Why do community-based education and social persuasion programs for promoting healthy lifestyle and preventing chronic disease sometimes fall short of our expectations? Why are population effects so difficult to engineer and why are they so ephemeral?

This research carried out at USC, the Claremont Graduate University, and collaborating institutions in China integrates across social, behavioral, and neurocognitive sciences to address those questions. We conclude tentatively that the answer to each of the questions may lie in individual and context variability relative to program response, and that in order to more fully address the question of prevention program response variability requires engagement and integration across several levels of science to consider the roles of social groupings, environmental selection and design, social influence processes, and brain biology.

What works in one social, cultural or organizational setting may not be so effective in another. What works for persons with certain genetic and experiential backgrounds may be totally ineffective for persons with different dispositional or personality characteristics. In a series of community/school based prevention trials carried out in markedly different southern California and central China settings, we have uncovered domains of consistent response, and other domains of substantial environment- and disposition-based response variability.

A social influences based smoking prevention program framed in collectivist values and objectives worked to prevent smoking in one cultural setting but not another. And an individualist framed social influences program worked in the setting where the collectivist program did not. But the characteristics of the particular settings, which defined program success or failure, were different from what conventional (e.g., cultural psychology) wisdom would have led us to expect. Furthermore, both within and across cultural settings, the same individual dispositional characteristics moderated or determined program effectiveness, again in ways not predicted by the common cultural and behavioral science wisdom.

In recent studies carried out both in China and the U.S. we have found affective decision deficits, with known neural underpinnings, to account for rapid progression to regular smoking and binge drinking. These deficits are akin to the dispositional characteristics found earlier to moderate prevention program effects. Subsequent brain imaging studies confirm the hypothesized regions of neural involvement. Together these findings hold promise for more effective – situation and phenotype specific – approaches to engendering and sustaining more optimal individual and population health behavior.

This daylong discussion, attended by roughly 40 scholars and practitioners from universities, labor organizations, corporations and NGOs, focused on how companies can move beyond monitoring and compliance to build socially and environmentally responsible supply chains.

At two workshops in 2008, the group discussed a few key strategies, leading Josh Cohen and Rick Locke to seek funding for a new research center. These included:

1. Scaling up codes of conduct
2. Reinvigorating national regulation
3. Combining labor standards and trade rules

The event on January 29th covered the following topics, summarized below:

Panel 1.   Recent research on ethical consumption

• Michael Hiscox, Jens Hainmueller, Sandra Sequeira (Harvard)
• Margeret Levi (University of Washington)
• Yotam Margalit (Stanford University)
• Dara O’Rourke (GoodGuide, UC Berkeley)

Selected findings:

• The Average “Fair Trade” effect is 9%, based on a coffee experiment with Whole  Foods
• Consumers are willing to pay some premium for social labels (7.3-13.1%)
• Berkeley: Personal health and wellness and the environment outrank labor concerns for consumers of products listed on GoodGuide.com

Panel  2.   Best practices in the environmental area that might be carried over to labor/trade

• Edgar Blanco (MIT)
• Bonnie Nixon (HP)
• Erica Plambeck (Stanford)
• Charles Sabel (Columbia)

Selected discussion points:

•  Compliance-based regulation no longer works; there are new roles for NGOs, government, and public-private partnerships in creating incentives for suppliers
• Suppliers care most about volume and length of contracts; since not everyone is Wal-Mart, buyers may need to come together to encourage ethical behavior

Panel 3.   New regulatory strategies in labor markets in emerging economies

• Salo Vinocur Coslovsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Mary Gallagher, University of Michigan
• Andrew Schrank, University of New Mexico
• Rick Locke, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Selected discussion points:

• Evidence from Brazil shows that law enforcement operates in parallel with private auditors in monitoring suppliers, becoming “shock troops of sustainable development”; some issues require state regulation
• There may be trade-offs between bureaucratic efficiency and equity in a compliance system, as in the Dominican Republic
• In some cases, the state’s role is to delegate work so private sector can police more effectively

Panel 4.   Looking Forward

• Caitlin Morris (Nike)
• Marcela Manubens (Phillips-Van Heusen)

Selected discussion points:

• Key issue is how to tie labor and environmental agenda together; for some companies, environmentalism is self-interest—materials like bamboo often resonate with designers. But who makes the bamboo shirt is less of an issue. One option is to derive cost savings from environmental policies and direct that money to programs for workers.
• Big question: in an entry-level sector, how far across the spectrum from minimum or entry-level to living wage do we go? How do we measure progress? Is it a 3% increase in labor value /product each year?
• Another issue in need of further exploration: where upgrading doesn’t reach lower down in the supply chain. There’s got to be a virtuous circle where technical upgrading and labor issues can be joined
• Environmental issues have won the battle because regulatory environment incents companies to care about it, and consumers care, too—it’s become hip. Maybe what’s needed is to institutionalize the “triple bottom line” approach to business such that companies with good labor policies get tax breaks.

» Notes and Presentations (password protected)

Co-sponsored with the Global Supply Chain Management Forum

Olena Nikolayenko (Ph.D. Toronto) is a Visiting Postdoctoral Scholar and the recepient of post-doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her research interests include comparative democratization, public opinion, social movements, youth, and corruption. In her dissertation, she analyzed political support among the first post-Soviet generation grown up without any direct experience with communism in Russia and Ukraine. Her current research examines why some youth movements are more successful than others in applying methods of nonviolent resistance to mobilize the population in non-democratic regimes. She has recently conducted fieldwork in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Serbia, and Ukraine.

A new moral, ethical, and legal framework is needed for international human rights law. Never in human history has there been such an elaborate international system for human rights, yet from massive disasters, such as the Darfur genocide, to everyday tragedies, such as female genital mutilation, human rights abuses continue at an alarming rate. As the world population increases and global trade brings new wealth as well as new problems, international law can and should respond better to those who live in fear of violence, neglect, or harm.

Modern critiques global human rights fall into three categories: sovereignty, culture, and civil society. These are not new problems, but have long been debated as part of the legal philosophical tradition. Taking lessons from tradition and recasting them in contemporary light, Helen Stacy proposes new approaches to fill the gaps in current approaches: relational sovereignty, reciprocal adjudication, and regional human rights. She forcefully argues that law and courts must play a vital role in forging a better human rights vision in the future.