Many global challenges cannot be addressed by one single actor alone. Achieving sustainability requires governance by state and non-state market actors to jointly realise public values and corporate goals. As a form of public-private governance, voluntary standards involving governments, non-governmental organisations and companies have gained much traction in recent years and have been in the limelight of public authorities and policymakers. From a firm perspective, sustainability standards can be a way to demonstrate that they engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR) in a credible way. To capitalise on their CSR activities, firms need to ensure their stakeholders are able to recognise and assess their CSR quality. However, because the relative observability of CSR is low and since CSR is a contested concept, information asymmetries in firm-stakeholder relationships arise. Adopting CSR standards and using these as signalling devices is a strategy for firms to reduce these information asymmetries, by revealing their true CSR quality. Against this background, this article investigates the voluntary ISO 26000 standard for social responsibility as a form of public-private governance and contends that, despite its objectives, this standard suffers from severe signalling problems. Applying signalling theory to the ISO 26000 standard, this article takes a critical stance towards this standard and argues that firms adhering to this standard may actually emit signals that compromise rather than enhance stakeholders' ability to identify and interpret firms' underlying CSR quality. Consequently, the article discusses the findings in the context of public-private governance, suggests a specification of signalling theory and identifies avenues for future research.
This paper explores the creation and use of a long-term global tourism transport model for private and public sector tourism policy makers. Given that technology is unlikely to reduce tourism transport's impact on climate change sufficiently to avoid serious dangers, behavioural change is necessary. The model presented here helps policy makers and the tourism sector evaluate behavioural change measures. Such tools to assess long-term (up to a century) policy impacts do not currently exist. Projecting behavioural change over such long periods is difficult with contemporary economic modelling. This paper's model is founded in psychological economics theory and mechanisms at work in product diffusion. It describes the tourism system based on identifiable mechanisms and not on statistical relations with only current validity. It delivers global numbers of trips and distances travelled per transport mode as a function of transport cost, travel time, population and income distribution. The model is based on theories including product innovation theory (Bass model) and prospect theory (psychological value). It has been successfully calibrated to tourism development between 1900 and 2005 and tested against future low and high growth economic and demographic scenario combinations. Implications for tourism travel and climate change are discussed.
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Teacher education is in a state of change. There is a new focus on professional competence, including the competence for further development and learning, conceived of as workplace learning. Teacher shortages put pressure on the development of alternative routes to teaching. The arrival of prospective teachers with experience and qualifications in other areas than education requires adaptive programs, with a greater emphasis on professional learning in school. It is argued that promoting professional workplace learning asks for a conceptual clarification, based on new theory of learning and concepts of professionalism. A definition of professional learning is proposed. Some examples of new practice in teacher education are discussed.
