Corporate Social Responsibility Implementation in the EU and USA : The Trend and the Way Forward

The core principles of CSR are being integrated into the core policy objectives of different economies and global companies and are also moving beyond their individual business initiatives. This integration can be seen from individual states’ perspectives; states are also accepting these issues in their socio-economic strategies and thus are establishing these issues within national economies. Given this background, this chapter explicates the trends in implementing CSR principles in the EU and USA. It demonstrates that companies in the developed countries use a mix of different strategies to incorporate CSR principles in their self-regulatory mechanisms. Strategies based on legal regulation are not foremost in this mix; rather, in these countries regulation-based strategy is meant to assist the non-legal drivers of CSR.

Evolution and innovation in guardianship laws: Assisted decision-making

Guardianship laws in most Western societies provide decision-making mechanisms for adults with impaired capacity. Since the inception of these laws, the principle of autonomy and recognition of human rights for those coming within guardianship regimes has gained prominence. A new legal model has emerged, which seeks to incorporate ‘assisted decision-making’ models into guardianship laws. Such models legally recognise that an adult’s capacity may be maintained through assistance or support provided by another person, and provide formal recognition of the person in that ‘assisting’ role. This article situates this latest legal innovation within a historical context, examining the social and legal evolution of guardianship laws and determining whether modern assisted decision-making models remain consistent with guardianship reform thus far. It identifies and critically analyses the different assisted decision-making models which exist internationally. Finally, it discusses a number of conceptual, legal and practical concerns that remain unresolved. These issues require serious consideration before assisted decisionmaking models are adopted in guardianship regimes in Australia.

Open Access and Scholarly Books: Workshop Report, 19 June 2013

On 19 June 2013 Knowledge Unlatched and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School jointly convened a one-day workshop titled Open Access and Scholarly Books in Cambridge, MA. The workshop brought together a group of 21 invited publishers, librarians, academics and Open Access innovators to discuss the challenge of making scholarly books Open Access. This report captures discussions that took place on the day.

Harnessing SD and CSR within corporate self-regulation of weak economies : a meta-regulation approach

The semantic of the terms “sustainable development” and “corporate social responsibility” have changed over time to a point where these concepts have become two interrelated processes for ensuring the far-reaching development of society. Their convergence has given dimension to the environmental and corporate regulation mechanisms in strong economies. This article deals with the question of how the ethos of this convergence could be incorporated into the self-regulation of businesses in weak economies where nonlegal drivers are either inadequate or inefficient. It proposes that the policies for this incorporation should be based on the precepts of meta-regulation that have the potential to hold force majeure, economic incentives, and assistance-related strategies to reach an objective from the perspective of weak economies.

Copyrights and copyfights : copyright law and the digital economy

This paper will consider questions around the reform of copyright law, and how they are increasingly being framed by the challenges of the digital economy. It discusses the review of copyright and the digital economy being undertaken by the Australian Law Reform Commission, with particular reference to the costs and benefits of copyright law to consumers and creative producers. We argue that there is a pressing need to develop fair copyright rules that encourage investment in the digital economy, allow widespread dissemination of knowledge through society, and support the innovative reuse of copyright works. To better align copyright law with these goals, we recommend that Australia introduce an open ended ‘fair use’ style copyright exception, and encourage the development of a digital copyright exchange of the sort discussed in the UK by the Hargreaves and Hooper Reports.

Advance health directives : competing perceptions, intentions and use by patients and doctors in Queensland

This paper reports on mixed method empirical research undertaken with individuals who have completed advance health directives (‘principals’) and doctors who have either attested to the principal’s capacity when the document was completed or been called upon to use these documents in clinical settings. Principals and doctors appear to have different understandings of the purpose of these documents and their role in decision-making about medical treatment. We recommend changes to the advance health directive form in Queensland to promote informed decision-making which will help to better align perceptions of principals and doctors about the role of these documents.

Airport enclaves : bridging boundary tensions between airports and cities

Current approaches to airport development and land use sit at odds with the tradition of airports as spaces for aviation (Stevens et a/. 2010). While airports remain the primary interface between air transport and society, the functions they include within their boundaries have expanded well beyond the provision of infrastructure for aviation and logistics. Shopping malls, commercial office space, hotels, golf courses and conference facilities arc increasingly normal uses of land within airport boundaries (Kasarda 2008), and enhance the role of airports from transport infrastructure to a new form of economic infrastructure (Freestone 2009). However, the expanding role of airports, and the resulting diversification in airport land uses, has not been without opposition.

