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.”

A particularity about the literature on the meaning of work is that the concept of meaning is discussed extensively and deeply, while the concept of work is hardly debated at all. Tackling this shortcoming, we start out by taking up contradictions in the social science debate on definitions of the concept of work. Four such contradictions stand out: (1) Subjective vs. objective definitions; (2) a single vs. several work concepts; (3) certain activities in themselves vs. any activity within specific social relations are to be regarded as work; and (4) empirical vs. ontological basis of the concept. In investigating them, we take help from what are often said to be the three most important classics of social science: How have Émile Durkheim, Max Weber and Karl Marx handled the concept of work? Specifically, can we get inspiration from them to take stands concerning the contradictions? The answers to these questions lead us to suggest this definition: Work is any activity performed in internal social relations that structure the sphere of necessity. Finally, we discuss the three suggested explicit conceptualisations of ‘work’ that we have found in the meaningful work literature.

Alban Berg’s serial works (c. 1925–35) show his ability to use the twelve-tone method of composition as a form of exegesis for his personal, intellectual, and musical heritage in musical narratives suffused with apparent contradictions. In so doing, Berg combined what has been understood as antithetical ideas in an overarching system that brings together his modernistic aesthetics and the art of the past through textures in which twelve-tone serialism and tonality are interwoven. Problematising scholarship that attempts to understand Berg’s music based on Schoenberg’s compositional models, I argue that Berg followed the lead of Fritz Heinrich Klein and Theodor Adorno and embraced contradiction as a ‘category of thought’ in his compositional process. Berg’s approach is evident from the construction of the series to compositions such as the Violin Concerto (1935), which contains a web of musical and extra-musical significations that continues to challenge existing analytical models.

Mette Bundvad considers Ecclesiastes as a book of contradictions and one that has a peculiar narrator and special thematic concerns. Instead of giving a catalogue of possible or plausible contradictions in the book, Bundvad surveys the ways in which scholars have reckoned with the book’s evident tensions. The question that emerges, then, is whether these contradictions are a feature of the book or a ‘bug’ of sorts. Ecclesiastes’ portrayal of its narrator falls under the rubric of these very tensions, exhibiting a man, or men, who wears various guises and no one persona. Bundvad concludes with reflections about the book’s treatment of time, a theme that does not resolve every tension but does open up new questions and possible structures.

Chapter 6 on ‘democratisation’ continues to examine how public banks can function in the public interest, if not without contradictions. Looking at the cases of Germany’s KfW and Costa Rica’s Banco Popular, the chapter argues that their ways of democratisation support their institutional credibility, and hence persistence. In distinct but meaningful ways, the KfW and Banco Popular enable their societies to have a meaningful say over how these public banks function. In contrast to decarbonisation and definancialisation, however, democratisation has a more disproportionately self-evident public interest effect. Yet it is not a completed act wherein these public banks are democratised once and for all. Democratisation, too, is pulled between contending public and private interests in class-divided society within global financialised capitalism.

The fall of the Qing dynasty was followed by the successive creation of two republics: the Republic of China (‘ROC’), established in 1912 and ultimately dominated by the Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek, and the People’s Republic of China (‘PRC’), established in 1949 by the Chinese Communist Party (‘CCP’) headed by Mao Zedong. Treatment of the two Chinas in the international arena could hardly have been more different. Never exercising more than nominal control over the entirety of the territory it claimed, the ROC was riven by an endless succession of warlords, an even greater number of Westerners holding onto semi-colonial privileges they claimed to have inherited from the Qing, a civil war between Nationalists and Communists, and a brutal occupation by Japan. Nevertheless, while there was no shortage of people in China rejecting the claims of the Nationalist Government, internationally no one doubted its legal existence, even when contradicted by facts.