This study examines Corporate Social Responsibility in Sustainable Development and the notion of the Triple Bottom Line as an imperative in today’s socially responsible corporation. Standardization is used as a tool for integrating social and environmental costs and benefits into the financial bottom line of an organization. This research aims to discover what standards or methods are used to measure social and environmental progress in three organizations in Houston, Texas and the implied potential for CSR as a driver for profitability. The primary data included in this research was captured through semi-structured qualitative interviews with upper level management of the three companies included in the final study. The results consistently supported positive correlations between CSR and improvements in company image and stakeholder relations. One participant was also able to report evidence of increased profitability through cost containment as a result of their integration of CSR initiatives throughout their organization.

The relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world has become discordant. Many of the harmful effects of this relationship, such as unsustainable forestry practices and oil spills, are easily visible. Conversely, much of the harm, such as the effects of climate change, is subtle and difficult to perceive. Landscape architecture, as a discipline and practice, is well-suited to lead a shift toward a healthier relationship between human and non-human nature. This practicum seeks to make various climate change-related phenomena within Manitoba landscapes visible. Conceived as tourist destinations, three distinct landscapes likely to undergo dramatic climate change-induced alterations are identified. For each site an intervention is proposed highlighting these changes. Thus, a global phenomenon is made visible at a local scale.

The processes used to negotiate novel forms of environmental governance being deployed in the North and Central Coast of British Columbia, known as the Great Bear Rainforest, provide useful insights into the kinds of efforts that may be required to effectively address contemporary environmental problems. Through various and complex political processes – constituted by many actors – a novel set of agreements, known as the Great Bear Rainforest Agreements, arguably emerged to resolve a conflict over the management of BC’s forests, a long standing and contentious issue in the province. This thesis first examines the wider limitations of institutions of governance to effectively address environmental problems and efforts to respond to these problems, particularly by environmentalists. Second, it tells the story of the Great Bear Rainforest Agreements, and examines their wider implications for participants of the negotiations and more generally. Overall this thesis argues that the Great Bear Rainforest negotiations can provide instructive lessons to institutions of governance by demonstrating how deliberative processes can help ease some of the structural tensions that condition environmental conflicts in Canada. Second, First Nations in the region played a crucial role in the Great Bear Rainforest negotiations, and the outcomes of this role are likely to have significant implications for future resource conflicts in the province. Third, the role of environmentalists in decision making in British Columbia is evolving. / Graduate

Beginning in a small informal collective of Mapuche women weavers in Puerto Saavedra, Chile, I explore how ecological knowledge has survived through textile handcraft, passed down from mother to daughter . Through analysis of interviews and observations with the women as weavers , I reflect on the importance of centering Indigenous women's knowledge, systematically excluded from the environmental cannon. The weavers maintain and shape traditions that have survived colonization and its disruption of Indigenous access to land and ways of living. They produce and transmit environmental knowledge on which they depend for subsistence and cultural expression. Using ecofeminism as a framework, I argue that the Mapuche women weavers' knowledge is counternarrative and expert knowledge. Through these stories told by hand and through oral story-telling it becomes clear that it is not enough to simply celebrate their beautiful craft and sustainable ways of interacting with the more-than-human environment; it is essential, also, to engage in activist work towards environmental and social justice.

