This paper studies the way supplier firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) affects their likelihood of being selected as new suppliers. Using a large sample of US public firms with detailed supply chain and CSR data, we provide empirical evidence that corporate customers prefer socially responsible suppliers, and that the effect is more prominent when the supplier industry is more competitive, the customer’s own CSR performance is better, or the supplier and the customer have more similar CSR focuses. Our paper contributes (...) to the literature of instrumental stakeholder theory (IST) by confirming corporate customer attraction as a desirable outcome of supplier CSR engagement. It complements the existing IST studies on customer responses by showing that CSR attracts not only final customers but also corporate customers. Moreover, by focusing on corporate customers’ revealed preferences for socially responsible suppliers, our paper also complements the stated-preference-based evidence in the literature of sustainable supply chain management. Our paper’s findings encourage supplier firm managers to invest in CSR to gain competitive advantages in the form of a higher likelihood of selection while simultaneously making positive contributions to society. (shrink)

Higher education (HE) mobility programmes around the globe have been key initiatives over the past thirty years, driven by combinations of supranational and national state-led knowledge economy policies, university strategies, and decisions made by individuals regarding employability, credentials, or academic tourism. In this paper we argue that mobility too often is understood through the prism of internationalism, itself umbilically tied to and nourished by Enlightenment liberal thinking, such as Kantian cosmopolitanism, and the romantic figure of the wandering scholar. This has (...) the effect of reducing our understanding of transnational mobility to individual actors, their desires, and experiences. In this paper we ask: to what extent and in what ways can HE transnational mobility projects be understood as forms of imperialism? In this regard we examine the literature on imperialism and argue for a more capacious use of the term; as taking economic, political and cultural forms. We use these to examine the links between the expansion and securing of empires historically, the state’s spatial projects and global market making. We do this through the prism of two nations, the UK and China, comparing their state’s transnational HE strategies, selectivities and outcomes. (shrink)

The problem of finite-time tracking control is discussed for a class of uncertain nonstrict-feedback time-varying state delay nonlinear systems with full-state constraints and unmodeled dynamics. Different from traditional finite-control methods, a C 1 smooth finite-time adaptive control framework is introduced by employing a smooth switch between the fractional and cubic form state feedback, so that the desired fast finite-time control performance can be guaranteed. By constructing appropriate Lyapunov-Krasovskii functionals, the uncertain terms produced by time-varying state delays are compensated for and (...) unmodeled dynamics is coped with by introducing a dynamical signal. In order to avoid the inherent problem of “complexity of explosion” in the backstepping-design process, the DSC technology with a novel nonlinear filter is introduced to simplify the structure of the controller. Furthermore, the results show that all the internal error signals are driven to converge into small regions in a finite time, and the full-state constraints are not violated. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. (shrink)