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ABSTRACT We selected eight toy suppliers from three emerging markets: China, Vietnam, and India, as research objects and adopted grounded analysis and multi-case study to explore the effectiveness, interrelationship, and function contexts of the global supply chain governance model. The study found that (1) contractual governance and relational governance affect the performance of suppliers’ social responsibilities and the overall performance of the supply chain; (2) the relationship between the two governance models can have a substitute view and a complementary view. They have similar functions and unique functions, which can have different advantages under different circumstances; and (3) in global supply chain governance of emergent markets, three combinations of the two governance models effectively promote social responsibility and performance: the combination of high relational and low contractual governance, the combination where relational and contractual governance are balanced, and the combination of high contractual and low relational governance. The conditions required to select an appropriate combination of governance models for a supply chain include the supplier’s capability, the cooperation time and experience of the two parties, the goal congruence, and the institutional distance. The selection of an adequate combination for supply chain governance must consider the complexity and variability of the emerging market environment. Additionally, the weight of contractual governance and relational governance should be reasonably selected and dynamically adjusted to effectively play their respective roles and functional superposition. Our research may reduce exploitation in global supply chains, accelerate green transitions, and improve livelihoods and strengthen long-term resilience by aligning profit motives with social and environmental good. RESUMEN Se seleccionaron ocho proveedores de juguetes de tres mercados emergentes, china, Vietnam e india, como objeto de investigación, utilizando métodos de análisis arraigados y estudios de casos múltiples para explorar la efectividad, la interrelación y el contexto funcional del modelo de gobernanza global de la cadena de suministro. El estudio encontró que (1) la gobernanza contractual y la gobernanza de las relaciones afectan el rendimiento de la responsabilidad social de los proveedores, lo que a su vez afecta el rendimiento general de la cadena de suministro.(2) La relación entre los dos modelos de gobernanza es tanto de sustitución como de complementariedad. Estos poseen tanto funciones similares como funciones únicas, lo que puede generar ventajas diferenciadas según las circunstancias.(3) En la gobernanza global de cadenas de suministro en mercados emergentes, las opciones de gobernanza que promueven efectivamente la responsabilidad social y el desempeño son tres combinaciones: combinación de alta relación y bajo contrato; combinación equilibrada entre relación y contrato; combinación de alto contrato y baja relación. Los criterios de selección para estas combinaciones incluyen: la capacidad del proveedor, el tiempo y experiencia de cooperación entre las partes, la congruencia de objetivos y la distancia institucional.Dada la complejidad y variabilidad del entorno de los mercados emergentes, estos factores contextuales deben considerarse simultáneamente en la gobernanza de la cadena de suministro. Además, el peso asignado a la gobernanza contractual y relacional debe seleccionarse racionalmente y ajustarse dinámicamente para que puedan desempeñar efectivamente sus respectivos roles y lograr una superposición funcional óptima.El aporte y el impacto social de nuestra investigación pueden reducir la explotación en las cadenas de suministro globales, acelerar las transiciones ecológicas, mejorar los medios de vida y fortalecer la resiliencia a largo plazo, alineando los motivos de lucro con el bien social y ambiental. RESUMO O presente estudo tem por objeto oito fornecedores de brinquedos de três mercados emergentes - China, Vietnã e Índia. Por meio de análise fundamentada e estudos multicaso, a pesquisa explora os contextos de eficácia, inter-relação e função do modelo global de governança da cadeia de suprimentos, constatando que: (1) a governança contratual e a governança relacional afetam o desempenho das responsabilidades sociais dos fornecedores e, consequentemente, o desempenho geral da cadeia de suprimentos; (2) a relação entre os dois modelos de governança é tanto de substituição quanto de complementaridade, sendo que possuem tanto funções semelhantes quanto únicas, o que lhes permite oferecer vantagens distintas em diferentes circunstâncias; (3) na governança global da cadeia de suprimentos em mercados emergentes, as combinações dos dois modelo de governança que efetivamente promovem a responsabilidade social e o desempenho são três: a combinação de alta governança relacional e baixa contratual; a combinação onde governança relacional e contratual estão em equilíbrio; e a combinação de alta governança contratual e baixa relacional. As condições para a seleção da combinação mais adequada incluem: a capacidade do fornecedor, o tempo e experiência de cooperação entre as partes, a congruência de objetivos e o distanciamento institucional. A seleção da combinação mais adequada para a governança das cadeias de suprimento deve também considerar a complexidade e variabilidade do ambiente de mercados emergentes, sendo que o peso da governança contratual e da governança relacional deve ser apreciado de modo racional e ajustado dinamicamente para que desempenhem efetivamente seus respectivos papéis e superposição funcional. A contribuição e o impacto social da nossa pesquisa podem reduzir a exploração nas cadeias de suprimentos globais, acelerar transições ecológicas, melhorar os meios de subsistência e fortalecer a resiliência em longo prazo, alinhando lucratividade e bem social e ambiental.

