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Public Wrongs and Human Rights: An Orderly Approach?
Get PDFCriminal law is a system for societal ordering, as much as it is for protection against interpersonal harm and wrongs. Whilst such laws can engage rights to privacy and freedoms of expression and movement, international human rights rarely feature in criminal theory. Using Duff’s public wrongs theory, a normative argument is made for recognition of international human rights within the national civil order, as well as through a proposed supra-national human rights polity. This is tested through identification of human rights criminalization principles from public ordering cases in the European Court of Human Rights. International human rights offers a formal route to recognition of liberal principles, as well as adding possible new boundary conditions within criminal theory
Poetry and Organizing: Perspectives on the Uses and Value of Poetry in Organization Studies
Get PDFThis creative book discusses the value of poetry within the field of management and organization studies. It examines how researchers can understand poetry and incorporate it into their work, exploring ways that poetry encourages readers to defy the status quo and engage in activism. Bringing together two supposedly contrary concepts, poetry and organization, the authors highlight sensorial and feminist approaches to organization rooted in affect and embodiment
Capital market listing as a window for ESG disclosure requirements for public companies: Corporate governance lessons for Saudi Arabia
Get PDFAs environmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosure are dynamic in response to economic and regulatory conditions, “dynamic materiality” plays a crucial role in determining the nature of information that companies need to disclose. Therefore, this study argues that the rule-based corporate governance model of Saudi capital market regulations is incompatible with the dynamic nature of ESG disclosures, where regulations impose rigid obligations in some respects, while leaving ESG disclosures voluntary, resulting in significant differences in application between listed companies. In contrast, the UK governance model has principle-based approach, with ‘comply or explain’ disclosures principle, which gives companies greater flexibility to disclose their sustainability according to economic and regulatory variables. Thus, the absence of a flexible regulatory framework in the Saudi market may hamper companies' ability to adapt to global developments, limiting the effectiveness of ESG disclosure compared to more adapted models. This study answers questions about the extent to which Saudi Arabia's rule-based governance model can support ESG disclosures given the dynamic materiality of ESG matters, and the potential to leverage the UK model in developing the Saudi regulatory framework in line with changing sustainability requirements. The study also proposes to address the current gap in the definition of materiality in Saudi capital market laws by exploring the possibility of adopting the concept of dynamic materiality to enhance the flexibility of disclosures and ensure their responsiveness to economic and regulatory developments. The study also tries to answer to the most important legal, social and economic challenges that the Saudi Capital Market Authority (CMA) may face when determined to impose mandatory ESG disclosures on companies listed in the Saudi Capital Market (Tadawul), in order to achieve the objectives of Saudi Vision 2030 in developing the financial sector and promoting overall ESG rank
Orchestration of Corporate Social Responsibility in Company Law – Reframing Human Security through Education
Get PDFThe objective of this paper is to argue the fundamental significance of education in addressing notable gaps in the constitutive, performance and evaluation criteria for corporate social responsibility (CSR) and endeavours to showcase the complementarity between education, human security, sustainable human development, and the pursuit of CSR as an ideal normative paradigm. An abstractive approach to studying CSR, which is common with some authors engages with corporate philanthropy, which has not been helpful outside traditional CSR paradigms without looking at key dynamics that can robustly underpin successful CSR. The paper explores the systemic nexus between sustainable development as an educational externality when embedded in CSR, climate change and action competence and how it dovetails into ‘education for sustainable development’.
Methodologically, this paper doctrinally relies on the systematic analysis of written data sources to theoretically explore the central significance, and complementarity between human security, education, and human dignity and how they can orchestrate a holistic CSR paradigm. In 1994, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in formulating the human security doctrine recognised the syncretic correlation between human security, education, and sustainable human development as fundamental elements that should underpin CSR. This paper contends that these are necessary intrinsic components of human dignity as the central factor that justifies a multi-dimensional and proactive approach to CSR.
