The Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) first launched Doi Moi [Renovation] in 1986—10 years after the VCP officially assumed power in 1976 of the Socialist Republics of Vietnam. As the VCP describes, Doi Moi is a comprehensive economic reform package with new initiatives toward building “a mixed economy” that introduces “market mechanism with state management and a socialist orientation” to Vietnam’s economy. With Doi Moi, pragmatism has evidently taken center stage in place of dogmatic concerns for ideological correctness. The thesis seeks to first examine the conditions and factors that gave impetus for the economic reforms in Vietnam. These conditions and factors are especially evident when they are examined in a comparative context with the Soviet Union and China’s experiences with similar reforms as they are done here in the thesis. Moreover, the change of orientation from a centrally planned economy to market-oriented economy is reflected in Doi Moi’s decentralization and economic liberalization reforms as well as the VCP’s opening up to international reintegration and reconciliation with namely the United States. From this examination, it is apparent that at the crux of the VCP’s decision to pursue reforms and the Vietnamese people's support for reforms are fundamental considerations of self and political interests—the VCP's to stay in power and the people's to subsist and prosper. Whether reforms are socialist or capitalist—in form or in practice—are thus of lesser importance to the VCP and Vietnamese people than whether reforms work or do not work. / text

Across four experiments, we show that when people can serve their self-interest, they are more likely to refrain from reporting the truth ( lie of omission) than actively lie ( lie of commission). We developed a novel online "Heads or Tails" task in which participants can lie to win a monetary prize. During the task, they are informed that the software is not always accurate, and it might provide incorrect feedback about their outcome. In Experiment 1, those in the omission condition received incorrect feedback informing them that they had won the game. Participants in commission condition were correctly informed that they had lost. Results indicated that when asked to report any errors in the detection of their payoff, participants in the omission condition cheated significantly more than those in the commission condition. Experiment 2 showed that this pattern of results is robust even when controlling for the perceived probability of the software error. Experiments 3 and 4 suggest that receiving incorrect feedback makes individuals feel more legitimate in withholding the truth, which, in turn, increases cheating.

The thesis challenges the established "myth of easy legitimacy" and argues for more cautious attitude toward involuntary social arrangements by shifting the burden of proof in favour of the rigorous individual rights. Any State action shall be held for impermissible unless it is shown to be unavoidable - beyond reasonable doubts. With the assumption of existence of individual rights as a starting point, the thesis inquires into the attempts to derive State's legitimacy from individual rights. Finding this task virtually impossible, it comes to the conclusion that the only way how to legitimize the State is to compromise the individual rights somehow. Yet, to maintain some meaning of the rights, this compromise need to be restricted in scope, so the thesis analyses further the meaningfulness of "necessary and proper" provisos and the notion of "ideology" as a factor driving collective action and as the ultimate check of the State's power.

Most LDC regimes, especially those with a colonial past, suffer from a deficit in legitimacy. Basing their rule on the personality and achievements of one person, these regimes have failed to pass on their legitimacy to their successors, or sometimes even secure legitimacy for the state. They have drawn up a social contract with their populations that entailed obligations to achieve objectives such as industrialisation, national and economic independence, and welfare of their societies. In return, their populations were expected to support their regimes, and surrender their political rights and liberties. In this research, we focus on the social contract in Egypt, as an example of an LDC state where the regime has suffered from a lack of legitimacy since the country gained its independence in 1952. Over the last five decades, Egyptian regimes have forged a social contract with their populations in order to legitimise their rule. The social contract encompassed achieving objectives adopted by the regime on the domestic and international level according to their visions. The formula of the social contract has been modified by the regime in response to changes in domestic and international factors. One of the main obligations that the regime has committed itself to since 1952 has been welfare provision by the state. The commitment of the regime to provide welfare for the population has been an effective tool to generate legitimacy. Thus, the maintenance of a 'welfare state' has constituted a central component of the social contract since 1952. However, a social contract based on welfare provision has not been durable; this type of contract has secured the regime legitimacy only as long as it has been able to deliver welfare products. As industrialisation failed to take off, Egyptian regimes found it difficult to sustain the welfare state. Their attempts to withdraw from welfare provision, without compromising their legitimacy, have been unsuccessful. This is because the regime has marketed welfare provision by the state as a right of the public based on citizenship; the populace has proved resilient in defending this right. Hence, the regime had to rely upon aid and or external borrowing to postpone the crisis; and modify the social contract by introducing some measures of political liberalisation.