In Chicago's Streeterville neighborhood, 676 North St. Clair Street is a medical office building connected to thirteen Northwestern University Hospital properties via a labyrinth of walkways, elevators, and escalators that allow patients to move from parking to diagnostics to surgery without setting foot outside. When I worked there as an internal business consultant at the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association for much of the 1980s and 1990s, however, it was a freestanding, multiuse office building that was distinguished more for its proximity to the Magnificent Mile to the west than the hospital to its east.Thirty years ago, before the urologists, psychiatrists, and orthopedists moved in, I helped the Blues transform from a social movement to what many consider to be just another insurance juggernaut. What I witnessed during that evolution reveals why we have continued to struggle over crafting a health system that satisfies us. Arguing over how the profit motive influences costs, access, and innovation has allowed us to avoid a more important confrontation: the price we are willing to pay when we are healthy versus the services we expect when we are sick. Our disregard for this conflict has been a barrier to achieving our goal: a more humane health system for all.The same November week that thenGovemor Bill Clinton beat President George H. W. Bush and Texas businessman H. Ross Perot for president, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association's CEO was holed up in a modest corner office on the twenty-third floor of the 676 building. Barney Tresnowski, a former hospital administrator, was putting the finishing touches on a speech he would deliver the following week in San Francisco, California, to 200 Blue leaders, mostly CEOs and their board chairs.At issue was a concern that still haunts us today: Should we generate profits from health care? By saying \"yes,\" we reaffirm our confidence in the power of capitalism to promote innovation, efficiency, and the American way. Even for many free-market economists, however, there is something unseemly about this answer. By saying \"no,\" we express our unease over business interests taking supremacy over life. When it comes to health care, it's no wonder that we want it both ways.

Background The spread of misinformation and declining trust in public health institutions have weakened COVID-19 booster vaccination efforts. Understanding how misinformation fuels vaccine hesitancy in vulnerable populations is essential for designing effective interventions. This study explored the psychological drivers behind booster refusal among individuals in socioeconomically deprived areas of the UK. Methods A qualitative descriptive study was conducted using semi-structured online interviews with 30 individuals aged 50+ who declined the COVID-19 booster. Participants were recruited from London and the West Midlands, diverse urban areas. Interviews explored perceptions of vaccines, exposure to (mis)information, and sources of trust or mistrust. Thematic analysis was conducted using NVivo V.12, with two researchers independently coding for reliability. Results Four key themes emerged: (1) widespread mistrust in vaccine development, including concerns about speed, safety, and pharmaceutical profit motives; (2) exposure to conflicting, overwhelming information across media, fostering confusion and scepticism; (3) strong influence of family, friends, and public figures, reinforcing a social “bandwagon” effect; and (4) psychological reactance to perceived coercive policies, such as workplace mandates or travel rules, heightening resistance. Psychological mechanisms like erosion of epistemic trust, the availability heuristic, and groupthink underpinned hesitancy. Participants often prioritized peer experiences over official guidance, especially within culturally diverse networks. Conclusions To address booster hesitancy, public health strategies must go beyond factual messaging. They should rebuild epistemic trust through culturally sensitive, transparent communication, engage trusted community leaders, amplify expert voices online, and address emotional and social drivers. Strengthening these efforts is vital for improving booster uptake and preparedness. Key messages • Misinformation and declining trust heavily influence COVID-19 booster hesitancy among vulnerable UK groups. • Public health strategies must rebuild trust with culturally tailored, transparent, and community-based communication.

In this issue of AJPH, Lanzarotta (p. 193) examines how manufacturers of the smallpox vaccine sought to assuage doubts about their product during the 19th century, when the risks of vaccineadverse events were far greater than they are today. Her cogent historical analysis highlights Americans' shifting attitudes toward pharmaceutical products, the ways that the alleged and actual risks of vaccination fostered hesitancy, and the enduring relationship between public trust in drug companies and the acceptance or rejection of vaccines. Americans have looked with optimism on the prospects that new diagnostics, vaccines, and treatments would extend life and improve its quality; at the same time, they have also questioned the motives and integrity of pharmaceutical companies and the effects of the profit motive on drug producers' behavior. Historically and in the present day, these concerns have undermined vaccine acceptance and have fueled both hesitancy and active opposition and resistance.Pharmaceutical companies began to assume their modern form in the early 20th century on the heels of the scientific breakthroughs of the bacteriological revolution. They developed more sophisticated methods of studying, producing, and marketing drugs and employed larger staffs with formal training in medicine and bacteriology.1 As Lanzarotta notes, this new model was a significant change from the small-scale, mostly unregulated \"farms\" where the smallpox vaccine had been propagated in cattle during the 19th century.

Institutional actors should aim to increase the long-term market value of their firms. This claim implies that firms should adopt a profit-maximizing mission. Business ethicists have been too quick to dismiss moral defenses of profit maximization. Even though there are limits to the moral benefits of profit maximization, a profit-maximizing approach is still morally better than alternative approaches to defining an institutional mission.

