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Since Kansas enacted the first blue sky law in 1911, securities regulation has sought to protect investors from fraud and speculation. Historically, this meant precluding substantial numbers of small businesses from raising capital in the form of equity investments. In order to facilitate small-business capital formation, in 2012 the federal government passed the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (JOBS Act). Although Title III of the JOBS Act required the Securities and Exchange Commission to undergo rulemaking to allow for small-dollar equity investments, the agency dragged its feet. In the interim, states anxious to jumpstart their own economies took the initiative. Legislation has now been enacted in over half the states. Although a laudable attempt to make raising capital easier, this legislation potentially provides an avenue for fraudulent offerings and significant investor losses. This Comment reviews the historical context in which state crowdfunding exemptions have been passed and compares enacted state laws to the JOBS Act's requirements. It argues that in order to effectively prevent fraud while enabling small-business capital formation, states should adopt specific protection measures in their crowdfunding laws. These prophylactic measures, including requirements on both issuers and intermediaries, as well as protections for investors, promise to better help business while also protecting investors.

Despite the dire implications of anthropogenic climate change, societies have failed to take comprehensive action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. A major reason for the lack of social and political engagement on this issue is the way in which political myths function to overcome the contradiction of environmental degradation and endless economic growth. Through a qualitative analysis of Australian business responses to climate change, we outline how the myths of corporate environmentalism, corporate citizenship, and corporate omnipotence absorb and adapt the critique of corporate capitalism while enabling ever more imaginative ways of exploiting nature -- a process of 'creative self-destruction'. Rather than seeking to falsify these myths, we explore how they are supported and what they seek to achieve -- the work of myths. Revealing the nature of current political myths in relation to climate change is, we argue, a necessary first step to constructing alternative imaginaries. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractA key response to environmental degradation, climate change and declining biodiversity has been the growing adoption of market principles in an effort to better value the social good of nature. Through concepts such as 'natural capitalism' and 'corporate environmentalism', nature is increasingly viewed as a domain of capitalist endeavour. In this article, we use convention theory and a pluralist understanding of social goods to investigatehowthe social good of the environment is usurped by the alternate social good of the market. Through analysis of interviews with sustainability managers and corporate documentation, we highlight how organizational actors employ compromise to temporally settle disputes between competing claims about environmental activities. Our findings contribute to an understanding of the processes of empirically grounded critique and the under‐theorized concept of compromise between social goods. Rather than protecting the environment, the corporate promotion of sustainability facilitates the corruption of the social good of the environment and its conversion into a market commodity.

Paul Gilding has had an extensive career in environmental activism and as a sustainability consultant to major global companies. His recent book The Great Disruption (Gilding, 2011), argues that consumer capitalism has reached it ecological and economic limits and we are entering a fundamental crisis. The following edited interview was conducted with Paul in January 2013 and explores how he imagines the future of a climate-shocked world.

In responding to climate change, organizations navigate in an increasingly volatile emotional milieu in which feelings of fear, anxiety, hostility and anger shape public debate. In this article, we explore how corporations have responded to the broader 'emotionology' surrounding climate change. Our focus is on the role of corporate sustainability specialists as intermediaries, or 'emotionology workers', acting between broader social debates and local organizational contexts. Through analysis of interview and documentary data from major Australian corporations we explore both the activities of these individuals in translating and shaping climate change emotionology within their organizations, and how they manage their own emotionality in this work. We find that sustainability professionals are key agents in the design and implementation of a positive emotionology of climate change as a challenge and opportunity for corporate action. However, these activities result in tensions and contradictions for these individuals in reconciling their own emotional engagement with climate change and the negative impact of corporate activities on the environment. Our analysis contributes to an understanding of the roles and activities of 'emotionology work', as well as broadening the concept of 'emotion work' to include those involved in promoting broader social change in organizational settings.

Despite increasing interest in corporate environmentalism, less attention has been directed to how corporations justify and defend their initiatives in this area. This is important in understanding how corporate environmentalism is legitimized in the face of crises, such as climate change, and the ongoing criticism of corporations' deleterious impacts upon the environment. Based on qualitative data from Australian corporations, we illustrate how organizations and managers employ a range of justifications for their activities in order to meet criticism and challenges. We identify different discursive legitimation strategies that are used by managers to deal with conflicts between justifications, and argue that this framework has broader implications in understanding the arguments that underpin social conflict over environmental sustainability.

This paper examines the empirical outcomes of the policies of nine monetary authorities (eight OECD nations and the Euro zone) so as to infer the strength and stability of the economic relationships behind those policies. Governments, responding to earlier rampant inflation, have in recent decades avowed to pursue monetary policies to maintain inflation at a low stable rate. In recent decades, the relationship between inflation and money supply, that is postulated in the received wisdom and confirmed by decades of observation, appears to be breaking down. In examining possible causes of this instability, this paper sees on-going changes in the velocity-of-money to be less plausible than shifting dominance in world currencies or the creative destruction of technological progress. This paper suggests the relative monetary stability of recent decades may be less achievable in the future.

While the concept of enterprise identity has been extensively discussed, the active role of individuals in promoting enterprise is less understood. This article presents enterprising selves not simply as a self-disciplinary outcome of power, but as agential, whereby actors support regimes of enterprise, either actively or symbolically. In particular, it explores a neglected group—former management consultants working as change agents within organizations. This `consulting diaspora' is appointed on the basis of the prestige of their former occupation, as well as their enthusiasm for, and skills in, change management. They also embody enterprise through their `personal brand' in the labour market and an anti-bureaucratic, pro-change orientation. However, these characteristics, combined with the perishability of their status, limit the ability of these actors to embed enterprise. Rather, it is through the loss of their novel, enterprising appearance—'going native'—that change is reinforced. Thus, paradoxically, their enterprising nature runs counter to the adoption of techniques of enterprise. This has implications for our understanding of enterprise as organizational change, as well as the promotion of management ideas more generally.

In this article we explore the construction of occupational identity amongst a new and significant occupation: management consultants. Extending a conceptual framework developed by Fine (1996), we argue that occupational identity is not a consistent whole, but constructed from imagery to interpret and manage situations commonly experienced by occupational members. We argue that consultants, as an occupation, face three key structural constraints as features of their work, which we term, legitimacy, efficiency and vulnerability. On the basis of our interview data, we identify five social roles around which occupational `rhetorics' are constructed — professional, prophet, partner, business person, and service worker. We explore how consultants use these rhetorics to respond to issues of legitimacy, efficiency and vulnerability, and also highlight how different imagery is used based on its situational salience.

This article reviews the implementation of supply chain management within the Australian food and grocery industry and examines the workplace implications of this new form of industry rationalization within the manufacturing, distribution and retailing components of the grocery supply chain. Based upon documentary sources and interviews with employers, consultants and trade union officials, we find the dominant workplace trend involves a focus on increased labour flexibility amongst upstream suppliers in response to the strategic power of the dominant supermarket chains. However, variations in labour use strategies and union responses across the supply chain also highlight the continued diversity of workplace regimes that result even within a highly concentrated product market. The implications of this case for broader debates on the process of `systemic rationalization' are explored.