The international community proclaims victory when a conflict-ridden state is able to get rid of the main cause of the conflict. However, all the problems of the state do not end with that victory. It rather triggers a whole new set of problems, which combined with the aftermath of the conflict, leads the country to a larger crisis. Afghanistan, after the fall of Taliban regime in 2001, faced various social, political and economic challenges that marked the beginning of a transition period that was much more challenging than the previous period. In this paper, I discuss the major problems of transition-period Afghanistan and how the handling of these problems has shaped the image of the government inside the country and outside. I look into various variables that have played leading roles in Afghanistan in the past ten years (legitimacy, corruption, and state capacity), analyze their interconnectedness, and examine the state‘s vulnerability, leading to a discussion of whether there is an immediate need for a changed approach by national leadership. I demonstrate the complex interaction of the variables in connection with their impact on economic development. Towards the end, I suggest the need for a balanced approach, including but not limited to the increase in sub- national capacity, which will involve strong leadership from the government to define and divide the functions of various actors involved in the stabilization of the country. We will see that Afghanistan‘s geographical location, its natural capacity and the international support it has been receiving provide it with immense prospect for stabilization and even development, providing that the variables analyzed in the paper are addressed.

This study examines the corporate environmental disclosures of South African mining organisations from 2009 to 2011 to establish the level and type of these environmental disclosures. An examination is made of mining organisations’ media articles to establish whether their environmental disclosures can be explained by the concept of an implicit social contract. Legitimacy theory posits that an organisation needs to be aware of all their stakeholders’ needs and needs to portray themselves as acting in line with stakeholder values and norms to ensure their continued success. Although environmental reporting has been on the strategic agenda of several organisations disclosures in South Africa, only a minority of research papers have explored how an environmental crisis may impact upon the provision of such disclosures. This paper will help fill this void by performing an examination of management communication strategies, organisational actions and the change in the level of environmental disclosures contained in the mining organisations’ annual report as a result of the acid mine drainage incident that occurred in late 2009. Media articles during and after the mining organisations’ legitimacy had been challenged were examined using Suchman’s (1995) three types of legitimacy: pragmatic, cognitive and moral to identify the type of legitimacy used in the context of a developing country. Regarding the annual report disclosures and media articles’ communication strategies, results were found to be consistent with the legitimacy theory. They indicate that South African mining organisations use mostly the repair strategy in attempting to change the perceptions of the public after an environmental crisis. The strategies utilised by the mining industry in the media disclosures are expected of an organisation in crisis. The mining industry used, primarily, repair strategies in interacting with its relevant stakeholders. The study’s finding that maintenance strategies were the least of the three types of legitimacies is consistent with an industry in crisis. Even though the mining industry primarily used the repair legitimisation tactic, the range of legitimacy techniques has proved to be a finding worth discussing. The mining industry did not completely avoid the event i.e. use disclaimer strategies. Overall, the mining organisations reacted to the heighted institutional pressures by increasing their environmental disclosures and disclosed environmental information that conformed to stakeholders’ values and persuaded society to view acid mine drainage as less problematic than it was reported to be.

Research on public perceptions of the police has identified various individual characteristics that have been found to influence police legitimacy. These individual characteristics often reflect demographic factors such as race/ethnicity, age and socioeconomic status. In addition to demographic factors, process-based factors such as procedural justice and fairness have also been found to influence individual perceptions of legitimacy. What has not been fully established within the literature on public perceptions of police is the extent to which neighborhood characteristics and context shape neighborhood assessments of police legitimacy. This thesis seeks to fill in the gap on public perceptions of police by examining whether expressive concerns and accumulated experiences with police at the neighborhood-level influence legitimacy judgments across high-crime areas. Using baseline survey data collected for the St. Louis County Hot Spots in Residential Areas (SCHIRA) project between March and May of 2012, residents in St. Louis County, Missouri are aggregated to 71 crime hot spots. Findings suggest that neighborhood-level expressive concerns and accumulated experiences do not influence legitimacy judgments across the high-crime areas. However, low neighborhood cohesion predicts the percentage of residents in the area having a recent negative experience with police. Implications for future research and police practice are discussed.

This thesis provides an analysis of the complex relationship between law and legitimacy in the WTO. It focuses on the notional dichotomy between ‘Member-driven’ (input-based) and ‘results-oriented’ (output-based) narratives of the WTO’s legitimacy, and how such narratives are both framed by, and reflected in, WTO law. It demonstrates how these narratives are used to legitimate the exercise of legal power in ways that exceed the reach of their internal normative claims; how they are used to displace responsibility for decision-making in the WTO; and the consequences of choosing to emphasize particular forms of legitimacy for our understandings of the WTO’s place in the world. In the process, the thesis also seeks to destabilize these legitimacy narratives by highlighting their partial, contingent and often mutually contradictory natures. The thesis proceeds in three parts. The first part (Chapter Two) clarifies what is meant by the terms ‘power’ and ‘legitimacy’ as used in the thesis and stresses their significance for WTO law. The second part (Chapters Three and Four) addresses two key input-oriented narratives of legitimacy associated with WTO law — those of consent and democracy. It argues that although consent has been central to understanding the legitimacy of WTO law as it is, and democracy is increasingly advanced in relation to WTO law as it should be, both narratives suffer from serious normative and descriptive limitations. The third part delves further into the concept of output legitimacy and its limits (Chapter Five), before exploring its application in relation to the legal-institutional dynamics of WTO negotiation rounds (Chapter Six) and the treatment of economic evidence in WTO dispute settlement (Chapter Seven). This part ultimately concludes that a more critical engagement with the concept of output legitimacy could open up productive avenues for rethinking the law and practice of the WTO.

