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Jeff Collin

Bio: Jeff Collin is an academic researcher from University of Edinburgh. The author has contributed to research in topics: Tobacco control & Tobacco industry. The author has an hindex of 29, co-authored 94 publications receiving 2693 citations. Previous affiliations of Jeff Collin include University of London & University of Nottingham.


Papers
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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: By showing how CSR practices are used to stymie evidence-based government regulation, the article underlines the importance of highlighting and developing matrices to assess the negative social impacts of CSR.
Abstract: Since scholarly interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR) has primarily focused on the synergies between social and economic performance, our understanding of how (and the conditions under which) companies use CSR to produce policy outcomes that work against public welfare has remained comparatively underdeveloped. In particular, little is known about how corporate decision-makers privately reconcile the conflicts between public and private interests, even though this is likely to be relevant to understanding the limitations of CSR as a means of aligning business activity with the broader public interest. This study addresses this issue using internal tobacco industry documents to explore British-American Tobacco’s (BAT) thinking on CSR and its effects on the company’s CSR Programme. The article presents a three-stage model of CSR development, based on Sykes and Matza’s theory of techniques of neutralization, which links together: how BAT managers made sense of the company’s declining political authority in the mid-1990s; how they subsequently justified the use of CSR as a tool of stakeholder management aimed at diffusing the political impact of public health advocates by breaking up political constituencies working towards evidence-based tobacco regulation; and how CSR works ideologically to shape stakeholders’ perceptions of the relative merits of competing approaches to tobacco control. Our analysis has three implications for research and practice. First, it underlines the importance of approaching corporate managers’ public comments on CSR critically and situating them in their economic, political and historical contexts. Second, it illustrates the importance of focusing on the political aims and effects of CSR. Third, by showing how CSR practices are used to stymie evidence-based government regulation, the article underlines the importance of highlighting and developing matrices to assess the negative social impacts of CSR.

233 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The products of tobacco, alcohol and food industries are responsible for a significant and growing proportion of the global burden of disease, and the greatest challenge and opportunity for public health lies in reducing the contributions of tobacco use, unhealthy diet and harmful alcohol consumption.
Abstract: The products of tobacco, alcohol and food industries are responsible for a significant and growing proportion of the global burden of disease. Smoking and alcohol combined account for 12.5% of global deaths and 19.5% in high-income countries, while six diet-related risk factors account for 13.6 and 17.5% of deaths, respectively. 1 Arguably the greatest challenge and opportunity for public health lies in reducing the contributions of tobacco use, unhealthy diet and harmful alcohol consumption to the rising global burden of non-communicable diseases. 2 This demonstrates a pressing need to improve our understanding of how corporations contribute to this disease burden, both directly through the promotion of products damaging to health and indirectly through influence over public policy. The concept of an industrial epidemic—an epidemic emerging from the commercializa-tion of potentially health-damaging products—lends itself to this purpose. 3,4 Adapting traditional public health constructs, it identifies the role of the host (the consumer), agent (the product, e.g. cigarettes, alcohol), environment and, crucially, the disease vector (the corporation). The vector analogy was first described in relation to the tobacco epidemic, 3 and tobacco control remains the only field where the commercial vector has been systematically studied. Analysis of millions of internal tobacco industry documents 5 has revealed the multiple strategies via which the tobacco industry has sought to and, often successfully, undermined public health policies. 6,7 Consequently, serious attention has been given to managing the conflicts of interest between public health and the tobacco industry. At global level, the World Health Organization (WHO) has actively sought to monitor and contain industry influence, with Article 5.3 of the Framework Convention on Tobacco (FCTC, WHO's first global public health treaty) requiring all 172 parties to the treaty, including the UK, to protect health policies 'from commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry.' 8 Yet WHO's approach to food and alcohol industries is strikingly different, with both its Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health 9 and new global alcohol strategy 10 assuming scope for partnership and cooperation that the FCTC precludes. Similarly in the UK, the food and alcohol industries have recently been invited to join a 'partnership' with government 11 from which the tobacco industry is excluded. The 'Public Health Responsibility Deal', on which, at the time of writing, limited details have emerged, 11,12 is heavily reliant on the concept of corporate social responsibility, with a clear presumption in favour of …

142 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A review of tobacco industry documents shows that policies on corporate social responsibility can enable access to and dialogue with policymakers at the highest level.
Abstract: Background: Recent attempts by large tobacco companies to represent themselves as socially responsible have been widely dismissed as image management. Existing research supports such claims by pointing to the failings and misleading nature of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. However, few studies have focused in depth on what tobacco companies hoped to achieve through CSR or reflected on the extent to which these ambitions have been realised. Methods and Findings: Iterative searching relating to CSR strategies was undertaken of internal British American Tobacco (BAT) documents, released through litigation in the US. Relevant documents (764) were indexed and qualitatively analysed. In the past decade, BAT has actively developed a wide-ranging CSR programme. Company documents indicate that one of the key aims of this programme was to help the company secure access to policymakers and, thereby, increase the company’s chances of influencing policy decisions. Taking the UK as a case study, this paper demonstrates the way in which CSR can be used to renew and maintain dialogue with policymakers, even in ostensibly unreceptive political contexts. In

