SDGC Glossary

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A

accounting fraud
The manipulation of financial statements through aggressive use of permissible accounting choices like early revenue recognition, optimistic asset valuations, or buried liabilities to misrepresent a company’s financial position.
algorithmic amplification
The process by which platform recommendation systems systematically promote content that generates high engagement, regardless of its accuracy or harm.
algorithmic hiring
The use of automated software systems to screen, rank, or select job candidates, typically trained on historical hiring data.
anchoring
The cognitive tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of numerical information encountered when making estimates or decisions. Even when people know that an initial number is arbitrary or irrelevant, it systematically pulls their judgments toward it.
at-will employment
An employment doctrine, dominant in the United States, under which either party may terminate the employment relationship at any time, for any reason not prohibited by law, without notice or cause. Most wealthy countries impose statutory notice periods, severance requirements, or just-cause protections that significantly limit at-will termination.
availability heuristic
The mental shortcut of estimating how likely or common something is by how easily examples of it come to mind. Vivid or recent events are overweighted relative to more common but less memorable ones.

B

backfire effect
The phenomenon in which presenting people with evidence that contradicts a strongly held belief causes them to hold that belief more firmly rather than updating it.
Basel Convention
The 1989 international treaty restricting the transboundary movement of hazardous waste, particularly from wealthy to developing nations.
bertillonage
The system of criminal identification developed by Alphonse Bertillon in the 1880s, based on recording eleven precise body measurements. Widely adopted by police forces in Europe and the colonial world, it was displaced by fingerprinting around 1900.
biometrics
The measurement and statistical analysis of unique physical or behavioral characteristics to identify or verify an individual’s identity.
blood libel
The accusation that Jews murdered Christian children to use their blood in Passover rituals.
boryokudan
The Japanese government’s official designation for organized crime groups, meaning “violence group,” used in anti-organized crime legislation since 1992 as an alternative to the self-identifying term yakuza.
bounded rationality
Herbert Simon’s term for the observation that human decision-making is rational only within the limits of available information, cognitive capacity, and time. People do not optimize; they search for solutions that are good enough and stop, a process Simon called satisficing.
brand protection
The enforcement of exclusive commercial identity through legal mechanisms such as trademarks and trade dress, used to prevent competitors from trading on an established name.

C

civil disobedience
The deliberate, nonviolent refusal to comply with laws or government demands as a form of political protest, aimed at changing the law rather than evading it.
codetermination
A labor relations system in which workers hold formal representation rights on corporate governing boards, as in the German Mitbestimmung model.
cognitive bias
A systematic pattern of deviation from rational judgment in which people reach conclusions through processes that are predictably and consistently skewed.
cognitive pollution
The systematic degradation of the shared information environment through the spread of misleading, manipulative, or low-quality content at scale.
collective bargaining
The process by which workers negotiate wages, hours, and working conditions as a group through their union rather than as individuals.
commons
Resources held in common by a community rather than owned privately, subject to collective governance rather than market allocation.
conspicuous consumption
Thorstein Veblen’s term for spending on goods and services primarily to signal social status rather than for their practical use or pleasure. The signal only works if the expenditure is visible and sufficiently costly to exclude lower-status competitors.
conspicuous leisure
Thorstein Veblen’s term for the visible display of not working as a signal of social rank. In contexts where most people must labor, idleness signals that one can afford to abstain; in modern professional contexts, the signal has inverted to highly visible overwork and constant availability.
consumer cooperative
A cooperative owned by its customers rather than its workers, in which members pay a joining fee or purchase membership shares and receive a dividend proportional to their purchases, with governance following a one-member-one-vote principle.
content moderation
The practice of reviewing and enforcing community standards on user-generated content on digital platforms, including decisions about removal, restriction, and amplification.
control fraud
A form of financial fraud in which the executives of an institution use the institution itself as a vehicle for personal enrichment at the expense of depositors, investors, or clients.
cooperative
A firm owned and governed by its members in which profits are distributed in proportion to participation rather than capital invested, and governance follows a one-member-one-vote principle rather than a one-share-one-vote principle.
copyleft
A licensing approach that requires derivative works to be distributed under the same open terms as the original, preventing proprietary appropriation of open-source contributions.
credit union
A member-owned financial cooperative that accepts deposits, makes loans, and returns surplus to members rather than distributing profits to outside shareholders.
crop lien
A credit arrangement in which farmers borrowed against their future harvest, typically from merchants who charged high interest and kept borrowers in perpetual debt.

