University of Lausanne

About: University of Lausanne is a education organization based out in Lausanne, Switzerland. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Medicine. The organization has 20508 authors who have published 46458 publications receiving 1996655 citations. The organization is also known as: Université de Lausanne & UNIL.

CSR Business as Usual? The Case of the Tobacco Industry

Abstract: Tobacco companies have started to position themselves as good corporate citizens. The effort towards CSR engagement in the tobacco industry is not only heavily criticized by anti-tobacco NGOs. Some opponents such as the the World Health Organization have even categorically questioned the possibility of social responsibility in the tobacco industry. The paper will demonstrate that the deep distrust towards tobacco companies is linked to the lethal character of their products and the dubious behavior of their representatives in recent decades. As a result, tobacco companies are not in the CSR business in the strict sense. Key aspects of mainstream CSR theory and practice such as corporate philanthropy, stakeholder collaboration, CSR reporting and self-regulation, are demonstrated to be ineffective or even counterproductive in the tobacco industry. Building upon the terminology used in the leadership literature, the paper proposes to differentiate between transactional and transformational CSR arguing that tobacco companies can only operate on a transactional level. As a consequence, corporate responsibility in the tobacco industry is based upon a much thinner approach to CSR and has to be conceptualized with a focus on transactional integrity across the tobacco supply chain.

Ant-like task allocation and recruitment in cooperative robots.

Abstract: One of the greatest challenges in robotics is to create machines that are able to interact with unpredictable environments in real time A possible solution may be to use swarms of robots behaving in a self-organized manner, similar to workers in an ant colony Efficient mechanisms of division of labour, in particular series-parallel operation and transfer of information among group members, are key components of the tremendous ecological success of ants Here we show that the general principles regulating division of labour in ant colonies indeed allow the design of flexible, robust and effective robotic systems Groups of robots using ant-inspired algorithms of decentralized control techniques foraged more efficiently and maintained higher levels of group energy than single robots But the benefits of group living decreased in larger groups, most probably because of interference during foraging Intriguingly, a similar relationship between group size and efficiency has been documented in social insects Moreover, when food items were clustered, groups where robots could recruit other robots in an ant-like manner were more efficient than groups without information transfer, suggesting that group dynamics of swarms of robots may follow rules similar to those governing social insects

The Institutional Foundations of Regulatory Capitalism: The Diffusion of Independent Regulatory Agencies in Western Europe

Abstract: This article studies the diffusion of the main institutional feature of regulatory capitalism, namely, independent regulatory agencies. While only a few such authorities existed in Europe in the early 1980s, by the end of the twentieth century they had spread impressively across countries and sectors. The analysis finds that three classes of factors (bottom-up, top-down, and horizontal) explain this trend. First, the establishment of independent regulatory agencies was an attempt to improve credible commitment capacity when liberalizing and privatizing utilities and to alleviate the political uncertainty problem, namely, the risk to a government that its policies will be changed when it loses power. Second, Europeanization favored the creation of independent regulators. Third, individual decisions were interdependent, as governments were influenced by the decisions of others in an emulation process where the symbolic properties of independent regulators mattered more than the functions they performed.