Chapter Five examines the role of international law in State Department policymaking. It describes the formal and informal decision-making processes within the State Department, focusing on the influential role of the Legal Adviser and the Legal Adviser’s Office. The chapter then examines closely the weight given by policymakers to legal advice and the nature of the interaction between policymakers and lawyers. Policymakers, at least at higher levels, generally have final decision-making authority, but the views of the Legal Adviser’s Office can be determinative in the relatively rare instances when the lawyers deem a course of action conclusively illegal. Otherwise, the lawyers’ advice is influential, but its weight may vary depending on the circumstances, including the nature of the national interest involved. Many former officials indicated that the development of policy was often a collaborative and constructive process. The lawyers were usually willing to work with policymakers, and they were often willing to find alternative courses of action within the law, though they would not usually budge on an interpretation of the law. Some former officials indicated that their relationship involved greater contestation, resembling a negotiation. When international law conflicted with significant policy interests, policymakers could sometimes seek to overcome those obstacles.

As scholars and activists seek to define and promote greater corporate political responsibility (CPR), they will benefit from understanding practitioner perspectives and how executives are responding to rising scrutiny of their political influences, reputational risk and pressure from employees, customers and investors to get involved in civic, political, and societal issues. This chapter draws on firsthand conversations with practitioners, including executives in government affairs; sustainability; senior leadership; and diversity, equity and inclusion, during the launch of a university-based CPR initiative. I summarize practitioner motivations, interests, barriers and challenges related to engaging in conversations about CPR, as well as committing or acting to improve CPR. Following the summary, I present implications for further research and several possible paths forward, including leveraging practitioners’ value on accountability, sustaining external calls for transparency, strengthening awareness of systems, and reframing CPR as part of a larger dialogue around society’s “social contract.”

This book explores some implications of studying international relations from a systemic perspective. This chapter takes on the preliminary tasks of defining systems, identifying distinctive characteristics of systemic explanations, and situating systems approaches in a broader context of relational framings. A system is a bounded set of components of particular types, arranged in definite ways, operating in a specific fashion to produce characteristic outcomes, some of which are emergent. The arrangement and operation of the components produce “emergent” “systems effects;” properties and outcomes that cannot be fully understood through knowledge of the parts considered separately. I emphasize the relational character of systemic explanations and their reliance on mechanisms and processes, in order to foster developing a relational processual systemic perspective within a pluralistic IR.

Multilevel multicomponent complex adaptive systems are not reducible to the sum of the causal effects of independent variables. Causal inference, which has a privileged place in contemporary IR (and many other social sciences) cannot address systems effects, which arise from interdependent elements and operations (not the impact of independent variables on dependent variables). Systems effects explanations explain why by showing how. They identify mechanisms and processes of causation. They thus are able to establish causal efficacy; that is, show how processes produce – actually cause – outcomes (rather than merely identify some elements that are part of an unspecified causal process). Such an understanding leads us away from a “laws and theories” conception of science, which remains popular in Physics and Chemistry, towards a “models and mechanisms” understanding, which predominates in the life sciences (which, on their face, seem a much better model for the social sciences).

The remaining chapters of this book begin to sketch a new systemic/relational perspective and illustrate some of its implications and attractions. Like systems approaches, relational approaches in contemporary IR, which employ frames such as networks, fields, practices, and assemblages, stress the arrangement of parts of wholes. A systems perspective, however, highlights a tendency among relationalists to overemphasize relations and underemphasize processes. (The frame “relationalism” draw attention away from processes and usually leaves obscure how relations and processes are related.) I argue for a systemic/relational perspective that understands social systems as configuring configurations that configure. And I argue that these hierarchically layered assemblages can best be understood through relational processual explanations.

The speed of sound in gases is derived in a manner similar to what was done for the speed of waves on a string. The mass of the gas molecules provides the inertial contribution. The gas laws, along with approximation techniques, are used to estimate the return force. The appropriate process is adiabatic, and so the speed of sound depends on the adiabatic constant. The adiabatic constant, in turn, depends largely on the shape of the molecules. Excellent agreement is found between the rather simple theory and measured results. The speed of sound in a gas is found to depend on the (average) mass of the molecules, temperature, and the adiabatic constant (the shape of the molecules); however, there is very little pressure dependence when the pressure is near 1 atmosphere.

The success of legal time is to be found in its exterior and standardized character. In this chapter, it argued on the basis of Heidegger and Bergson that such a perspective misses the peculiar characteristics of human time and does not relate well to processes. The first characteristic of human time is that it cannot be stopped. This does not only imply that time is finite, it also means that human time inevitably moves forward from birth to one’s inescapable death. Furthermore, human time cannot be traversed: in a human life, one cannot actually go back to the past or move forward to the future. A third characteristic of human time lies in its irreducible relationship with eternity. If one wants to eternally exclude someone, it is unclear how long this will actually last. Bergson furthermore reminds us that the reference to processes is always inadequate, it is qualitatively different from what it refers. We see this in the discussion of formal and material criteria used to refer to the process of migrants living within a certain territory. Two dominant approaches – jus domicilii and jus nexi – both ultimately fail to grasp such process.