D

dark triad
A cluster of three overlapping personality traits—psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism—that researchers treat together because they tend to co-occur and share a common pattern of callous self-interest, manipulation, and disregard for others.
decriminalization
The removal of criminal penalties for a behavior, typically while other civil or regulatory restrictions remain in place.
Delaware flip
The process by which a non-US startup reincorporates by creating a Delaware holding company above the existing domestic entity and transferring intellectual property to it, typically required by American venture capital investors as a condition of investment.
deplatforming
The removal of an individual or group from a digital platform as a content moderation enforcement action.
diffuse decision-making
The distribution of accountability across many individuals in an organization such that no single person can be held responsible for harmful outcomes.
disposition effect
The tendency of investors to sell assets that have increased in value while holding on to assets that have declined, the opposite of what a rational strategy would recommend. It follows from loss aversion: selling a losing position requires acknowledging a loss, which is more painful than an equivalent gain is pleasurable.
divestment
The disposal of financial assets in a company or sector as a form of political pressure, imposing reputational and economic costs on targeted firms or governments.
donor-advised fund
A financial vehicle in which a donor contributes assets, receives an immediate tax deduction, and retains the ability to direct grants to charitable recipients at any pace over time, while the contributed assets remain under the donor’s effective control.
downline
In multi-level marketing, the network of distributors recruited by a participant and by those distributors’ own recruits, whose sales generate commission income for everyone above them in the chain.
dual-class shares
A corporate share structure in which two or more classes of stock carry different voting rights, typically giving founders or insiders shares with ten or more votes each while public investors receive shares with one vote, allowing the company to raise capital without ceding effective control.
due process
The legal requirement that government or institutional action affecting rights must follow fair procedures and provide a meaningful opportunity for challenge.

E

electronic waste
Discarded electronic devices containing toxic materials such as lead, mercury, and cadmium, much of which is exported for processing in developing countries under hazardous conditions.
Enclosure Acts
Parliamentary legislation in Britain from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries that converted common agricultural land to private ownership.
Enclosure movement
The historical process by which common agricultural lands in Britain were converted into private property, displacing rural communities that had depended on shared access.
engrams
In Scientology, traumatic memories believed to be stored in the reactive mind and to impair mental and physical function; the target of the auditing process, which aims to discharge them through conscious recall.
enshittification
The process by which platform businesses progressively degrade the quality of their service as they shift value extraction from users to advertisers and away from both to shareholders.
equity compensation
Payment in the form of stock or stock options rather than cash, used extensively in the tech industry to align worker incentives with company value while deferring cash costs.
excommunication
Formal exclusion from membership in a religious community and its sacraments, historically used by the Catholic Church as a disciplinary and political tool against individuals.

F

face turn
In professional wrestling, a character’s transition from villain to hero, typically marked by a moment that reveals underlying decency and produces crowd approval where there was previously hostility.
Fair Game
A Scientology policy, first articulated in 1965, stating that members who leave the organization and publicly criticize it may be subjected to any action by other members without organizational discipline. It was officially rescinded in 1968 but documented as continuing in practice under different names.
Flexner Report
The 1910 report that restructured American medical education around elite university-based schools, simultaneously professionalizing medicine and closing institutions that had trained women and Black physicians.
Framework Convention on Tobacco Control
The 2003 World Health Organization treaty on tobacco regulation, the first international public health treaty negotiated under WHO auspices, committing signatory countries to measures including advertising restrictions, health warnings, and plain packaging.
FRAND
Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory: the licensing commitment a patent holder makes when their technology is incorporated into a formal technical standard. The commitment is intended to prevent the patent holder from using a standards-essential patent as a chokepoint to extract monopoly rents from everyone implementing the standard. What counts as “reasonable” is routinely contested in litigation.
front-running
The practice of executing trades based on advance knowledge of pending client orders before those orders are filled, exploiting information asymmetry in financial markets.

G

general partnership
A business structure in which two or more people share ownership, management, and unlimited personal liability for the firm’s debts and legal obligations.
GNU Public License (GPL)
A free software license that grants users the freedom to use, study, modify, and distribute software, with the key requirement that any distributed modifications or derivative works must also be released under the same terms.
greater fool theory
The idea that an overpriced asset can still be a rational purchase if the buyer believes they can sell it to someone else at an even higher price before the market corrects. A bubble collapses when no greater fool can be found.

