Formulating standards for sustainable forest management in Canada

Over the past decade, but particularly in the years since Rio, many initiatives have surfaced in the name of sustainable forest management (SFM). There is now a growing literature recognizing new techniques in timber labelling and the certification of sustainable management systems. However, they have not yet been located adequately in wider political contexts, such as the new (non-governmental) approaches to regulatory compliance or the new corporate response to the western environmental movement. This article examines a leading SFM framework in Canada, known as the Z808 initiative. Co-ordinated by the Canadian Standards Association (CSA), it advances a system of standards pertaining to sustainable forest management. As a politically-driven process to translate the concepts and practices of sustainable resource management into a concrete form, the CSA experience is very revealing. The article reviews the origins and the parameters of the Z808 system. This is followed by a commentary and critique of the system, centred on four dimensions: the pivotal role of the management system approach, the treatment of sustainability as a conceptual goal, the enclosure of the public interest, and the underlying convergence of business and state interests within this third-party certification approach. In the case of Z808, the most crucial political choices have been made already, and the operational logic of the system can be clearly discerned. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Convenience food consumption in the Nordic countries and St. Petersburg area

Building on the theoretical framework provided by sociological research on eating practices, family meals, self‐cooked meals and time use, this study examines national differences and similarities in the use of convenience food in Northern Europe. The study draws on two quantitative sets of data, the primary data set (N = 8248) collected in 2012 in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, and the complementary data set (N = 800) collected in St. Petersburg area in 2013. In general, consumers’ attitudes towards convenience food were negative. Time saving was an important motivator for convenience consumption in all countries. The effects of other attitudes were diffuse and factors such as low cost, health effects, and taste of convenience food, affected convenience consumption differently in different countries. In the four Nordic countries women used less convenience food than men. In Finland and in Norway older respondents used convenience food less often than the young. Generally, the use of convenience food was most frequent among those living alone. The effects of education and occupation were small, implying that the phase of life is more important than social stratification in explaining convenience food consumption. In the St. Petersburg data, there were no differences related to social background.     

Consumers as legitimating agents: How consumer‐citizens challenge marketer legitimacy on social media

Previous research has shown that consumers increasingly challenge the legitimacy of marketers and unsolicited marketing communication in online contexts. Based on a qualitative study, this article examines how and for what reasons consumers challenge marketer legitimacy—the perceived appropriateness of marketers and their activities—in the empirical context of Reddit, a popular social news and community website. The study suggests that consumers challenge or accept marketer legitimacy in online communities based on particular, community and situation specific, legitimacy criteria that reflect and reproduce the values and norms of the community. In doing so, it is argued, consumers play a role as legitimating agents—consumer‐citizens that have the power to confer or deny legitimacy in the context of business‐society relations. Overall, the study advances knowledge in the field of consumer studies in two ways. First, it builds a symbolic interactionist perspective on consumer‐citizens as legitimating agents who enact their active citizenship role in the marketplace by assessing and constructing marketer legitimacy in online communities. Second, it offers an empirically grounded account of how and for what reasons consumer‐citizens challenge or accept the legitimacy of marketers and unsolicited marketing communication in online communities.     

Language ability and entrepreneurship education: Necessary skills for Europe’s start-ups?

Language ability and entrepreneurial education are seen as essential resources for start-ups operating in intensified landscapes of internationalisation and globalisation. Deemed as the necessary skills for corporate effectiveness vis-à-vis rivals, this paper responds to calls for increased understandings of cultural components as vital to entrepreneurship and the product of institutional forces. Thus, it explores (a) the impact language ability has on start-up expansion; (b) the perceptions of international relations as based on language ability as a tool for cross-cultural communication; and (c) the role of educational context from the entrepreneurs’ perspective. Based on interviews from European online start-ups across three discrete contexts—Finland, Portugal and Sweden—it concludes that contextual trends regarding language and education are founded upon the cultural-cognitive and normative pillars of institutionalisation. Further, by combining actor-context perspectives, it poses that language ability and education are resources borne from the domestic environment which positively moderate the start-up’s international success. Nevertheless, the notion of learnt entrepreneurship remains contested. Taken together, this study contributes by offering deeper insight into the role of context on entrepreneurial tendencies by combining resource and institutional perspectives.     