131 citations

01 Jan 2016
TL;DR: The ways in which British American Tobacco influenced the European Union Treaty so that new EU policies advance the interests of major corporations, including those that produce products damaging to health are investigated.
Abstract: Background: Impact assessment (IA) of all major European Union (EU) policies is now mandatory. The form of IA used has been criticised for favouring corporate interests by overemphasising economic impacts and failing to adequately assess health impacts. Our study sought to assess how, why, and in what ways corporations, and particularly the tobacco industry, influenced the EU’s approach to IA. Methods and Findings: In order to identify whether industry played a role in promoting this system of IA within the EU, we analysed internal documents from British American Tobacco (BAT) that were disclosed following a series of litigation cases in the United States. We combined this analysis with one of related literature and interviews with key informants. Our analysis demonstrates that from 1995 onwards BAT actively worked with other corporate actors to successfully promote a business-oriented form of IA that favoured large corporations. It appears that BAT favoured this form of IA because it could advance the company’s European interests by establishing ground rules for policymaking that would: (i) provide an economic framework for evaluating all policy decisions, implicitly prioritising costs to businesses; (ii) secure early corporate involvement in policy discussions; (iii) bestow the corporate sector with a long-term advantage over other actors by increasing policymakers’ dependence on information they supplied; and (iv) provide businesses with a persuasive means of challenging potential and existing legislation. The data reveal that an ensuing lobbying campaign, largely driven by BAT, helped secure binding changes to the EU Treaty via the Treaty of Amsterdam that required EU policymakers to minimise legislative burdens on businesses. Efforts subsequently focused on ensuring that these Treaty changes were translated into the application of a business orientated form of IA (cost–benefit analysis [CBA]) within EU policymaking procedures. Both the tobacco and chemical industries have since employed IA in apparent attempts to undermine key aspects of European policies designed to protect public health. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that BAT and its corporate allies have fundamentally altered the way in which all EU policy is made by making a business-oriented form of IA mandatory. This increases the likelihood that the EU will produce policies that advance the interests of major corporations, including those that produce products damaging to health, rather than in the interests of its citizens. Given that the public health community, focusing on health IA, has largely welcomed the increasing policy interest in IA, this suggests that urgent consideration is required of the ways in which IA can be employed to undermine, as well as support, effective public health policies. Please see later in the article for the Editors’ Summary. Citation: Smith KE, Fooks G, Collin J, Weishaar H, Mandal S, et al. (2010) ‘‘Working the System’’—British American Tobacco’s Influence on the European Union Treaty and Its Implications for Policy: An Analysis of Internal Tobacco Industry Documents. PLoS Med 7(1): e1000202. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000202 Academic Editor: Elizabeth Smith, University of California San Francisco, United States of America Received February 5, 2009; Accepted November 4, 2009; Published January 12, 2010 Copyright: 2010 Smith et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This work was supported by the Smoke Free Partnership (SFP) through a CR-UK grant (CR-UK is one of the SFP partners [www.cancerresearchuk.org]), the others being the European Respiratory Society (ERS at www.ersnet.org), and the Institut National du Cancer (INCa at www.e-cancer.fr). The funders had no influence on the research design, data collection, data interpretation or the writing of this article. AG is supported by a Health Foundation Clinician Scientist Award. GF is supported by the National Cancer Institute of the United States National Institutes of Health [grant number: 2 R01 CA091021-05]. Competing Interests: JC and ABG were part of a WHO Tobacco Free Initiative (TFI) Expert Committee convened to develop recommendations on how to address tobacco industry interference with tobacco control policy, and as such my travel to a meeting in Washington D.C. was reimbursed by WHO TFI. Abbreviations: BAT, British American Tobacco; BIA, business impact assessment; CBA, cost benefit analysis; CBI, Confederation of British Industry; DG, Directorate General; EPC, European Policy Centre; ETS, environmental tobacco smoke; EU, European Union; FRC, Fair Regulation Campaign; HIA, health impact assessment; IA, impact assessment; IBEC, Irish Business and Employers Federation; ICI, Imperial Chemical Industries; PPU, Public Policy Unit; RA, risk assessment; REACH, Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemical Substances; RIA, regulatory impact assessment; TMA, Tobacco Manufacturers’ Association; UNICE, the Union of Industrial and Employers’ Confederations of Europe (now known as BusinessEurope). * E-mail: K.Smith@bath.ac.uk PLoS Medicine | www.plosmedicine.org 1 January 2010 | Volume 7 | Issue 1 | e1000202

106 citations


Cited by
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Journal Article
TL;DR: This research examines the interaction between demand and socioeconomic attributes through Mixed Logit models and the state of art in the field of automatic transport systems in the CityMobil project.
Abstract: 2 1 The innovative transport systems and the CityMobil project 10 1.1 The research questions 10 2 The state of art in the field of automatic transport systems 12 2.1 Case studies and demand studies for innovative transport systems 12 3 The design and implementation of surveys 14 3.1 Definition of experimental design 14 3.2 Questionnaire design and delivery 16 3.3 First analyses on the collected sample 18 4 Calibration of Logit Multionomial demand models 21 4.1 Methodology 21 4.2 Calibration of the “full” model. 22 4.3 Calibration of the “final” model 24 4.4 The demand analysis through the final Multinomial Logit model 25 5 The analysis of interaction between the demand and socioeconomic attributes 31 5.1 Methodology 31 5.2 Application of Mixed Logit models to the demand 31 5.3 Analysis of the interactions between demand and socioeconomic attributes through Mixed Logit models 32 5.4 Mixed Logit model and interaction between age and the demand for the CTS 38 5.5 Demand analysis with Mixed Logit model 39 6 Final analyses and conclusions 45 6.1 Comparison between the results of the analyses 45 6.2 Conclusions 48 6.3 Answers to the research questions and future developments 52

4,784 citations

01 Jan 2012

3,692 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper assess the eff ectiveness of self-regulation, public-private partnerships, and public regulation models of interaction with unhealthy commodity industries and conclude that unhealthy commodity industry should have no role in the formation of national or international NCD policy.

1,308 citations