This chapter examines the development of digital business. It commences with a reflection on the huge benefits arising from digitalisation, including greater productivity, more competition, greater choice and convenience, innovation and profitability. It also notes that it is extremely difficult to separate the digital economy from the rest of the economy. The key features of digital businesses include direct and indirect network effects, economies of scale, anti-competitive lock-in effects, the importance of data and complementarity. The four most significant new types of business models are explained: multi-sided platforms, resellers, vertically integrated firms and input suppliers. Lastly, there are observations made about the key characteristics of highly digitalised business models which have significance and importance in the context of looking at the challenges to the international tax system.

This chapter reviews the use of chess in business, health, and education. In business, chess has been used with educational purposes, and as a model to evaluate game-theory aspects of the game. In health, there are applications of chess to address problems such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), neurodegenerative disorders, or schizophrenia. In education, chess has become widely used as a pedagogical method thought to entail education al benefits for languages, mathematics, concentration, self-control, or the development of socio-affective competences. Some recent studies suggest significant higher levels of academic performance for schoolchildren and adolescents into chess-based teaching or who practice chess on a regular basis, when compared with students uninvolved in chess playing or chess instruction. Another set of studies, however, question the purported benefits of chess training for formal education. According with this latter point of view, there are both conceptual and methodological concerns that hinder in a great extent the available evidence about the association of chess training with academic achievement. Two of these issues relate with the transfer of abilities across domains, and with the concept of statistical power, which are addressed in greater depth within this chapter.

This chapter analyzes Brazil’s 500 largest firms and financial institutions in the mid-2010s to evaluate how well corporate life fit into a Latin American variety of capitalism that Schneider (2013) termed “hierarchical market capitalism.” While Brazil adhered to the general characteristics of the hierarchical market economy (HME), Brazilian firm life differed from other HMEs in the region due to significant state activity, the presence of large but relatively undiversified business groups, and credit and equity markets with a large dose of state participation that enabled firms to behave and organize in ways that differed from their regional peers. Five characteristics of Brazilian firm life stood out: the segmented firm structure; the muscular influence of developmentalist policy tools on firms; the segmentation of labor markets; the segmentation of skills; and the segmentation of social policy provision. This segmentation had a variety of implications for firms’ incentives to participate in politics.

Many books that aspire to go beyond descriptions of motivational processes to address the question of how to motivate self and others adopt a tactical approach that is overly mechanical and often limited to a narrow range of change pathways and targets of intervention. To avoid these pitfalls, this chapter focuses on broad principles for enhancing optimal human functioning rather than offering simplistic “prescriptions” for motivating self and others. In doing so, we also explain why the uniqueness of individual motivational patterns – psychologically, developmentally, and contextually – makes it impossible to offer formulaic advice for motivating self and others. To engage the reader’s interest, we use a novel Q&A format after the initial presentation of overarching principles to illustrate how a “principled” approach to motivating self and others can be used to diagnosis motivational problems, identify multiple targets of intervention, and envision a variety of pathways to more optimal functioning.

The number of transnational corporations (TNCs) – including parent companies and subsidiaries – has exploded over the last forty years. In 1970, there were approximately 7,000 TNCs in the world; today, there are more than 100,000 with over 900,000 foreign affiliates.1 TNCs are now so complex and amorphous in their structure – even compared to ten years ago – that it is difficult for even the most sophisticated legal systems to adequately hold TNCs accountable for the harms they create in countries where they operate, even as the TNCs make enormous profits at the expense of often vulnerable communities. The truth is, certain legal doctrines, often devised nearly a century ago or longer, are too outdated to sufficiently assure that TNCs are held accountable for harms they create in today’s world, where TNCs operate globally, and often have structures that transcend a single country or jurisdiction.