H

harm principle
John Stuart Mill’s principle, articulated in On Liberty (1859), that the only legitimate basis for restricting individual liberty is to prevent harm to others.
harm reduction
A public health approach that aims to reduce the negative consequences of drug use without requiring abstinence, through measures such as needle exchanges, naloxone distribution, and supervised consumption sites.
heel
In professional wrestling, a character designated to play the villain, whose role is to behave in ways the audience finds objectionable so that sympathy and approval flow toward the opposing character.
heuristics
Mental shortcuts or rules of thumb that people use to make decisions quickly under uncertainty. Heuristics often work well but produce systematic, predictable errors in specific circumstances, which behavioral economists call cognitive biases.
Hicklin test
The 1868 British legal standard defining obscenity as material tending to deprave and corrupt those whose minds were open to immoral influences, superseded in the US by the Miller test.
horizon problem
In cooperative economics, the tendency of member-owners to underinvest in long-term assets because their claim on the cooperative ends when their membership ends, giving them a shorter time horizon than the firm’s productive life.
hyperbolic discounting
The tendency to discount rewards in the near future much more steeply than rewards in the more distant future, producing time-inconsistent preferences.

I

impression management
The ongoing effort by individuals to control how they are perceived by others. In large organizational hierarchies, where decision-makers have limited direct observation of a candidate’s actual work, impression management skills become a primary determinant of career advancement, independently of underlying performance.
information asymmetry
A condition in which one party to a transaction has significantly more or better information than the other, enabling exploitation of that advantage.
interdict
A Catholic Church sanction that suspends religious services in a territory or for a community, historically used as collective punishment to pressure secular rulers.
interoperability
The ability of systems from different vendors or platforms to exchange information and work together without requiring special adaptation by the user. Interoperability mandates are legal requirements that a platform accept connections from competing services on non-discriminatory terms.
investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS)
A mechanism in trade and investment treaties allowing foreign investors to bring arbitration claims against governments in private tribunals, bypassing domestic courts, when government actions are alleged to have damaged their investments.
invisible labor
Work that is essential to the functioning of an organization or household but goes unrecognized, uncompensated, and uncounted because it is performed by people with less power (typically women, caregivers, and low-status workers). Examples include emotional labor, domestic work, and the administrative coordination tasks that fall to junior employees or support staff rather than the people who take credit for outcomes.

J

joint-stock company
A firm whose ownership is divided into transferable shares held by multiple investors, each of whom bears risk only in proportion to their investment; the organizational predecessor of the modern publicly traded corporation.

K

kayfabe
The collective maintenance, by performers and audience alike, of the fiction that professional wrestling matches are genuine athletic contests; by extension, any shared pretense that all parties know to be false but sustain because the fiction serves a social or commercial function.
keiretsu
A Japanese network of interlocked companies that hold shares in one another, maintain long-term supply and trading relationships, and are often anchored around a central bank, insulating member firms from hostile takeovers and short-term market pressure.

L

legibility
The degree to which a state or institution can observe, measure, and administer a population or resource through standardized categories.
legitimacy
The quality of being recognized as having rightful authority, distinct from power exercised by force or coercion alone.
limited liability corporation
A firm in which shareholders cannot be held personally responsible for the company’s debts or legal obligations beyond the amount they have invested, separating the financial risk of the owners from that of the enterprise.
limited partnership
A partnership structure with two classes of partners: limited partners, who risk only the capital they have contributed and take no part in management, and at least one general partner, who retains full personal liability and operational control.
long firm
A fraud in which a business establishes credibility through legitimate trading before ordering large quantities of goods on credit and disappearing with them.
longtermism
The belief that the most important thing people can do is to ensure that the long-run future of civilization goes well, on the grounds that a future containing trillions of people vastly outweighs present-day welfare in moral calculations. Longtermism is used to justify present harm in the name of speculative futures, and that its practitioners disproportionately assume that they themselves should be making those decisions.
loss aversion
The finding from prospect theory that losses produce roughly twice the psychological impact of equivalent gains.

