Three Decades of Environmental Values: Some Personal Reflections

The journal Environmental Values is thirty years old. In this retrospective, as the retiring Editor-in-Chief, I provide a set of personal reflections on the changing landscape of scholarship in the field. This historical overview traces developments from the journal's origins in debates between philosophers, sociologists, and economists in the UK to the conflicts over policy on climate change, biodiversity/non-humans and sustainability. Along the way various negative influences are mentioned, relating to how the values of Nature are considered in policy, including mainstream environmental economics, naïve environmental pragmatism, the strategic role of corporations, neoliberalism and eco-modernism/techno-optimism. At the same time core value debates around intrinsic value in Nature and instrumentalism remain relevant, along with how plural environmental values can be articulated and acted upon. Naturalness, human relations to non-humans, and Nature as other, remain central considerations. The broadening of issues covered by the journal (e.g. covering social psychology, sociology and political science), reflect the need to address both human behaviour and the structure of social and economic systems to confront ongoing social-ecological crises.

The Political Economy of the Mental Health System: A Marxist Analysis

The present paper analyses the functions of the mental health system in relation to the economic organisation of society, using concepts derived from Marx’s work on political economy and building on previous critiques. The analysis starts from the position that mental health problems are not equivalent to physical, medical conditions and are more fruitfully viewed as problems of communities or societies. Using the example of the United Kingdom, it traces how a public mental health system evolved alongside capitalism in order to manage the problems posed by people whose behaviour was too chaotic, disruptive or inefficient to participate in a labour market based on exploitation. The system provided a mixture of care and control, and under recent, Neoliberal regimes, these functions have been increasingly transferred to the private sector and provided in a capitalistic manner. Welfare payments are also part of the system and support those less seriously affected but unable to work productively enough to generate surplus value and profit. The increased intensity and precarity of work under Neoliberalism has driven up benefit claims at the same time as the Neoliberal state is trying to reduce them. These social responses are legitimised by the idea that mental disorders are medical conditions, and this idea also has a hegemonic function by construing the adverse consequences of social and economic structures as individual problems, an approach that has been particularly important during the rise of Neoliberalism. The concept of mental illness has a strategic role in modern societies, therefore, enabling certain contentious social activities by obscuring their political nature, and diverting attention from the failings of the underlying economic system. The analysis suggests the medical view is driven by political imperatives rather than science and reveals the need for a system that is more transparent and democratic. While the mental health system has some consistent functions across all modern societies, this account highlights one of the endemic contradictions of the capitalist system in the way that it marginalises large groups of people by narrowing the opportunities to make an economic contribution to society.

Different roots, intertwined branches: linking International Business and Economic Geography through the Uppsala Model and Global Production Network

PurposeThe aim of this study is to propose a link between international business (IB) and economic geography, which are two streams of thought that have developed without one acknowledging the other. We use the Uppsala model and the Global Production Network as pillars to sustain this link. We expect that this research triggers a collaboration with allied social sciences in important debates surrounding the business-societal interface.Design/methodology/approachWe selected papers produced by Johanson and Vahlne to understand the development of the Uppsala model over 40 years. The same was done with the Global Production Network, where we scrutinized the work of Henderson, Coe, Dicken, Hess and Yeung – scholars from the Manchester School of Geography – in the last twenty years. Based on Humphrey et al. (2019), we applied an inductive and inferential approach to uncover similarities and differences between the Uppsala model and Global Production Network.FindingsThe Uppsala model reinforces the strategic role of network position in the internationalization process, while the Global Production Network aims to explain how the governance of global firms scattered world-wide affects the development and upgrading opportunities of the various regions and firms involved. Despite these clear differences, the geographical nature of IB and shared similarities accounting the network as a channel to foster and provide access to important resources and practices regarding management, coordination and governance of dispersed parts of multinational enterprises give room to using these two theories as pillars to link IB and economic geography.Originality/valueWhile attempts to link IB and economic geography are not new, none of these studies have focused on the Uppsala model and Global Production Network as pillars to create a link. We foresee an intense cross collaboration and an even possible renaissance of IB and economic geography to target the ever-changing business environment and its impact on social and economic development.

