Gender and climate change: A sustainable tourism perspective

The aim of this article is to examine whether female tourism entrepreneurs are more interested in climate change than male entrepreneurs are as part of their focus on sustainable entrepreneurial endeavors. A qualitative study of female tourism entrepreneurs is examined that focuses on three main climate change strategies: conservative, compliant, and proactive. The findings suggest that female tourism entrepreneurs are more influenced by their social circle and general interest in environmental issues that lead them to focus on climate change actions. The results of this study will help tourism providers, businesses, government, and the community better understand the role of gender in sustainable tourism entrepreneurship. Climate change is a topic of immense interest in society particularly for those in the tourism industry. Sustainable tourism entrepreneurs often focus on climate change action as a way to compete in the global marketplace and to derive a competitive advantage. Less well understood is the role of gender in sustainable tourism entrepreneurship particularly in terms of perceptions around climate change action.     

In absence of money: a field experiment on volunteer work motivation

Although volunteers are a critical resource for non-profit organizations, little is known about how best to motivate them to work. A non-profit organization asked episodic volunteers to produce handmade greeting cards to sell at a fundraising event. By running a natural field experiment, we study the effect of motivating these volunteers through (a) the opportunity to vote on how the money that was raised would be spent and (b) the prospect of individual performance feedback. We find an economically and statistically significant positive effect of both tools on the quantity of work done, while the quality is mostly unaffected. Moreover, we observe significant gender differences in responsiveness to the treatments. While the prospect for feedback is more motivating to men, women respond more strongly to the opportunity to decide how the money would be spent. Empowerment seems to be a simple way to increase engagement for people with low enjoyment.

     

Nuevo Latino: Rebranding Latin American Cuisine

Nuevo Latino Cuisine invites diners to experience the vertigo of consuming a reinvented version of traditional Latin American food while enjoying a cosmopolitan atmosphere at sophisticated restaurants. Using “border thinking” and critical ethnography, this paper discusses how the restaurant industry in the US reproduces colonial desire by aestheticizing and commodifying traditional meals. This article assesses the rebranding of Latin American Cuisine as a fashionable consumer trend where identity, class, and cultural representations are resignified through consumption practices. The central issue guiding this research consists of identifying the rationales and strategies used by the restaurant industry when rebranding Latin American cuisine. Understanding Nuevo Latino at the intersection of hybrid cultural forms, cosmopolitanism, and the power structures of market forces in late capitalistic societies is fundamental to assessing the colonization of lifeworlds by the economic system, which imposes an alternative process of subjection and subjectivation through consumption.     

The Difficult Relation between International Law and Politics: The Legal Turn from a Critical IPE Perspective

International law is currently undergoing a major transformation that has provoked a ‘legal turn’ in the field of International Relations. At the heart of this transformation are the juridification of international politics and subsequently the judicialisation of international law. This contribution argues that scholars of critical International Political Economy have not yet paid enough attention to this process. What is needed is a theory of international law that is able to grasp the societal implications of this transformation. In a first step some accounts drawing on Antonio Gramsci and Evgeny Pashukanis are presented, with a view to making their theory fruitful for analysing international law. Against the background of an empirical study that compares the global regulation of trade in goods with the trade in services, delivered notably through natural persons, some major shortcomings of these accounts are outlined. The last part of the contribution presents some ideas on how to further develop a critical theory of international (trade) law that introduces a communicative dimension into the legal turn with a view to distinguishing between different extra-economic dynamics.     

Carbon Accounting: Challenges for Research in Management Control and Performance Measurement

Carbon reduction programs and corporate emissions reporting have expanded rapidly across firms in response to climate change and global warming. This development is partly driven by institutional demands and partly by value creation considerations. The consequences of these developments for management accounting and control (MAC) are not clear, despite anecdotal evidence that suggests an increasing effort to incorporate carbon accounting into traditional decision and reporting processes. The reasons for this lack of clarity are the disproportionate focus in practice on carbon disclosure, compared to a small number of empirical studies, and the absence of an academic debate in this novel area from a MAC perspective. This paper seeks to stimulate such an academic debate by reviewing the extant literature, identifying key theoretical and empirical shortcomings of extant academic research, and outlining some directions for future studies on carbon accounting. These directions are inspired by more established MAC research that may help to guide and organize MAC research in the emerging and exciting field of carbon accounting.     

The effects of uncertainty on the roles of controllers and budgets: an exploratory study

This paper explores how contextual uncertainty and the use of the budgetary system explain cross-sectional variation in the organisational role of business unit controllers. We argue that there are complementarities between the role of the budgetary control system (i.e. coercive vs. enabling) and the role of the controller (i.e. corporate policeman vs. business partner). Thus, we explore both the direct effect of uncertainty on the role of the controller and the indirect effect through the role of the budgetary control system. Using survey data from 134 business unit controllers, we find that uncertainty provides a partial explanation of the variation in the role of budgetary control systems and in the role of controllers. In particular, our data suggest alignment between the coercive (enabling) use of the budgetary control system and the role of controllers acting as corporate policemen (business partners). These findings add to our understanding of the functioning of business unit controllers within their organisational context.     

Converging on Disaster: Climate Security and the Malthusian Anticipatory Regime for Africa

Malthus’s privileging of population growth as the main cause of poverty, scarcity and war still resonates widely in both the public policy arena and popular culture. It shapes dominant discourses about the relationship between climate change, conflict and security in Africa. This article examines what I call the Malthusian Anticipatory Regime for Africa (MARA). MARA represents the convergence of current international strategies for reducing high fertility in sub-Saharan Africa through long-acting female contraception with climate conflict narratives that blame environmental degradation on population pressure and portray young African men as a security threat. Together these serve as a powerful gendered rationale for Western humanitarian and military interventions. MARA also plays a role in justifying the new land enclosures on the continent. How can critical scholarship more effectively challenge MARA and intervene in the politics of anticipating the future?     

Who benefits most? The effects of managerial assistance on high- versus low-performing small businesses

This study investigates the relationship between outside managerial assistance and small business performance using a conditional quantile regression approach. The model was tested using a sample of 902 ventures that received managerial or technical assistance from the U.S. Small Business Administration's Entrepreneurial Development Resource Partners. Results show that outside assistance for primary business functions, such as marketing strategy, promotional strategy, financial management and general management, is more effective for firms with lower levels of financial performance. Outside assistance for secondary business functions, such as human resources and obtaining capital, is likely to have a greater impact on firms in the middle- to upper-quantile levels. Based on the results, we propose that managerial outside assistance providers should employ different approaches for firms with lower versus higher levels of financial performance.