Along with traditional organisational forms, such as SMEs and MNCs, a variety of alternative types of organising exist in the business world. As hybrid organisations between traditional for-profit businesses and non-profit organisations, alternative types of organising often integrate social and environmental concerns deeply into their business models. Hence, these organisations aim at combining economic goals with the pursuit to proactively create a positive social and environmental impact.

In this chapter, we will take a deeper look into alternative types of organising for corporate sustainability as a promising pathway to integrate sustainability into the business sector and discuss the challenges they face as well as the social and environmental impact they create. Specifically, we will discuss four examples of these organisations: foundation-owned companies, which are companies that are fully or partially owned by an industrial foundation instead of shareholders; cooperatives, which are community-based organisations that are owned by their members (i.e., individuals who voluntarily join their forces and collaborate); social businesses, defined as organisations that pursue a social or environmental mission while engaging in commercial business activities; and B Corps as a specific form of social businesses, meaning those that have applied for and passed a certain certification process.

This chapter discusses the nature, legitimacy, impact and critique of voluntary standards for sustainability. We first develop a definition of sustainability standards and distinguish three different types of standards. This discussion shows that, while standardisation in the field of sustainability has grown in recent years, existing initiatives differ in several important ways. Next, we discuss how the legitimacy of sustainability standards can be assessed. We differentiate between standards’ input and output legitimacy. We then focus on the impact that sustainability standards can potentially have on adopting firms, end consumers and the regulated issue area. The final section takes a detailed look at the critique that has been raised against selected standards (e.g., the coexistence of multiple standards with a similar purpose).

This chapter discusses the role of ethical reflection in the context of corporate sustainability. It starts by reviewing the relevance of four normative ethical theories (utilitarian ethics, duty-based ethics, virtue ethics and posthuman ethics) for corporate sustainability. Next, the chapter discusses how people in organisations make ethical decisions and which cognitive biases impact our decision-making. In the following section, the chapter asks two essential questions: Why do we need ethics when discussing corporate sustainability? and Can corporations engage in ethical reflection or is this something that only individuals can do? The final section discusses how firms can manage ethics, and we distinguish two orientations that can guide such management: compliance and integrity.

This stage of the journey focuses on concepts as candidates for word meaning. It contains a discussion of several versions of the mentalistic/representational approach to word meaning, also assessing them for candidacy for a general theory of meaning in language that covers words, sentences, utterances, and discourses, pursued in the upcoming stages. It foregrounds the role of context in determining lexical content and the associated ‘food for thought’ questions.

In this chapter we consider a class of codes known as trellis codes. Unlike block codes, trellis codes can encode an arbitrary length sequence of information symbols to produce a sequence of coded symbols. So the notion of block length is not directly applicable. A subclass of codes known as convolutional codes, which are linear trellis codes, has found widespread applications in many communication systems.

This final brief stage of the journey invites reflection on the various seminal, ground-breaking ideas and approaches introduced in this journey and on how they can be woven into a ‘postively eclectic’ view of what meaning in language is – a unique view that each reader can develop for themselves with the help of this introduction to ideas and to ways of thinking. It also addresses the role of metasemantics and metapragmatics in posing ‘foundational questions’ about meaning. It concludes with a dicussion of the future of meaning, in the context of some ‘big questions’: constraints on processing information imposed by the human brain, the intelligence–consciousness interface, and, generally, how to comprehend the human take on the world – the human way of comprehending it and organizing and conveying information. In short, it puts the theories and approaches discussed in this journey under the net of our human meaning.

In this chapter we consider a communication system that transmits a single bit of information using one of two signals. The receiver filters the received signal, samples the filter output, and then makes a decision about which of the two signals was transmitted. We first consider an example in which the two signals are just rectangular pulses with opposite sign. For those signals in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) we analyze the probability of error for a receiver that uses a filter matched to the transmitted signal. Second, we consider optimizing the system over all possible filters, signals, and decision rules. The optimal filter and signals are derived for binary modulation in which one of two signals is transmitted. Finally, the effect of imperfect receivers is considered. Approaches to analyzing a system with intersymbol interference (ISI) are discussed.