CoordenaÃÃo de AperfeÃoamento de Pessoal de NÃvel Superior / Tendo em vista os vÃrios exemplos de atrocidades promovidas por governos autoritÃrios no passado e no presente da histÃria, nos quais depositam as vontades de particulares acima dos reais interesses do povo, à necessÃrio que faÃamos uma anÃlise constante sobre a legitimidade dos poderes que nos governam. à imprescindÃvel aos homens assegurarem uma sociedade justa em que seus cidadÃos possam gozar de deveres e direitos iguais. Portanto, o interesse maior deste trabalho à apresentar os fundamentos teÃrico-jurÃdicos que legitimam o poder polÃtico, com o intuito de demonstrar as mÃximas construÃdas por Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) para se alcanÃar uma organizaÃÃo social legÃtima. Frente a tal proposta, partiremos primeiramente das obras Discurso Sobre a Origem e os Fundamentos da Desigualdade Entre os Homens (1755) e Do Contrato Social ou PrincÃpios do Direito PolÃtico (1762), pois acreditamos que para melhor expor as principais caracterÃsticas que embasaram a legitimidade do poder, os referidos textos fazem parte das mais significativas fontes de pesquisa produzidas pelo autor acerca do tema tratado. Devemos enxergar Rousseau em sua Ãpoca na qual as discussÃes em torno das estruturas de governo ganharam espaÃo e notoriedade, pois o movimento racional caracterÃstico da modernidade impÃe questÃes pertinentes à autoridade polÃtica vigente. Entre os grandes pensadores da filosofia moderna Grotius, Pufendorf, Hobbes, Montesquieu, Locke, tiveram importantes papeis, porÃm à Rousseau que, ao partir da Piedade, direciona-se à manutenÃÃo dos interesses voltados a coletividade por meio da vontade geral. / In view of the many examples of atrocities promoted by authoritarian governments in the past and present history, and deposit the wills of individuals above the real interests of the people, we need to make a constant analysis of the legitimacy of the powers that govern us. It is essential to men ensure fair society in which its citizens can enjoy equal rights and duties. Therefore, the greatest interest of this work is to present the theoretical and legal foundations that legitimate political power in order to demonstrate the maximum built by Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) to achieve a legitimate social organization. Faced with such a proposal, first depart the works Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men (1755) and From the Social Contract or Principles of Political Right (1762), as we believe that to better expose the main features that supported the legitimacy power, its provisions are among the most significant sources of research produced by the author about the theme. We see Rousseau in his time at which the discussions on the governance structures gained ground and notoriety as the rational characteristic movement of modernity imposes issues relevant to the current political authority. Among the great thinkers of modern philosophy Grotius, Purfendorf, Hobbes, Montesquieu, Locke, had important roles, but Rousseau is that, from the Mercy, directs to the maintenance of interests on the community through the general will.

Corporate social reporting, embracing the triple bottom line reporting concept, entails the reporting of economic, social and environmental performance as opposed to the more narrow focus on conventional financial reporting. Many corporations are now engaging in environmental and social reporting in an effort to communicate the social and environmental effects of organisations‟ operations to particular interest groups within society. The main objective of this thesis is to examine corporate motivations and hesitations to undertake social reporting in Malaysia. Most studies have so far applied quantitative method on themes identification to determine rationales for corporate social reporting. Little attention has been given to in-depth primary and secondary data to understand rationales for corporate social reporting in a national context. In addition to motivation, this study fills the gap in the literature by investigating corporate reluctance for social reporting. A qualitative approach was adopted for this study. A mixed method of data collection, consisting of both semi-structured interviews and corporate social reports, was used. A total of 20 interviews were conducted with representatives of six reporting and six non-reporting corporations, and eight non-corporate respondents representing the Malaysian political and social sectors. In addition to primary data, corporate social information in annual reports and corporate websites of six reporting corporations was also collected to support the interviews. Thematic analysis was applied to identify salient themes to explain both corporate motivation and hesitation for social reporting. The analysis was divided into two levels: corporation and society. At the corporate level, results identify public relations as the central motivation for social reporting. More specifically, the concepts of image and identity, issues management, two-way symmetrical and asymmetrical communication, autocommunication, and publicity are used to explain the adoption of social reporting. Image and identity and issues management were also among the concepts applied to explain corporate hesitation for social reporting. However, the results also support stockholder theory and reveal the lack of public relations understanding to be the cause of the low acceptance of social reporting. In-depth analysis revealed organisational legitimacy as the main reason to explain both motivation and hesitation for social reporting. Corporations require stakeholder support for their continual existence. At the societal level analysis, the concept of political economy was applied to explain the limited social reporting practice in the Malaysian context. Finally, the implications for both practising as well as neglecting social reporting are discussed using the concept of the risk society.