Chapter 8 explores the ways in which the press talk about people having mental illness using a mixed-methods approach. In the chapter, the frequency and semantic and pragmatic content of the verbs ‘suffer’ and ‘ experience’ in the context of prescribed forms for talking about having mental illness are investigated. I show that ‘suffer’ and ‘experience’ occur in different semantic contexts in the MI 1984–2014 Corpus as well as general language corpora, which may contribute to ‘suffer’ being a more problematic term for describing mental health than ‘experience’. Moreover, I show that ‘suffer’ is proportionally less likely to be used in first-person narratives because ‘suffering’ is attributed to people with mental illness by others, for example, medical professionals, in reported speech. I bring together my findings in a set of lexicogrammatical heuristics based on the semantic content of ‘suffer’ and ‘experience’ in context (e.g. whether the word encodes animacy or is temporally bounded).

Chpater 4 argues that an account of causation in terms of quasi-inertial processes and interferences handles problematic cases of pre-emption and overdetermination better than rival accounts. It also explains why and how the causal relations fail to be transitive.

I argue that our ordinary concept of causation (‘disruptive causation’) can be spelled out in terms of quasi-inertial processes and interferences. These processes and factors, in turn, can be fully explicated in terms of the generalisations provided by physics, biology or other sciences. The quasi-inertial processes in particular can be characterised in terms of the behaviour systems are disposed to in the absence of interfering factors and thus in terms of ceteris paribus generalisations and their underlying dispositions.

Good nursing practice is based on evidence and undertaking a community health needs assessment is a means to providing the evidence to guide community nursing practice. A community health needs assessment is simply a process that examines the health status and social needs of a population. It may be conducted at a whole-of-community level, a sub-community level or even a sub-system level. Nursing practice frequently involves gathering data and assessing individuals or families to determine appropriate nursing interventions. This concept is transferable to an identified community, when the community itself is viewed as being the client. This chapter focuses on exploring the principles and processes involved in undertaking a community health needs assessment.

Good nursing practice is based on evidence and undertaking a community health needs assessment is a means to providing the evidence to guide community nursing practice. A community health needs assessment is simply a process that examines the health status and social needs of a population. It may be conducted at a whole-of-community level, a sub-community level or even a sub-system level. Nursing practice frequently involves gathering data and assessing individuals or families to determine appropriate nursing interventions. This concept is transferable to an identified community, when the community itself is viewed as being the client. This chapter focuses on exploring the principles and processes involved in undertaking a community health needs assessment.

Multi-stakeholder mechanisms have been touted as a more democratic and equitable alternative to forest and land use decision-making. It has been argued that these processes do not address power relations and thus maintain the status quo. In this chapter, we examine eight Multi-stakeholder fora in the Peruvian Amazon, half of which have been set up in the Madre de Dios region, and the other half in the San Martin region, both in the Peruvian Amazon. These regions represent two different poles of development paradigms in Peru. While the chapter does not provide a definitive answer around whether multi-stakeholder processes can address power inequalities, three preliminary ideal types are used to analyze these mechanisms, drawn from a realist synthesis review of the literature: decision-making, management and influence. This chapter illuminates how multi-stakeholder fora are affected by their contexts, as well as their process and outcomes.

Transnational legal orders are an important feature of the contemporary global order, but they are challenging to study since they take many different forms, change over time, and consist of both formal and informal legal mechanisms. They lack the centralized political and legal systems of nation states, which are more capable of exerting formal control. Focusing on the processes, practices, and ideologies of transnational legal orders, as the chapters in this volume do, provides a valuable way to understand the way such orders develop and function. The chapters analyze the dynamics of creation, transformation, and demise of these forms of social organization through the in-depth analysis of individual TLOs engaged in controlling criminal behavior. Taken together, these chapters provide a rich understanding of this important and complex phenomenon.

Just like everyone else, nurses sometimes make mistakes that can result in harm to others. The Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia (NMBA) Code of Conduct for Nurses (NMBA 2018) makes a number of statements in relation to the safe conduct of nursing practice. These statements reflect the expectation that nurses are aware of and committed to industry-wide standards of safety and quality in their practice. Consequently, one could infer that nurses have a moral obligation to deal with clinical errors and incidents in an open, honest and constructive fashion. Some clinical incidents will be the result of clinical error, which is a failure by a clinician to observe the appropriate standards of knowledge and practice. The causes of mistakes can vary greatly too, from the simple and obvious, to complex and systematic problems of workplace culture. How you, as a nurse, respond to your own clinical errors and incidents and those of others is a measure of your professional and moral character and competency.