This dissertation argues that the crucial quality of American literary naturalism is the polemicism of its major authors and texts. Scholars have long been attuned to the “rebellious” nature of naturalism. Indeed, following the charge of H. L. Mencken (for whom naturalism constituted an aesthetic assault on the pious vacuities of Howellsian social realism), critics have been apt to frame naturalism as the national literature of disobedience. What is less than clear, however, is what, exactly, naturalism is supposed to be rebelling against. In a century of criticism, naturalism has constituted an assault on “machine industrialism” (Parrington), romantic imagination (Trilling), literary realism (Pizer), sentimentality (Lehan), regionalism and local color fiction (Campbell), feminization (Seltzer), capitalism (Benn Michaels), European aestheticism (Dudley), and patriarchal hegemony (Fleissner). My thesis builds on the assumption that the “real object” of naturalism’s rebellion is less definitive than the antinomian spirit itself. The naturalists, in short, were polemicists: naturalism is defined less by a coherent and stable philosophical orientation than by an attitude, a posture of aggressive controversy, which happens to cluster loosely around particular philosophical themes. Moreover, the conspicuous polemicism of the original naturalist project has been registered and extended in the critical construction of the genre over the past century. Naturalism has always depended upon polemical reconstruction by its critics, who were themselves feeding upon the palpable polemicism of Norris, Dreiser, et. al. In chapter one, I argue that the naturalists (and their critics) have adopted a self-effacing polemical rhetoric to establish the genre as the “central marginal” figure in the American canon. By emphasizing their own otherness to the American mainstream, the naturalists were, in effect, claiming it. Then, in close examinations of works by Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Richard Wright, I argue that the naturalists used their fiction to explore some of the most controversial political and cultural issues in modern American life. Scholars have long noticed how naturalism draws on the scientific theories of Darwin, Spencer, Sumner, Huxley, and others to challenge the prevailing Judeo-Christian cosmology. But the naturalists also charted the basic co-ordinates of a wide range of issues. So, my second chapter considers Frank Norris’s The Octopus in relation to emerging discourses of environmentalism and nascent anxieties over ecological despoliation. Chapter three considers the relationship between abortion and censorship in Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, and argues that the “tragedy” of Dreiser’s text hinges upon our understanding how its protagonist, Clyde Griffiths, is himself a work of art. In chapter four, I argue that Native Son’s chilling protagonist, Bigger Thomas, represents a distinctly modern figure for terror, and that the novel elaborates a disturbing complimentarity between terrorism and lynching as the crime and punishment that exist outside the confines of the law. While my project considers each of these polemical debates within the cultural and intellectual climates in which they emerged, it is also an attempt to engage with these ideas in their own spirit—that is, to situate naturalistic novels, polemically, within the highly fraught contexts they helped to invent.

This dissertation argues that the crucial quality of American literary naturalism is the polemicism of its major authors and texts. Scholars have long been attuned to the “rebellious” nature of naturalism. Indeed, following the charge of H. L. Mencken (for whom naturalism constituted an aesthetic assault on the pious vacuities of Howellsian social realism), critics have been apt to frame naturalism as the national literature of disobedience. What is less than clear, however, is what, exactly, naturalism is supposed to be rebelling against. In a century of criticism, naturalism has constituted an assault on “machine industrialism” (Parrington), romantic imagination (Trilling), literary realism (Pizer), sentimentality (Lehan), regionalism and local color fiction (Campbell), feminization (Seltzer), capitalism (Benn Michaels), European aestheticism (Dudley), and patriarchal hegemony (Fleissner). My thesis builds on the assumption that the “real object” of naturalism’s rebellion is less definitive than the antinomian spirit itself. The naturalists, in short, were polemicists: naturalism is defined less by a coherent and stable philosophical orientation than by an attitude, a posture of aggressive controversy, which happens to cluster loosely around particular philosophical themes. Moreover, the conspicuous polemicism of the original naturalist project has been registered and extended in the critical construction of the genre over the past century. Naturalism has always depended upon polemical reconstruction by its critics, who were themselves feeding upon the palpable polemicism of Norris, Dreiser, et. al. In chapter one, I argue that the naturalists (and their critics) have adopted a self-effacing polemical rhetoric to establish the genre as the “central marginal” figure in the American canon. By emphasizing their own otherness to the American mainstream, the naturalists were, in effect, claiming it. Then, in close examinations of works by Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Richard Wright, I argue that the naturalists used their fiction to explore some of the most controversial political and cultural issues in modern American life. Scholars have long noticed how naturalism draws on the scientific theories of Darwin, Spencer, Sumner, Huxley, and others to challenge the prevailing Judeo-Christian cosmology. But the naturalists also charted the basic co-ordinates of a wide range of issues. So, my second chapter considers Frank Norris’s The Octopus in relation to emerging discourses of environmentalism and nascent anxieties over ecological despoliation. Chapter three considers the relationship between abortion and censorship in Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, and argues that the “tragedy” of Dreiser’s text hinges upon our understanding how its protagonist, Clyde Griffiths, is himself a work of art. In chapter four, I argue that Native Son’s chilling protagonist, Bigger Thomas, represents a distinctly modern figure for terror, and that the novel elaborates a disturbing complimentarity between terrorism and lynching as the crime and punishment that exist outside the confines of the law. While my project considers each of these polemical debates within the cultural and intellectual climates in which they emerged, it is also an attempt to engage with these ideas in their own spirit—that is, to situate naturalistic novels, polemically, within the highly fraught contexts they helped to invent.

Thesis (M.A.) - Simon Fraser University, 2006. / Theses (Dept. of Sociology/Anthropology) / Simon Fraser University. Includes bibliographical references (p. 139-148).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Anthropology, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 74-78).

Thesis (M.B.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1993. / Includes bibliographical references.