M

Miller test
The 1973 US Supreme Court three-part test for obscenity, requiring that material be evaluated by community standards, appeal to prurient interest, and lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
Mitbestimmung
The German system of codetermination, in which workers in large firms hold legally mandated representation on corporate supervisory boards with formal authority over management.
Mittelstand
The layer of medium-sized, often family-owned manufacturing and engineering firms that form the backbone of the German economy, characterized by long time horizons, specialist expertise, strong regional roots, and formal worker representation under the codetermination system.
Montreal Protocol
The 1987 international treaty requiring signatory countries to phase out the production and use of ozone-depleting substances, including chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). It is notable for including differentiated timelines for developing and developed countries, a technology transfer fund, and trade sanctions against non-signatories.
moral disengagement
The psychological mechanisms by which people disengage their moral standards to engage in or tolerate harmful behavior, including displacement and diffusion of responsibility, dehumanization of victims, and advantageous comparison with worse acts.
moral licensing
The psychological phenomenon in which past virtuous behavior reduces the felt need for future virtuous behavior, sometimes leading to more harmful subsequent choices.
moral panic
A disproportionate social reaction to a perceived threat, typically focused on a specific group or behavior, amplified by media coverage and political entrepreneurs.
motivated reasoning
The cognitive tendency to evaluate evidence in ways that support conclusions already preferred, rather than following evidence to its logical conclusion.

N

narrative economics
The study of how popular stories and narratives spread through populations and drive economic behavior, including investment manias and market crashes.
neoreaction
A political movement, also called the Dark Enlightenment, arguing that Enlightenment values such as democracy, equality, and human rights have made societies weaker and more chaotic. The movement is distinct from classical fascism in its rejection of nationalism and its preference for corporate over state power, though critics note this distinction matters less to those governed by the result.
network effects
The phenomenon in which a product or service becomes more valuable to each user as more people use it, creating strong advantages for established platforms and barriers to entry for competitors.
normalization of deviance
The process by which organizations gradually come to accept risk thresholds that would initially have been unacceptable, through repeated exposure to near-misses that did not immediately produce catastrophe.
nudge
A change in how choices are presented, such as a default setting or the order of options, that predictably influences behavior without restricting options or changing financial incentives. Nudges exploit the same cognitive tendencies that produce bias, and may serve the choice designer’s interests rather than the chooser’s.

O

obscenity law
The body of law governing the prohibition of material deemed indecent or harmful to public morals, whose legal standards have shifted substantially across time and jurisdiction.

P

paradox of tolerance
The argument that unlimited tolerance must eventually lead to the disappearance of tolerance: a society that extends tolerance to movements committed to destroying tolerance will itself be destroyed.
Parkinson’s Law
The observation that work expands to fill the time available.
partnership
A business structure in which two or more people share ownership and, in a general partnership, unlimited personal liability; a foundational organizational form for professional services firms, law firms, and investment funds.
passion principle
The cultural norm in certain fields that workers should pursue their work as a vocation rather than merely a job, used to justify poor conditions, low pay, and long hours.
patent assertion entities
Companies that acquire patents not to produce goods but to extract licensing fees or litigation settlements from operating businesses; commonly called patent trolls.
payola
The practice of record labels paying radio stations or disc jockeys to play their songs without disclosing the payment to listeners.
penny press
The mass-market newspapers of the 1830s that lowered cover prices and relied on advertising revenue rather than subscriptions, establishing the commercial model that now dominates media. See also “yellow press”.
peonage
A system of debt bondage in which workers are legally required to continue working until a debt to an employer is repaid, effectively a form of coerced labor.
philanthrocapitalism
The use of private charitable foundations and large-scale philanthropic giving by wealthy individuals to shape public policy, research priorities, and social institutions, without democratic accountability or electoral legitimacy.
pollution haven
A jurisdiction with weak environmental regulations that attracts investment in polluting industries relocating from places with stricter standards.
Ponzi scheme
A fraudulent investment scheme that pays returns to earlier investors using funds from later investors rather than from actual profits, collapsing when new investment stops.
positional goods
Toods whose value depends on how few other people have them. Unlike material goods, which can be democratized as production scales, positional goods lose their value if everyone has access to them, producing self-defeating competition in which each round of gains returns participants to the same relative position.
precarious workers
Workers in contingent, part-time, contract, or gig arrangements who lack the employment security, benefits, and legal protections associated with standard employment.
predatory pricing
Setting prices below cost to drive competitors out of a market, with the intention of raising prices once competitive pressure is eliminated.
predictive policing
The use of algorithmic tools to forecast where crimes will occur or who is likely to offend, criticized for encoding and amplifying existing racial and socioeconomic biases.
propaganda model
The observation that mass media systematically filters news to serve elite interests through ownership structure, advertising dependence, and other institutional pressures.
prospect theory
A model of how people actually evaluate risky outcomes. Key findings are that people evaluate outcomes relative to a reference point rather than in absolute terms, and that losses loom roughly twice as large as equivalent gains (a phenomenon called loss aversion).
Psychopathy Checklist
A clinical assessment instrument for measuring psychopathic traits in individuals. The checklist evaluates characteristics including callousness, grandiosity, manipulation, lack of remorse, and failure to accept responsibility. The Framework is also used to show that corporate legal structure produces psychopathic behavior at the organizational level.
public benefit corporation
A corporate form that legally requires directors to consider the interests of employees, communities, and the environment alongside shareholder returns, providing some protection against purely financial acquisition pressure; available in several Canadian provinces and US states.
publication bias
The tendency for academic journals and researchers to publish positive or statistically significant findings while null or negative results go unreported, distorting the scientific record.
putting-out system
A pre-industrial manufacturing arrangement in which merchants supplied raw materials to workers in their homes and collected finished goods, a precursor to the factory system.