Welfare surveillance, income management and new paternalism in Australia

This article discusses the situation of income support claimants in Australia, constructed as faulty citizens and flawed welfare subjects. Many are on the receiving end of complex, multi-layered forms of surveillance aimed at securing socially responsible and compliant behaviours. In Australia, as in other Western countries, neoliberal economic regimes with their harsh and often repressive treatment of welfare recipients operate in tandem with a burgeoning and costly arsenal of CCTV and other surveillance and governance assemblages. Through a program of ‘Income Management’, initially targeting (mainly) Indigenous welfare recipients in Australia’s Northern Territory, the BasicsCard (administered by Centrelink, on behalf of the Australian Federal Government’s Department of Human Services) is one example of this welfare surveillance. The scheme operates by ‘quarantining’ a percentage of a claimant’s welfare entitlements to be spent by way of the BasicsCard on ‘approved’ items only. The BasicsCard scheme raises significant questions about whether it is possible to encourage people to take responsibility for themselves if they no longer have real control over the most important aspects of their lives. Some Indigenous communities have resisted the BasicsCard, criticising it because the imposition of income management leads to a loss of trust, dignity, and individual agency. Further, income management of individuals by the welfare state contradicts the purported aim that they become less ‘welfare dependent’ and more ‘self-reliant’. In highlighting issues around compulsory income management this paper makes a contribution to the largely under discussed area of income management and welfare surveillance, with its propensity for function creep, garnering large volumes of data on BasicsCard user’s approved (and declined) purchasing decisions, complete with dates, amounts, times and locations.

Digitally enabled?! An analysis of law and justice students' use of smart devices

The research seeks to understand the nature of law and justice students’ use of technology for their learning purposes. There is often an assumption made that all students have, and engage with, technology to the same degree. The research tests these assumptions by means of a survey conducted of first year law and justice students to determine their actual use of smart devices inside and outside classes. The analysis of results reveals that while the majority of respondents own at least one smart device; most rarely use their device for their learning purposes.

Residential real estate education and globalisation in Australian real estate markets and practices

The purpose of this scoping paper is to offer an overview of the literature to determine the development to date in the area of residential real estate agency academic and career education in respect to Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) transactions and implications in Australia. This paper will review studies on the issue of foreign real estate ownership and FDI in Australian real estate markets to develop an understanding of the current state of knowledge on residential real estate agency practice, career education and real estate licensing requirements in Australia. The distinction between the real estate profession education, compared to other professions such as accounting, legal and finance is based on the intensity of the professional career training prior or post formal academic training. Real estate education could be carried out with relatively higher standards in terms of licensing requirement, career and academic education. As FDI in the Australian real estate market is a complex globalisation and economic phenomenon, a simple content of residential real estate training and education may not promote proper management or capacity in dealing with relevant foreign residential property market transaction. The preliminary summarising from the literature of residential real estate agency education, with its current relevant or emerging licensing requirement are focused on its role and effectiveness and impact in residential real estate market. Particular focus will be directed to the FDI relevant residential real estate agency transactions and practices, which have been strongly influenced by the current residential real estate market and agency practices. Taken together, there are many opportunities for future research to extend our understanding and improving the residential real estate agency education and training of Foreign Direct Investment in the Australian residential real estate sector.

Twitter and Sports : Football Fandom in Emerging and Established Markets

Twitter and other social media have become increasingly important tools for maintaining the relationships between fans and their idols across a range of activities, from politics and the arts to celebrity and sports culture. Twitter, Inc. itself has initiated several strategic approaches, especially to entertainment and sporting organisations; late in 2012, for example, a Twitter, Inc. delegation toured Australia in order to develop formal relationships with a number of key sporting bodies covering popular sports such as Australian Rules Football, A-League football (soccer), and V8 touring car racing, as well as to strengthen its connections with key Australian broadcasters and news organisations (Jackson & Christensen, 2012). Similarly, there has been a concerted effort between Twitter Germany and the German Bundesliga clubs and football association to coordinate the presence of German football on Twitter ahead of the 2012–2013 season: the Twitter accounts of almost all first-division teams now bear the official Twitter verification mark, and a system of ‘official’ hashtags for tweeting about individual games (combining the abbreviations of the two teams, e.g. #H96FCB) has also been instituted (Twitter auf Deutsch, 2012).

Crisis Communication in Natural Disasters : The Queensland Floods and Christchurch Earthquakes

Over the past decade, social media have gone through a process of legitimation and official adoption, and they are now becoming embedded as part of the official communications apparatus of many commercial and public-sector organisations— in turn, providing platforms like Twitter with their own sources of legitimacy. Arguably, the demonstrated utility of social media platforms and tools in times of crisis—from civil unrest and violent crime through to natural disasters like bushfires, earthquakes, and floods—has been a crucial driver of this newfound legitimacy. In the mid-2000s, user-created content and ‘Web 2.0’ platforms were known to play a role in crisis communication; back then, the involvement of extra-institutional actors in providing and sharing information around such events involved distributed, ad hoc, or niche platforms (like Flickr), and was more likely to be framed as ‘citizen journalism’ or ‘crowdsourcing’ (see, for example, Liu, Palen, Sutton, Hughes, & Vieweg, 2008, on the then-emerging role of photo-sharing in disasters). Since then, the dramatically increased take-up of mainstream social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter means that the pool of potential participants in online crisis communication has broadened to include a much larger proportion of the general population, as well as traditional media and official emergency response organisations.