Despite the criticisms against human security, this paper identifies it as an important concept that could instrumentally orchestrate a model of CSR that uniformly mainstreams sustainable human development and human dignity that leverages education which has routinely and traditionally been seen as a constitutive component of CSR. It reveals how a holistic path to CSR can reinvigorate the central pillars of human security and human dignity using education as a springboard and makes a compelling case for supporting explicit references to education in company law with appropriate human security informed constitutive, performance and evaluation criteria which are absent in existing legally orchestrated CSR
Randomised active controlled trial examining effects of aerobic exercise, cognitive and music interventions on depression, balance and mobility in schizophrenia
Get PDFSchizophrenia significantly impairs daily functioning, requiring innovative, cost-effective treatments
beyond standard antipsychotics, and cognitive interventions. This study examined the individual
and combined effects of cognitive, music, and aerobic exercise interventions on depression, balance,
and mobility in patients with schizophrenia and severe depression. Eighty-four male patients with
schizophrenia and severe depression from an inpatient psychiatric centre participated in a 12-week,
single-blind, randomised active-controlled trial. Participants were systematically assigned to one
of seven equal groups (n=12 each): aerobic exercise (AerG), cognitive rehabilitation/treatment-as usual (CogG), music intervention (MusG), aerobic exercise+music intervention (A&MG), aerobic
exercise+cognitive intervention (A&CG), cognitive intervention+music intervention (C&MG), and
a comprehensive combination of all three modalities (ACMG). Each intervention was delivered over
60 min, three times weekly for 12 weeks. The study employed the Beck Depression Inventory Short
Form, Stork Balance Test, and modified Timed Up and Go Test to assess improvements in depression,
balance, and mobility. Statistical analyses were conducted using paired t-tests for within-group
comparisons and ANCOVA with Bonferroni post hoc tests for between-group differences, with
significance set at p≤0.05. Results showed significant improvements in depression, balance, and
mobility across all treatment groups. The CogG group outperformed both AerG and MusG in all
outcomes, establishing it as the gold-standard comparator. A&CG yielded greater benefits than other
single or dual-modality groups, while the multimodal ACMG group demonstrated the most substantial
improvements across all measures. These findings highlight the practical value of incorporating
multimodal interventions into standard care to improve both mental health and physical function,
offering a scalable, cost-effective approach to addressing the diverse needs of this population of
patients with schizophrenia and severe depression. Implementing such interventions in psychiatric care
settings could lead to more comprehensive and effective treatment strategies for improving patient
outcomes
Ideal and broken humanitarian supply chains: exploring education network design and Syrian refugees’ experiences in Jordan
Get PDFThis thesis explores humanitarian supply chain networks for Syrian refugees living in urban Jordan, focusing on NGO, and government educational services, and refugee experiences of these services. The study addresses the gap between idealised networks for educational programs and services and the actual needs and lived realities of refugee families. Literature shows how ideal HSC networks, deployed in reports, plans, and professional discourse more broadly, contrast with broken HSC that exist around refugee families and their life experiences. The research critiques traditional SC models historically rooted in commercial logistics and more recent HSC models that assume and promise rational, linear, bureaucratic solutions to humanitarian problems. These models, though logical in theory, do not fully explain or respond to complex refugee contexts and experiences. The study adopts Activity Theory (AT) as an approach to support the analysis of complex social, and technical relations between stakeholder groups, and presents these relations using the AT Systems’ concepts, networks and contradictions. The methodology deployed is interpretative-qualitative, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and 28 semi-structured interviews with stakeholders, including international NGOs, Jordanian ministries, and Syrian refugees. Findings reveal complex HSC networks with various stakeholders, experiences, breakdowns, tensions, plans, and a marginalisation of human experience, obscured behind more tangible SC products and objects. One key finding shows that refugees feel pressured to leave education pathways to work and secure money and food for families. Another finding illustrates how educational SC split to provide additional services, but inadvertently result in community segregation and educational failures, rather than quality education and community integration. The results suggest planned, ideal HSCs do not acknowledge actual, lived in, broken HSCs, and how the ‘human’ in ‘humanitarian’ becomes obscured. Such problematic results were not intended by stakeholders, but result from well-intentioned, yet broken SC configurations. All of this while the humanitarian supply chains witness a significant withdrawal from critical roles played by the international community and UN organisations in supporting educational initiatives in recent years, exacerbating the challenges faced by these supply chains and further marginalising the lived experiences of refugees. This study provides two key contributions: it contrasts idealized HSC models with broken, lived-in HSC through AT as a novel framework, offering theoretical and practical insights, and it bridges HSC theory with AT to explore breakdowns in human and social experiences, expanding AT's application to humanitarian contexts. The findings are particularly relevant to researchers and professionals in humanitarian and refugee-related fields
Legitimacy and the Misguided Quest for a Representative Constitutional Court