Implementing corporate social responsibility (CRS) among foreign direct investment (FDI) enterprises in Vietnam and in Nghe An province in particular is imperative in the current context of economic integration and competition. Beyond the profit motive, FDI enterprises are expected to contribute to the sustainable development of host economies by fulfilling tax obligations, protecting the environment, respecting labor rights, safeguarding consumers, and engaging with local communities. Nghe An has attracted substantial FDI inflows in recent years; the FDI sector has contributed to economic restructuring, growth, job creation, and improved living standards. However, the rapid increase in the number of FDI enterprises raises the need for systematic assessments of business performance, compliance with legal regulations, and the quality of working environments. This article reviews the current status of CSR implementation among selected FDI enterprises in Nghe An and proposes actionable solutions to enhance CSR performance in the near term.

In this article, we examine the historical emergence of the concept of “digital literacy” in education to consider how key insights from its past might be of use in addressing the ethical and political challenges now being raised by connective media and mobile technologies. While contemporary uses of digital literacy are broadly associated with access, evaluation, curation, and production of information in digital environments, we trace the concept’s genealogy to a time before this tentative agreement was reached—when diverse scholarly lineages (e.g., computer literacy, information literacy, media literacy) were competing to shape the educational agenda for emerging communication technologies. Using assemblage theory, we map those meanings that have persisted in our present articulations of digital literacy, as well as those that were abandoned along the way. We demonstrate that our inherited conceptions of digital literacy have prioritized the interplay of users, devices, and content over earlier concerns about technical infrastructures and socio-economic relations. This legacy, we argue, contributes to digital literacy’s inadequacies in addressing contemporary dilemmas related to surveillance, control, and profit motives in connective environments. We propose a multidimensional framework for understanding digital literacies that works to reintegrate some of these earlier concerns and conclude by considering how such an orientation might open pathways for education research and practice.

In this article I develop a proposal for the theoretical vantage point of the sociology of markets, focusing on the problem of the social order of markets. The initial premise is that markets are highly demanding arenas of social interaction, which can only operate if three inevitable coordination problems are resolved. I define these coordination problems as the value problem, the problem of competition and the cooperation problem. I argue that these problems can only be resolved based on stable reciprocal expectations on the part of market actors, which have their basis in the socio-structural, institutional and cultural embedding of markets. The sociology of markets aims to investigate how market action is structured by these macrostructures and to examine their dynamic processes of change. While the focus of economic sociology has been primarily on the stability of markets and the reproduction of firms, the conceptualization developed here brings change and profit motives more forcefully into the analysis. It also differs from the focus of the new economic sociology on the supply side of markets, by emphasizing the role of demand for the order of markets, especially in the discussion of the problems of valuation and cooperation.

The aim of the current study was to understand how gangs have changed in the past 10 years since Pitts’ (2008) study in the London Borough of Waltham Forest. The study undertook interviews with 21 practitioners working on gang-related issues and 10 young people affected by gangs or formerly embedded in them. Two focus groups involving 37 participants from key agencies then explored the preliminary findings and contributed to a conceptualization of a new operating model of gangs. The study found that local gangs had evolved into more organized and profit-oriented entities than a decade earlier. The new operating model rejected visible signs of gang membership as ‘bad for business’ because they attracted unwanted attention from law enforcement agencies. Faced with a saturated drugs market in London, gangs moved out to capture drugs markets in smaller UK towns in ‘county lines’ activities. This more business-oriented ethos has changed the meaning of both territory and violence. While gang members in the original study described an emotional connection with their postcode, territory is increasingly regarded as a marketplace to be protected. Similarly, violence has moved from an expressive means of reinforcing gang identity to being increasingly used as an instrumental means of protecting business interests. The current study offers a rare opportunity to gain a picture of gangs at two time periods and contributes to work on the contested nature of UK gangs and renewed interest in gang evolution. These findings have important implications for local authorities and criminal justice agencies who need to address the profit motive of gang activity directly.

We exploit the change in U.S. segment reporting rules (from SFAS No. 14 to SFAS No. 131) to examine two motives for managers to conceal segment profits: proprietary costs and agency costs. Managers face proprietary costs of segment disclosure if the revelation of a segment that earns high abnormal profits attracts more competition and, hence, reduces the abnormal profits. Managers face agency costs of segment disclosure if the revelation of a segment that earns low abnormal profits reveals unresolved agency problems and, hence, leads to heightened external monitoring. By comparing a hand-collected sample of restated SFAS No. 131 segments with historical SFAS No. 14 segments, we examine at the segment level whether managers' disclosure decisions are influenced by their proprietary and agency cost motives to conceal segment profits. Specifically, we test two hypotheses: (1) when the proprietary cost motive dominates, managers tend to withhold the segments with relatively high abnormal profits (hereafter, the proprietary cost motive hypothesis), and (2) when the agency cost motive dominates, managers tend to withhold the segments with relatively low abnormal profits (hereafter, the agency cost motive hypothesis). Our results are consistent with the agency cost motive hypothesis, whereas we find mixed evidence with regard to the proprietary cost motive hypothesis.