(Can the writer help me decide) Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 2

(Can the writer help me decide) - Essay Example In â€Å"Bad Weather: Planetary Crisis,† Masco (2010) studies the development of and competition between two kinds of planetary crises- the nuclear war and climate change. The security state is linked to the concept of the planetary crisis because, on the one hand, it uses the latter when it advances the former’s development and growth in reach and control; on the other hand, it disregards the latter if it contradicts or hinders its ends. Ironically, another important link is that the security state, in its desire to control planetary crises, is only creating more of them, which can potentially lead to new planetary crises with long-term negative impacts on living things and the biosphere. The security state exploits the planetary crisis for its own gains and disregards it if it hinders its overarching goal of a â€Å"U.S.-centric world† (Masco 2014: 1). The security state uses the planetary crisis if it can be a platform for greater control over and outside its national boundaries. Masco (2014) explains that the first kinds of planetary crises that were of interest to the security state were usually threats to national security, such as the Cold War and national and global terrorists. He argues that the state uses these threats to magnify imagined horrific futures, in order to generate fear and terror that could justify what Cheney (2001) called as the â€Å"new normalcy† (qtd. in Masco 2014: 8). This new normalcy refers to the public’s acceptance of the state’s ever increasing incursions on civil rights and freedoms. These are changes that have â€Å"institutional, technological, and affective levels, reordering domestic politics and geo politics in a startlingly economical gesture† (Masco 2014: 8). They include scientific studies that expand military technology, covert operations that collect intelligence about national and other

To what extent do companies benefit Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

To what extent do companies benefit - Essay Example Such actions suggest that corporations will increasingly be held accountable for activity of concern to multiple stakeholder groups. As a result there will likely be a renewed interest in identifying the dimensions and consequences of corporate social responsibilities. Cameron has suggested that multiple perspectives of organizational effectiveness exist and that "consensus regarding the best, or sufficient, set of indicators of effectiveness is impossible to obtain" (1986: 541). The same arguments can be made regarding social performance as a specific aspect of overall corporate performance. Social responsibility continues to be a poorly defined as well as difficult to measure concept. There appears to be no real agreement as to what constitutes social performance. What is indicated, however, is the need to apply measures which address multiple criteria of social performance. This study attempts to specify the underlying dimensions of a multiple measure of corporate social responsibility and investigate the relationship between corporate social performance and multiple measures of financial performance. For the purposes of this study, corporate social performance represents a measure of a firm's attentiveness to multiple stakeholder groups. ... This perspective generally cast corporate activity as a zero-sum game. Whatever resources were expended in the interests of social responsibility came at the expense of shareholders (Wartick and Cochran, 1985). The interests of shareholders and other stakeholders were defined implicitly as conflicting and mutually exclusive. Many criticisms have been leveled at this perspective and it seems safe to conclude that corporations are no longer viewed, even theoretically, as solely economic institutions (Sharfman, 1992). At a very minimum, there appears to be a consensus that firms serve multiple constituencies and stakeholder groups whose memberships are overlapping and whose interests are interdependent (Aram, 1989; Freeman, 1984; Nash, 1990). An understanding of such relationships and an attendant concern for the interests of all stakeholder groups may force firms to act in a socially responsible way regardless of their motivation (Sen, 1993). Out of these perspectives come varied hypotheses regarding the relationship between social responsibility and corporate economic performance. When corporations are viewed as economic institutions, a negative relationship between social responsibility and profitability is assumed (Ullmann, 1985). The opposing hypothesis suggests a positive relationship between social responsibility and performance. Proponents of this perspective argue that socially concerned management is likely to also possess the skills necessary to achieve superior financial performance (Alexander and Buchholz, 1978; Metzger et al., 1993). A final perspective hypothesizes an inverted U-shaped correlation between social and economic performance. To an