Fungsi Pengawasan Partisipatif Dalam Mewujudkan Pemilu Demokratis

The involvement of the community in the political process is very necessary to be considered as the existence of political apathy in the general election. The political process can be said to be democratic when the community is the main actor in making political decisions, so that democracy guarantees the participation of the community itself. Participatory election supervision is a joint way of how the community can participate in supervising both campaigns, calm periods and election day by transforming moral strength into strength. with the consequence of having knowledge and skills about electoral and monitoring techniques. The main problem in this research is how to implement participatory supervision in realizing democratic elections?. The results show that participatory supervision plays a strategic role in the formation of responsive and impartial electoral law, implementation of election law by supervisors at the field level and the formation of a community legal culture/culture that can support the creation of participatory supervision for the realization of democratic elections in 2024.

The Mapping of Mosque Community to Improve Mosque Engagement in Community

The Mosque in the Prophet Muhammad SAW era had a strategic role. The role is to be a solution and provide prosperity for the Muslims in particular and the surrounding community in general. Currently, the mosque plays a narrower role. It is a provider of facilities for pilgrims to carry out routine worship. In order for this role to increase, the mosque administrator, called DKM (Mosque Prosperity Council), must know his congregation more closely so that he knows what is needed and then comes to provide solutions. This study aims to create and implement an information system to manage congregational data to improve the role of mosques in the community. The main material that was obtained and prepared was data on residents around the mosque and the stakeholder needs (leaders of organizations around the mosque such as the heads of hamlet (RW), neighbourhood (RT), and youth organizations). The citizen data and stakeholder needs are used to develop the system. Because the specifications of the requirements can change during system development, the development method chosen is the prototyping method. There are two main outputs of this activity, namely the availability of a congregational data mapping application, and the installation of internet network infrastructure at the mosque. The two outputs in their implementation have proven to be beneficial for the congregation and the surrounding community. The information system provides improved service quality to pilgrims and residents in various activities such as zakat and qurbani. Meanwhile, Internet infrastructure provides new hope in easing the burden of community quotas and bringing children closer to the mosque.

Innovative Adaptation in Strategic Organizational Resilience

This chapter has the purpose to analyze the implications of innovative adaptation in strategic organizational resilience. It is assumed that organizational resilience has a strategic role designed and implemented to promote organizational community resilience to survive, adaptive innovation, and achieve success after a disaster. The method employed is the reflective and analytical review of the theoretical and empirical literature to clarify the relevant issues of innovative innovation in strategic organizational resilience. It is concluded that innovative adaptation and engineering resilience strategies achieve organizational resilience as the capability to self-renew through innovation.

Identifying Innovations in Human Resources

HR is evolving into a more technology-based profession because organizations needs to streamline HR processes and reduce administrative burden, reducing administrative cost; compete more effectively with global talent; improve services and access data to the employees and managers; provide real-time metrics in order tom on spot decisions for the decision makers; and manage the workforce more effectively and enable the HR to transform so it can play more strategic role in the business and operations. The purpose of this chapter is to develop a meaningful debate on the innovations in human resource in terms of new ideas, methods, and technology to better meet the evolving requirement of the organization and workforce. Anticipating and exploring the future needs and circumstances rather than simply finding some responses to the situation, this chapter highlights challenges and prospects related to innovations in HR.

The Link Between Climate Change and Digitization of Archives in South Africa

This chapter assesses the link between climate change and digitisation of archives in South Africa. The study found linkage between flooding, fire, and digitization of archives in the sense that records required long-term preservation to be accessible. The chapter focuses on converting paper-based records into digital platforms as a strategic role to prevent records from damage. Heritage institution such as the National Archives of South Africa is in the forefront of the preservation of archives in South Africa. It is their national mandate to preserve archival materials and make them accessible to various stakeholders. The success of digitization is dependent on the organisation strategy. This means that partnership, privacy, copyright need to be considered. The research found that most of the heritage institutions in South Africa lack digitization strategy, which led to loss of institutional memory.