Assessing the validity of impact pathways for child labour and well-being in social life cycle assessment

Background, aim and scope: Assuming that the goal of social life cycle assessment (SLCA) is to assess damage and benefits on its ‘area of protection’ (AoP) as accurately as possible, it follows that the impact pathways, describing the cause effect relationship between indicator and the AoP, should have a consistent theoretical foundation so the inventory results can be associated with a predictable damage or benefit to the AoP. This article uses two concrete examples from the work on SLCA to analyse to what extent this is the case in current practice. One considers whether indicators included in SLCA approaches can validly assess impacts on the well-being of the stakeholder, whereas the other example addresses whether the ‘incidence of child labour’ is a valid measure for impacts on the AoPs.

Materials and methods: The theoretical basis for the impact pathway between the relevant indicators and the AoPs is analysed drawing on research from relevant scientific fields.

Results:   The examples show a lack of valid impact pathways in both examples. The first example shows that depending on the definition of ‘well-being’, the assessment of impacts on well-being of the stakeholder cannot be performed exclusively with the type of indicators which are presently used in SLCA approaches. The second example shows that the mere fact that a child is working tells little about how this may damage or benefit the AoPs, implying that the normally used indicator; ‘incidence of child labour’ lacks validity in relation to predicting damage or benefit on the AoPs of SLCA.

Discussion: New indicators are proposed to mitigate the problem of invalid impact pathways. However, several problems arise relating to difficulties in getting data, the usability of the new indicators in management situations, and, in relation to example one, boundary setting issues.

Conclusions: The article shows that it is possible to assess the validity of the impact pathways in SLCA. It thereby point to the possibility of utilising the same framework that underpins the environmental LCA in this regard. It also shows that in relation to both of the specific examples investigated, the validity of the impact pathways may be improved by adopting other indicators, which does, however, come with a considerable ‘price’.

Recommendations and perspectives: It is argued that there is a need for analysing impact pathways of other impact categories often included in SLCA in order to establish indicators that better reflect actual damage or benefit to the AoPs.

Invisible labour : home–school relations and the front office

When school front offices are mentioned in research on schools and their relations with the community, it is often to describe how parents/carers and the public are treated officiously and/or inappropriately. In professional development materials, schools are urged to improve communication, and occasionally directed to consider the practices of the front office staff. Yet when schools send out information to parents/carers, the school office is usually the place to which all queries are directed. However, there is almost no detailed research that looks at what actually happens in this place. In this paper we draw on a small-scale commissioned research project which began to fill this gap. In seeking to reread our data and push further on analysis, we have come to realize that those who work in school front offices are women whose physical and emotional labour is not only rendered largely invisible in a wide range of literatures relating to home-school relations but is also inadequately recognized through recruitment practices, professional development and remuneration. We suggest that there needs to be further research into the high energy, multitasking, nurturing work that goes on in school front offices.

Higher education and the labour market in Oman

This study aimed to investigate whether there is a mismatch between higher education and the labour market in Oman, the types of this mismatch that exist, and the reasons for this mismatch as they appeared from statistics and interviewees' responses ( the higher education providers, principals from the public sector, and employers from the private sector)

TQM and labour productivity in Jordanian industrial companies

Reports on research to determine the degree of application of total quality management (TQM) philosophy and practices in industrial corporations in Jordan. Uses primary and secondary empirical data to examine the link between TQM and labour productivity. Survey responses were classified into two groups: high-TQM implementation and low-TQM implementation. Found that mean labour productivity measurements for high-TQM companies were significantly higher than for low-TQM companies over the period 1993-1998. Also, mean growth rates of labour productivity measurements for companies with high-level TQM were higher than for those with low-level TQM during this period. Regression analysis demonstrated a statistically significant positive relationship between TQM and labour productivity.

Great bowerbirds create theaters with forced perspective when seen by their audience

Birds in the infraorder Corvida [1] (ravens, jays, bowerbirds) are renowned for their cognitive abilities [2–4], which include advanced problem solving with spatial inference [4–8], tool use and complex constructions [7–10], and bowerbird cognitive ability is associated with mating success [11]. Great bowerbird males construct bowers with a long avenue from within which females view the male displaying over his bower court [10]. This predictable audience viewpoint is a prerequisite for forced (altered) visual perspective [12–14]. Males make courts with gray and white objects that increase in size with distance from the avenue entrance. This gradient creates forced visual perspective for the audience; court object visual angles subtended on the female viewer’s eye are more uniform than if the objects were placed at random. Forced perspective can yield false perception of size and distance [12, 15]. After experimental reversal of their size-distance gradient, males recovered their gradients within 3 days, and there was little difference from the original after 2 wks. Variation among males in their forced-perspective quality as seen by their female audience indicates that visual perspective is available for use in mate choice, perhaps as an indicator of cognitive ability. Regardless of function, the creation and maintenance of forced visual perspective is clearly important to great bowerbirds and suggests the possibility of a previously unknown dimension of bird cognition.

Demystifying the supply of capital and labour in a nation’s economic chain

Public capital has been considered to be the wheels of economic activity in a nation or region. The reverse effect, the contribution of economic growth to public capital, is also worth analysis. The non-structural vector auto-regression (VAR) approach is performed for the Australian economy using yearly data for the 1960-2008 period. The optimal lag is investigated to build the VAR model that is then tested for stability. The impulse response function is further employed to examine the response of one economic variable to the innovation of others and to determine the lagged terms for the maximum absolute value of the other variables’ responses. The results will provide historical evidence for the federal and regional governments of Australia to estimate the effects of these production variables, in particular, the effect of infrastructure spending on the gross domestic product.

Running on empty : 'modernising' the British and Australian labour parties

Australia's cultural cringe towards Britan does not just focus on the monarchy. Many in the ALP and the media pay undue deference to Tony Blair's so-called new Third Way. This book shows why the ALP needs to reassess its own history and examines the complex reality of how it compaes with the British Labor Party.