The impact of stress on tournament entry

Individual willingness to enter competitive environments predicts career choices and labor market outcomes. Meanwhile, many people experience competitive contexts as stressful. We use two laboratory experiments to investigate whether factors related to stress can help explain individual differences in tournament entry. Experiment 1 studies whether stress responses (measured as salivary cortisol) to taking part in a mandatory tournament predict individual willingness to participate in a voluntary tournament. We find that competing increases stress levels. This cortisol response does not predict tournament entry for men but is positively and significantly correlated with choosing to enter the tournament for women. In Experiment 2, we exogenously induce physiological stress using the cold-pressor task. We find a positive causal effect of stress on tournament entry for women but no effect for men. Finally, we show that although the effect of stress on tournament entry differs between the genders, stress reactions cannot explain the well-documented gender difference in willingness to compete.     

Doing sensory ethnography in consumer research

This paper is a contribution to sensory‐aware cultural consumer research. It suggests that while the audio‐visual domain is unquestionably a crucial ingredient of contemporary consumer culture, there is a pressing need to explore the role of the other senses as well. The study works towards a practice‐based culturalist approach to sensory ethnography, a perspective that allows consumer scholars to empirically account for the cultural aspects of the senses. Through an empirical case study on sport fishing, the paper scrutinizes the challenges and opportunities related to conducting sensory ethnography. In addition, it discusses the benefits of this approach in consumer research.     

A cost-benefit analysis of the random assignment UK Employment Retention and Advancement Demonstration

This article presents a cost-benefit analysis of Britain’s Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) demonstration, which was evaluated through the first large-scale randomized control trial in the UK. ERA used a combination of job coaching and financial incentives in attempting to help long-term unemployed men and low-income lone parents sustain employment and progress in work once they were employed. Using both administrative and survey data, ERA’s effects on benefits and costs were estimated through impact analyses, which exploited the experimental design. The findings indicated that ERA was cost beneficial for long-term unemployed adult men, but not for lone parents. The key findings appear robust to sensitivity tests. Uncertainty, as implied by the SEs of the estimated impacts, was addressed through a Monte Carlo analysis, an approach seldom previously used in cost-benefit analyses of social programs.     

Why is group-based pay perceived as meaningful,meaningless or negative? Exploring the meanings of pay suggested by reflection theory

This study explored the propositions of the reflection theory of pay [Thierry (2001), Work Motivation in the Context of a Globalizing Economy, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 149–166]. The theory is grounded in theories of individual motivation. However, in a group-based pay context more socially oriented motivational factors may also play a role. In addition, the theory does not take into account that pay may have negative meanings. In this study, we have adopted a qualitative approach to improve the understanding of what meanings group-based pay may have. The research questions were the following: (1) why is group-based result-oriented pay perceived as meaningful, (2) why is group-based result-oriented pay perceived as meaningless and (3) why is group-based result-oriented pay perceived to have a negative meaning. To study the meanings attached to group-based pay, we conducted 29 focus group interviews (88 employees) in six municipal organizations in Finland. The results showed that the reasons for perceiving group-based pay as meaningful were related to the value of money, compensation for performance, the positive messages signalled by the pay and positive outcomes. On the other hand, when pay was perceived as meaningless, the arguments were related to the weak instrumentality of money, weak links between performance and pay, incompatibility and lack of knowledge. The negative meanings were related to negative message conveyed by the pay and its outcomes. When these results were compared with four meanings proposed by reflection theory, all four categories were found in the speech of the interviewees. In addition, two new categories were found and designated as ‘messages’ and ‘outcomes’. These new categories were theoretically linked to social identity theory.     

Immigration and Access to Fringe Benefits: Evidence from the Tobacco Use Supplements

We examine the extent to which assimilation and residential ethnic enclaves are associated with immigrant access to smoking‐related fringe benefits. In particular, we consider access to office smoking bans and employer‐sponsored smoking cessation programs. We first document differences in access to these benefits between immigrant and native workers. Second, we show that assimilation is positively associated with smoking‐related fringe benefit access while enclave residence does not predict access. These findings broaden our understanding of immigrant employment.