):  
Sam Adelman ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
Climate Justice ◽  
Potential Contribution ◽  
International Environmental Law ◽  
Main Driver ◽  
Business As Usual ◽  
Ecological Catastrophe

Business as usual is widely acknowledged as the main driver of ecological collapse and climate breakdown, but less attention is paid to the role of law as usual as an impediment to climate justice. This article analyses how domestic and international environmental law facilitate injustices against living entities and nature. It calls for a paradigm shift in legal theory, practice and teaching to reflect the scale and urgency of the unfolding ecological catastrophe. Section 2 outlines the links between climatic harms and climate injustices. This is followed by discussions of unsustainable law and economic development in sections 3 and 4. Section 5 examines the potential contribution of new materialist legal theory in bringing about a legal paradigm shift that reflects the jurisgenerative role of nature in promoting climate justice.

scholarly journals Public-Private Partners Against Crime: Governance, Surveillance and the Limits of Corporate Accountability

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 471-484 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karin Svedberg Helgesson
Keyword(s):  
Money Laundering ◽  
Banking Industry ◽  
The State ◽  
Corporate Accountability ◽  
Private Business ◽  
Private Partnership ◽  
Tentative Conclusion ◽  
Initial Assumption ◽  
Business As Usual

Recent risk-based regulation on anti-money laundering emphasises the need for private business actors to be more actively engaged in preventative efforts. This proposed public-private partnership against crime raises important questions of how to balance values and interests as it situates business actors in an intricate position at the centre of conflicting claims and attributions. Based on an interview study of the banking industry in Sweden, this article analyses how surveillance for the state in relation to anti-money laundering is implemented into the business-as-usual of business actors. The findings support the initial assumption that the role of agent of the state is in conflict with the role of being an agent for private principals. However, a complementary tentative conclusion is that the demands of one principal could also be beneficial for promoting the interests of the other principal. Finally, it is suggested that making oneself more accountable may, in fact, be a means to limit corporate accountability.

scholarly journals Business, as usual: the policy priorities of the World Bank's discourses on youth unemployment, and the global financial crisis

2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross Fergusson ◽  
Nicola Yeates
Keyword(s):  
World Bank ◽  
Global Financial Crisis ◽  
Criminal Activity ◽  
Youth Unemployment ◽  
The World ◽  
Wage Regulation ◽  
The Global Financial Crisis ◽  
Business As Usual ◽  
The Unemployed

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.

The Changing Role of Private Foundations: Business as Usual or Creative Innovation?

1987 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 22-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Constance W. Mahoney ◽  
Carroll L. Estes
Keyword(s):  
Private Foundations ◽  
Business As Usual ◽  
Changing Role

scholarly journals Radiance in Reclamation

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-89
Author(s):  
Ali Javeed
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Depth Of Field ◽  
East Side ◽  
Federal Law ◽  
Activist Group ◽  
Don River ◽  
Photo Essay ◽  
Business As Usual ◽  
The City

In the sharp frosty winds of the morning of January 9th, 2019, Indigenous activist group Idle no More and their allies shut down the Bloor Viaduct, a well-used truss arch bridge in Tkaronto, Ontario, Kanata (Three Fire Territories) that connects the city’s east-side to its downtown core. The action took place during rush hour in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en First Nation. The Canadian government was once again violating unceded land by mobilizing armed federal law enforcement to forcibly remove the nation from their land in order to build a gas pipeline. In response to this violence, allies throughout the city, myself among them, decided to show Tkaronto that it was not business as usual by bringing traffic on the Viaduct to a halt. Importantly, the bridge looms over the Don River. Reclamation of this space was therefore a reminder of the sanctity of water, gesturing to the fact that it is a privilege to be able to access clean water, while also reminding us of the threat of contamination posed by the pipelines’ development. As the day came to an end and the sun retreated, cycling through its farewell hues of yellow and orange, the elders began to sing. We round danced, our bodies flowing as one like the river beneath us. Our melodic voices of hope and mourning, joining the gusts of wind that whistled between the bridge supports. After the protest, we continued to chant as we walked back, fists raised with the awareness that, although this action was over, our spirits had been rekindled for the next one. This photo essay seeks to echo the calls of resistance of that day. I capture the warm hopeful tones of the sunset in an otherwise frigid colour scheme, while using wide angles to capture the scope of attendance, and a low depth of field to center the role of femme-identifying water protectors in the movement.

The Role of Practice and Feedback for Developing Teacher Candidate’s Opportunities to Respond Expertise

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristin L. Sayeski ◽  
Bethany Hamilton-Jones ◽  
Grace Cutler ◽  
Gentry A. Earle ◽  
Lauren Husney
Keyword(s):  
Teacher Preparation ◽  
Skill Acquisition ◽  
Teacher Candidates ◽  
Best Practice ◽  
Teacher Educators ◽  
Performance Measure ◽  
Usual Condition ◽  
Opportunities To Respond ◽  
Business As Usual

A greater emphasis on measuring the outputs of teacher preparation programs such as practice-based evaluations (e.g., edTPA) has increased the need for teacher educators to examine “best practice” for developing the skill-based competencies of teacher candidates. The purpose of this study was to examine the role of practice and feedback on teacher candidates’ knowledge and skill acquisition of a specific evidence-based practice, the provision of opportunities to respond (OTRs). Using an experimental, pretest–posttest design, 48 teacher candidates in an introductory special education course (i.e., nonpracticum course) were randomly assigned to a distributed practice with feedback (experimental) condition or a massed practice with no feedback (business-as-usual) condition. Candidates in the experimental condition outperformed candidates in the business-as-usual condition on a measure of knowledge and a performance measure on the accuracy of specific OTR technique delivery. There were, however, no differences between the groups in terms of rate of OTR delivery. Implications for teacher preparation are discussed.

Introduction: Reinhabiting the Earth

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
David Wood
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
Life Patterns ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Common ◽  
Business As Usual ◽  
The Relationship

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the relationship between habit and climate change. It would be hard to overestimate the role of habit in people's lives. At one level, this is all well and good. There are, of course, bad habits, which people try to kick, but people's daily life would collapse without the scaffolding of habit. Still, when one contemplates climate change and the catastrophic future it presages, it is hard not to conclude that “business as usual” simply cannot continue for long. “Business as usual” means the common cloth of people's Western daily lives, their normal practices, in large part consisting of habits—personal, collective, economic, and intellectual. Forms of life, patterns of dwelling, other than the current consumerist model are undoubtedly possible. But whether people can get there from here voluntarily is another matter. If reinhabiting the earth means changing some of people's deep habits, habits reflecting historical sedimentations and congealings, then unearthing the forces in play, seeing how they operate and what is at stake in reconfiguring them, is a historical task to which philosophy can at least contribute. Economists are also central to imagining other economic orders, such as that of degrowth.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document