The views of corporate managers on the current state of, and future prospects for, social reporting in Bangladesh: an engagement based study

Purpose – This paper seeks to respond to recent calls for more engagement-based studies of corporate social reporting (CSR) practice by examining the views of corporate managers on the current state of, and future prospects for, social reporting in Bangladesh. Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses a series of interviews with senior managers from 23 Bangladeshi companies representing the multinational, domestic private and public sectors. Findings – Key findings are that the main motivation behind current reporting practice lies in a desire on the part of corporate management to manage powerful stakeholder groups, whilst perceived pressure from external forces, notably parent companies' instructions and demands from international buyers, is driving the process forward. In the latter context it appears that adoption of international social accounting standards and codes is likely to become more prevalent in the future. Reservations are expressed as to whether such a passive compliance strategy is likely to achieve much in the way of real changes in corporate behaviour, particularly when Western developed standards and codes are imposed without consideration of local cultural, economic and social factors. Indeed, such imposition could be regarded as little more than an example of the erection of non-tariff trade barriers rather than representing any meaningful move towards empowering indigenous stakeholder groups. Originality/value – The paper contributes to the literature on CSR in developing countries where there is a distinct lack of engagement-based published studies.

Packet voice/data in local broadcast networks

A local area network that can support both voice and data packets offers economic advantages due to the use of only a single network for both types of traffic, greater flexibility to changing user demands, and it also enables efficient use to be made of the transmission capacity. The latter aspect is very important in local broadcast networks where the capacity is a scarce resource, for example mobile radio. This research has examined two types of local broadcast network, these being the Ethernet-type bus local area network and a mobile radio network with a central base station. With such contention networks, medium access control (MAC) protocols are required to gain access to the channel. MAC protocols must provide efficient scheduling on the channel between the distributed population of stations who want to transmit. No access scheme can exceed the performance of a single server queue, due to the spatial distribution of the stations. Stations cannot in general form a queue without using part of the channel capacity to exchange protocol information. In this research, several medium access protocols have been examined and developed in order to increase the channel throughput compared to existing protocols. However, the established performance measures of average packet time delay and throughput cannot adequately characterise protocol performance for packet voice. Rather, the percentage of bits delivered within a given time bound becomes the relevant performance measure. Performance evaluation of the protocols has been examined using discrete event simulation and in some cases also by mathematical modelling. All the protocols use either implicit or explicit reservation schemes, with their efficiency dependent on the fact that many voice packets are generated periodically within a talkspurt. Two of the protocols are based on the existing 'Reservation Virtual Time CSMA/CD' protocol, which forms a distributed queue through implicit reservations. This protocol has been improved firstly by utilising two channels, a packet transmission channel and a packet contention channel. Packet contention is then performed in parallel with a packet transmission to increase throughput. The second protocol uses variable length packets to reduce the contention time between transmissions on a single channel. A third protocol developed, is based on contention for explicit reservations. Once a station has achieved a reservation, it maintains this effective queue position for the remainder of the talkspurt and transmits after it has sensed the transmission from the preceeding station within the queue. In the mobile radio environment, adaptions to the protocols were necessary in order that their operation was robust to signal fading. This was achieved through centralised control at a base station, unlike the local area network versions where the control was distributed at the stations. The results show an improvement in throughput compared to some previous protocols. Further work includes subjective testing to validate the protocols' effectiveness.

Die Behandlung englischen Kulturgutes im Wiener fin de siècle:am Beispiel von Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Hermann Bahr und Peter Altenberg

This study explores the fascination which English culture represented in turn-of-the-century Vienna. The writers that are going to be discussed are the renowned Anglophile Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the more ambivalent Hermann Bahr and the idealizing, but Janus-faced Peter Altenberg. With the more widely known poet, prose writer and playwright, Hofmannsthal, individual aspects of his engagement with English culture have already been well researched; the same, however, cannot be said in the case of Hermann Bahr, whose extensive literary oeuvre has now largely been forgotten, and who has, instead, come to be valued as a prominent figure in the culture life of modernist Vienna, and Peter Altenberg, whose literary fame rests mainly on his prose poems and who, a legend in his life-time, has in recent years also increasingly attracted research interest as a phenomenon and ‘embodiment’ of the culture of his time: while their engagement with French literature, for example, has long received its due share of attention, their debt to English culture has, until now, been neglected. This thesis, therefore, sets out to explore Hofmannsthal’s, Bahr’s and Altenberg’s perception and portrayal of English civilization – ranging from English character and stereotypes, to what they saw as the principles of British society; it goes on to investigate the impulses they derive from Pre-Raphaelite art (Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Whistler) and the art and crafts-movement centred around William Morris, as well as their inspiration by the art criticism of John Ruskin and Walter Horatio Pater. In English literature one of the focal points will be their reading and evaluation of aestheticism as it was reflected in the life and writings of the Dubliner Oscar Wilde, who was perceived, by these Austrian authors, as a predominant figure of London’s cultural life. Similarly, they regarded his compatriot George Bernard Shaw as a key player in turn-of-the-century English (and European) culture. Hermann Bhar largely identified with him. Hofmannsthal, on the other hand, while having some reservations, acknowledged his importance and achievements, whereas Peter Altenberg saw in Shaw a model to reassure him, as his writings were becoming more openly didactic and even more miniaturistic than they had already been. He turned to Shaw, too, to explain and justify his new goal of making his texts more intelligent to a wider circle of readers.