No full textThis chapter casts doubt on the view, put forward in recent years by Robert Alexy among others, that the legitimacy of constitutional review rests (at least in part) on the fact that constitutional courts are representative institutions. It mounts a three-pronged challenge against Alexy’s account. First, it proposes the following litmus test for accounts, such as Alexy’s, which portray courts as representatives: they must offer a convincing explanation of the distinctive contribution that the courts’ putative representative character makes to political legitimacy such that it justifies that they be given the power of constitutional review. Second, it criticizes Alexy’s claim that courts are argumentative representatives in the sense that they represent (many) citizens qua rational agents through the way they reason their decisions. However, if the standard of reasoning that judicial decisions must meet is demanding, akin to correctness, then it is not representation that does the moral heavy lifting. And if it is understood as mere plausibility, then it is unclear why we would be bound by a decision solely because it satisfies it. Second, the chapter seeks to undercut the motivation for Alexy’s account by arguing against the proposition -which he seems to presuppose- that the legitimacy of a democratic regime depends on its being willed (in the appropriate sense) by the people. In its place the chapter offers a different understanding of legitimacy, informed by the ideal of separation of powers, that provides that government ought to be shaped by different moral forces -not all of which refer back to the people’s will. On this understanding, it is morally appropriate, all else being equal, for power to be assigned to a multiplicity of institutions, some representative, some not representative. The upshot of this understanding is that proponents of constitutional review do not have to defend it by fitting it into the representation straitjacket
Innovations to fundamental stock valuations: Estimating future earnings per share and free cash flows using statistical and machine learning methods
Get PDFThis study proposes innovations to financial valuation models. Fundamental valuation is used by investors to make buy/sell decisions regarding stock issues. Valuation is the process of determining the intrinsic value — the price reasonable to pay for a stock given its future prospects, which are measured with cash flows, given the level of risk an investor bears when buying stock. These cash flows are measured with two key series: Earnings-Per-Share (EPS) and Free Cash Flows (FCF). Correspondingly, the two series are used as inputs in common valuation models: the Forward Price-Earnings and Discounted Cash Flows. It is required that investors estimate the future cash flows — a sensitive process whereby under- or overstating future cash flows is prone to the risk of losing invested equity. Hence, being able to accurately capture the next quarter's value is of utmost importance for investors active in financial markets: it guides the stock selection process. We propose to formulate this as a regression problem, where the target variable is the next quarter's Earnings-Per-Share or Free Cash Flow value. The input features are their respective lags. The main challenge in this problem is the fact that the series are sparse and limited in the number of observations. This is because the fundamental financial data is published every quarter of the year, as required by law. Hence, our estimators have limited training/validation data to learn from. We approach this problem with the selection of 8 Machine Learning (ML) and 5 Statistical (SE) estimators, conducting experiments on a representative sample of 100 U.S. publicly traded companies. Our study contributes in several ways. First, we show that the quantile transformer and the PCHIP interpolation improves model generalization by making more blatant the linear relationship of the target variable with its features and artificially increasing the number of data observations, respectively. Second, we demonstrate that while certain ML estimators do overfit to the small data sets, others perform at the same or better rate than the statistical estimators. Third, building on top of our observations about data patterns and behaviour of a diverse range of estimators, we propose the transfer learning methodology that allows to combine the predictive capabilities of the ML and SE. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach based on the reduction across the range of regression error measures, and the improvement in portfolio performance, over a fixed backtesting simulation period
Passive motion paradigm implementation via deep neural networks: analysis and verification
Get PDFAbstractIn recent years, passive motion paradigms (PMPs), derived from the equilibrium point hypothesis and impedance control, have been utilised as manipulation methods for humanoid robots and robotic manipulators. These paradigms are typically achieved by creating a kinematic chain that enables the manipulator to perform goal-directed actions without explicitly solving the inverse kinematics. This approach leverages a kinematic model constructed through the training of artificial neural networks, aligning well with principles of cybernetics and cognitive computation by enabling adaptive and flexible control. Specifically, these networks model the relationship between joint angles and end-effector positions, facilitating the computation of the Jacobian matrix. Although this method does not require an accurate robot model, traditional neural networks often suffer from drawbacks such as overfitting and inefficient training, which can compromise the accuracy of the final PMP model. In this paper, we implement the method using a deep neural network and investigate the impact of activation functions and network depth on the performance of the kinematic model. Additionally, we propose a transfer learning approach to fine-tune the pre-trained model, enabling it to be transferred to other manipulator arms with different kinematic properties. Finally, we implement and evaluate the deep neural network-based PMP on the Universal Robots, comparing it with traditional kinematic controllers and assessing its physical interaction capabilities and accuracy.</jats:p
Individual Producer Responsibility Based Product Take-Back, Circular Product Design, and Firm Performance
No full textProduct take-back programs based on Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) are critical in advancing the Circular Economy; however, their effectiveness depends on the underlying governance models. While Collective Producer Responsibility (CPR) dominates in regions like the European Union (EU), it is often criticized for failing to help incentivize sustainable product design. In contrast, Individual Producer Responsibility (IPR) is regarded as more effective in incentivizing sustainable product design, but its efficacy lacks empirical evidence. Our research fills this gap by empirically investigating how IPR-based product take-back affects firm-level environmental and financial performance. Drawing on the Practice-Based View, we hypothesize the effects of IPR-based product take-back on Circular Product Design (CPD) and firm performance. Based on survey data from 227 Chinese manufacturers and nine post-survey interviews, we find that IPR-based product take-back does not directly impact environmental or financial performance. However, it positively impacts CPD, through which it exerts an indirect positive effect on both environmental and financial performance. These results contrast sharply with the EU’s CPR-dominant model, in which producers have little incentive to alter product designs. Our findings underscore the significance of EPR governance models in shaping the effectiveness of product take-back programs and have important theoretical and practical implications