As scholars and activists seek to define and promote greater corporate political responsibility (CPR), they will benefit from understanding practitioner perspectives and how executives are responding to rising scrutiny of their political influences, reputational risk and pressure from employees, customers and investors to get involved in civic, political, and societal issues. This chapter draws on firsthand conversations with practitioners, including executives in government affairs; sustainability; senior leadership; and diversity, equity and inclusion, during the launch of a university-based CPR initiative. I summarize practitioner motivations, interests, barriers and challenges related to engaging in conversations about CPR, as well as committing or acting to improve CPR. Following the summary, I present implications for further research and several possible paths forward, including leveraging practitioners’ value on accountability, sustaining external calls for transparency, strengthening awareness of systems, and reframing CPR as part of a larger dialogue around society’s “social contract.”

This chapter examines the miscommunication of an intercultural team working on a task via videoconferencing technology using English. We utilize multimodal (inter)action analysis (Norris, 2004, 2011, 2019, 2020) as our theoretical and methodological framework to shed new light on how participants appear to negotiate and co-construct common ground, while they in fact do not achieve conceptual convergence but, instead, produce their own actions. The data for this chapter comes from a corpus of twelve dyads working on tasks via videoconferencing technology in New Zealand. Data was collected from various English monolingual and Serbian multilinguals in various interactive constellations. In this chapter, we focus on a dyadic team with a Serbian native speaker and a monolingual New Zealand English speaker. Rajic and Norris (2018) show that Serbian native speakers’ nonverbal actions vastly differ from New Zealand English speakers’ nonverbal actions. While the difference in production of nonverbal actions is relevant in all interactions, they do not necessarily lead to intercultural miscommunications. However, as noted earlier, interactive alignment is not just a linguistic accomplishment (Pirini & Geenen 2018). Our results conflict somewhat with those of other scholars (House, 1999; Mauranen, 2006), who claim that few miscommunications occur in English as a Lingua Franca interactions. Owing to our analysis, we would like to claim that miscommunications in linguistically and culturally diverse communicative situations are more frequent than previously thought. However, many of the miscommunications that occur cannot be said to come about because of cultural differences.

James Baldwin’s account of “looking away” in “Nobody Knows My Name,” points to the prevailing habit of ignoring the history and facts of blackness that continues to be replicated in American culture. “Looking away” is, however, only partial since it simultaneously demands and denies black existence, a paradoxical strategy designed to facilitate the work of whiteness and the cultural formation it engenders. One can be resistant to the facts of race while being preoccupied with the idea of race as advanced within a critique of modernity. This chapter argues that these complex and pervasive strategies inform a mental practice, a white epistemology that is the product of historical formation, from which the reader and reading are not immune. By contrast, the chapter’s review of early modern and current theories of reading indicates the continuing trend of racial avoidance. Building on Michel de Certeau’s class-inflected analysis that “the text has a meaning only through its readers,” this chapter argues, however, that whiteness exercises an elite racial function in reading that, following Charles W. Mills’ critique, produces distortion and misinterpretation.

With the inescapable constructive dimension of CIL, courts serve a key function in the development of CIL through their interpretations and their interpretative methodologies. Sometimes courts are mistaken in their interpretation of CIL. This contribution explores three main questions: (1) what is misinterpretation? (2) how and why do misinterpretations take place? and (3) what are the potential consequences of misinterpretation of CIL? These all converge in the underlying question of whether there are detectable objective standards for the determination of misinterpretation or whether such observation is always a subjective one – anchored on a disagreement on the values which lie at the core of international law. To preserve legal certainty and predictability in the interpretation of CIL, it is crucial to recognise that courts are not infallible, may lack the requisite methodological tools and occasionally just get CIL wrong. The indeterminacy of CIL renders futile the attempts to pin down precise conditions for its validity, and simultaneously, leaves open the definition of misinterpretation of CIL.