This chapter provides an overview of the book in terms of concepts and content. It introduces the reader to the questions of what accountability for corporate complicity in human rights violations is, why they take place, and when, where, and how they unfold. It also explores obstacles that have blocked accountability efforts. The chapter sets out the concepts of “corporate,” “complicity,” “accountability,” and “transitional justice.” It examines when and why there is need for accountability for these types of violations. It further considers where corporate accountability could take place, in courts and in truth commissions. The chapter sets out the argument for how accountability processes have occurred, their reliance on civil society demand and institutional innovators to overcome the absence of international pressure and the obstacles posed by a powerful business veto. It uses these factors to present the “justice from below” model used in the book. It suggests that the model functions like Archimedes’ Lever in putting the right tools in weak hands to lift the weight of international human rights accountability. A chapter outline is also provided.

This chapter explores how accountability barriers can be overcome. First, it contrasts transitional justice accountability efforts with regard to state and rebel actors with corporate accountability efforts. It explores why the same international pressure that played such a crucial role in advancing accountability in such contexts has not emerged in corporate accountability efforts. It also looks at veto players and examine why their power was reduced in those efforts, and are so strong in corporate accountability.

Second, it examines conceptually when and why local efforts can overcome the absence of international pressure and the power of the corporate veto to advance accountability. It discusses the significance of domestic actors over international ones bridging two previously unconnected literatures: transitional justice and business and human rights approaches.

The concluding section develops the Archimedes’ lever analogy for corporate accountability from below, establishing scope conditions, key actors and factors at work. It contends that corporate accountability from below is not merely an abstract analytical exercise. It is one grounded in, and in dialogue with, empirical, comparative, and historical analyses. It further aims to sharpen, refine, adapt, and make accessible to corporate accountability advocates, a set of tools to advance corporate accountability.

This chapter summarizes the key arguments in the book. The chapter explains why a specific children’s rights focus is granted within the broader business and human rights debates and seeks to move beyond legal fiction to situate businesses as children’s rights duty-bearers. The chapter summarizes the arguments and analysis on how children and their rights are treated within existing normative frameworks on business and human rights. The legalization of business duties and norms specifically related to children’s rights within that context are sketched out. Insights from the four case illustrations are used in refining and defining the need for a forward-looking proposal on duty-bearing, which concludes the chapter.

− ESG–Agency scholarship highlights the fragmented, expanding, and complex forms of authority that prescribe, steer, and govern behaviour on environmental issues. − Agency scholarship on earth system governance covers interdisciplinary debates in four broad areas: the types of agents, the ways authority is exercised, the nature of agents’ influence, and the varieties of governance structures or architectures within which agents act.− Even with increasing scholarship into the fragmentation of authority and multiplication of the types agents to include nonstate, transnational, and subnational actors, states continue to be the centre of agency scholarship. Future research is needed on agency theory and the theoretical nature of relationships between actors and within differing geographic, economic, and political contexts.

In addition to being a writer, Mark Twain was a businessman, although almost always a failure. He was an inventor who tried to market his ideas, with mixed results. He founded his own publishing company when he grew tired of dealing with publishers, and for a time he was successful, although that too ended in bankruptcy. Like others in the Gilded Age, which he named, he was an investor, again with mixed and finally disastrous results. Although he criticized his age as one of monetary grasping, he himself was fully inculcated in his age. He lived in an age of great economic change, and his works reflect a tortured relationship with money and economics.

As the fastest growing economy in the world, India is uniquely placed to deliver on its commitments to inclusive and sustainable development and ensuring the balance among its three pillars – economic, social and environmental. Since partnerships by companies are expected in this endeavour, a need for companies to consider long-term corporate sustainability arises. In this respect, the chapter covers issues relating to corporate India’s willingness and capacity for such participation, including whether the business environment is facilitative for such participation and whether the experience to date provides reason for optimism. As there are conflicting policy objectives, it becomes imperative to take account of the governance mechanisms that affect corporate sustainability in India and highlight the seemingly unconnected issues that underpin the business environment. The chapter discusses current business practices and impacts of business operations, as well as recent legal and regulatory reforms impacting corporate sustainability.