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Over the past decade, the World Bank has moved closer to accepting the International Labour Organization's (ILO's) core labour standards (CLS) and, in the process, sought to balance its promotion of labour market flexibility with a new focus on labour market regulation. The Bank's change of approach includes the 2009 decision to review and subsequently remove its labour market flexibility indicator (used to score the extent of labour market flexibility amongst its member-states) from its flagship publication, Doing Business. The aim of this article is to chart the softening of the Bank's emphasis on labour market flexibility and distil the contributing factors. With reference to the global financial crisis and the Bank's organizational characteristics, the article evaluates the work of international trade unions and the ILO as agenda-setters and compliance monitors and pro-labour industrialized states as 'insider advocates' in broadening the Bank's commitment to the CLS. The article demonstrates the influential nature of tacit coalitions between state and non-state actors representing a coalescence of normative values and economic interests. The Bank's changing approach to labour markets also contributes new evidence to the emerging, yet tentative, consensus that the neoliberal paradigm is undergoing a rebalancing, rather than an overhaul, in the post-crisis era. Adapted from the source document.

In 1571 the Nuremberg physician, Joachim Camerarius (1534-1598), submitted for the appraisal of his city's Senate, a substantial manuscript titled "Short and Ordered Considerations for the Formation of a Well-Ordered Regime." As one of these 'considerations', he petitioned the Council to establish a Collegium medicum: an institutional body that would operate under the council's mandate to regulate and reform the practice of medicine in the Imperial City of Nuremberg. Although never published, this text became the manifesto of an ongoing movement for the reform and reorganization of medicine throughout the sixteenth century. This 'medical reformation' was a professional claim to social status and political authority on the part of academically educated municipal physicians. More elusively and more importantly, the medical reformation was also the consequence of a series of epistemological shifts within medical knowledge, as practiced and conceived by German municipal physicians in the sixteenth century. In a series of chapters on publications, personal libraries, and correspondence networks respectively, this dissertation examines the way in which the Nuremberg physicians re-created their practice of medicine, privileging their medical 'methodologies,' tactile processes, observation, consensus between physicians and new pharmaceutical distillations, over the simple reception of Galenic branches of knowledge. The municipal physicians and their medical reformation offer a perspective on distinctly artisanal practices: experience, demonstration, an engagement with the vernacular, and professional consensus. However, they do so from a non-artisanal social background. As all were graduates of German, French and Italian universities, no one more embodies the world of scholastic learning than they. Their claim to professional primacy was based not just on an appreciation of the value of new mechanical and technical processes, such as pharmacy, diagnostics and treatment but, also, on an appropriation of their social role. When the Collegium medicum was established in 1592, it elevated university educated physicians above other practitioners in the medical marketplace. It restricted pharmaceutical innovation to physicians, rather than apothecaries, awarded to the physicians jurisdiction over the allocation of medical duties among the medical marketplace, and put in place a set of relationships between physician, patient and polity that endures to this day.

Demands for sustainability policies have set new challenges for business both on the individual firm level and on the level of organized business interests. This edited volume brings together economic, social, environmental, and cultural dimensions of sustainability that comprise different challenges for business processes and activities. The aim is to develop an overarching framework to the study of sustainability and business and to advance an interdisciplinary analytical perspective. The book establishes a balanced account that equally represents business as problem causers as well as problem solvers, and therefore responds to the urgent need to investigate the intersection between sustainability issues and business participation.

AbstractThe political strategy of forum shopping is an under‐researched but highly relevant concept for understanding the dynamics of global governance. Forum shopping involves actors seeking to realise their policy objectives within preferred policy arenas on the basis of an arena's particular governing characteristics. We examine the forum shopping behaviour of the key states, business and non‐governmental groups in regard to three policy issues: labour standards, intellectual property rights, and chemicals regulation. Our preliminary analysis is centred around the questions of why actors forum shop, the circumstances in which forum shopping enables actors to succeed in promoting their interests, and the impact of forum shopping on the effectiveness of global governance. Our cases suggest an arena's membership, issue mandate, decision making procedures and enforcement capacity are the key characteristics that shape actors' arena preferences. Another important implication is that a multi‐arena global governance system comprised of duplication and overlap in issue mandate (rather than large multilateral single issue arenas) may be beneficial for advancing actors' policy agendas. The overarching goal of the article is to spark more systematic research into the often practiced but under‐theorised phenomenon of forum shopping.Policy ImplicationsGlobal governance is achieved through action in multiple arenas, which provide different opportunities for political action. An arena's membership, issue mandate, decision making procedures and enforcement capacity should be taken into account by policymakers in assessing appropriate arenas for advancing their goals.Entrepreneurial actors take advantage of 'strategic inconsistencies' in the characteristics of international policy arenas in order to progress or block the development of proposals through incremental decisions.Policymakers must be alert to the likely use of forum shopping by other actors, including business actors and NGOs, which may advance or stymie the development of policy agendas in one arena via action in alternative arenas.

BACKGROUND: Determinants of COVID-19 vaccine acceptance are complex; how perceptions of the effectiveness of science, healthcare and government impact personal COVID-19 vaccine acceptance is unclear, despite all three domains providing critical roles in development, funding and provision, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccine. OBJECTIVE: To estimate impact of perception of science, healthcare systems, and government along with sociodemographic, psychosocial, and cultural characteristics on vaccine acceptance. DESIGN: We conducted a global nested analytical cross-sectional study of how the perceptions of healthcare, government and science systems have impacted COVID-19 on vaccine acceptance. SETTING: Global Facebook, Instagram and Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk) users from 173 countries. PARTICIPANTS: 7411 people aged 18 years or over, and able to read English, Spanish, Italian, or French. MEASUREMENTS: We used Χ(2) analysis and logistic regression-derived adjusted Odds Ratios (aORs) and 95% CIs to evaluate the relationship between effectiveness perceptions and vaccine acceptance controlling for other factors. We used natural language processing and thematic analysis to analyse the role of vaccine-related narratives in open-ended explanations of effectiveness. RESULTS: After controlling for confounding, attitude toward science was a strong predictor of vaccine acceptance, more so than other attitudes, demographic, psychosocial or COVID-19-related variables (aOR: 2.1; 95% CI: 1.8 to 2.5). The rationale for science effectiveness was dominated by vaccine narratives, which were uncommon in other domains. LIMITATIONS: This study did not include participants from countries where Facebook and Amazon mTurk are not available, and vaccine acceptance reflected intention rather than actual behaviour. CONCLUSIONS: As our findings show, vaccine-related issues dominate public perception of science's impact around COVID-19, and this perception of science relates strongly to the decision to obtain vaccination once available.

Entscheiden stellt einen Grundbegriff moderner Gesellschaften und ihrer Selbstbeschreibung dar. Allerdings ist sowohl die Art und Weise als auch das Ausmaß, wie über Entscheiden geredet, wie es begrifflich gefasst und wie darüber erzählt werden kann, historisch bedingt. Semantiken und Narrative des Entscheidens unterscheiden sich daher je nach sozialem und kulturellem Kontext. Der Band verfolgt das Ziel, in einer epochen- und disziplinübergreifenden Perspektive sowohl dem Wortfeld ›Entscheiden‹ wie auch den Narrativen, mit denen Entscheiden als eine Form des sozialen Handelns dargestellt wird, in ihrem historischen Wandel nachzugehen. Mithilfe historisch-semantischer und narratologischer Methoden untersuchen die Beiträge unterschiedliche Fallbeispiele, die vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart und von Europa bis Indien reichen.