Q

R

racial formation
The process by which racial categories are created, transformed, and destroyed through political, economic, and social forces rather than biology.
redlining
The systematic denial of mortgages and insurance to residents of non-white neighborhoods in the US by government agencies and private lenders from the 1930s onward. It was formally outlawed in the US in 1968 but its effects persist in wealth and credit gaps.
regulatory capture
The process by which a regulatory agency comes to serve the interests of the industry it is supposed to regulate rather than the public interest it was created to protect.
regulatory compact
An implicit or explicit agreement between a regulated monopoly and a government regulator, in which the monopoly accepts rate and service regulation in exchange for protection from competition.
revolving door
The movement of individuals between roles in regulatory agencies and the industries those agencies oversee.

S

satisficing
The strategy of searching through available options until a good-enough solution is found, rather than evaluating all possibilities to find the optimal one. Satisficing reflects bounded rationality: people do not have the time, information, or cognitive capacity to optimize.
scrip
Company-issued currency or vouchers that could only be spent at company-owned stores, historically used by employers to keep workers’ wages circulating within the company economy.
selection bias
A statistical error that occurs when the sample used in a study is not representative of the population it is meant to reflect, leading to skewed or misleading conclusions.
selectorate
In selectorate theory, the full set of people whose nominal support a leader depends on to hold power, from which the winning coalition is drawn. The selectorate is large enough to give the leader alternatives if individual coalition members defect, but most members receive only public goods rather than private benefits.
selectorate theory
A framework explaining political and organizational behavior in terms of the size of the winning coalition a leader must satisfy to remain in power. Leaders with small winning coalitions can maintain power by distributing private benefits to a few key supporters; those with large winning coalitions must provide broader public goods.
sharecropping
A system in which tenant farmers gave a portion of their crop as rent to a landowner, often perpetuating poverty and dependency through tied credit arrangements.
sideloading
Installing software on a device from sources other than the platform operator’s official app store, bypassing the operator’s review and commission systems.
slotting fees
Payments made by consumer goods manufacturers to retailers for guaranteed shelf placement, functioning as a barrier to entry that favors established brands with resources to pay.
social legibility
The degree to which an individual’s characteristics, credentials, or identity are visible and interpretable within the categorization systems used by institutions making decisions about them.
sodomy laws
Laws criminalizing certain sexual acts, historically applied primarily to same-sex relations; declared unconstitutional in the United States by the Supreme Court in 2003.
sole proprietorship
The simplest business structure, in which a single individual owns and operates a firm with no legal separation between personal and business assets, meaning the owner bears unlimited personal liability for the firm’s debts and obligations.
speculative bubble
A rapid, self-reinforcing rise in the price of an asset driven by expectations of further price increases rather than underlying value, followed by an equally rapid collapse when those expectations reverse.
stand your ground
Laws that remove the traditional legal duty to retreat before using lethal force in self-defense, applicable wherever a person has a legal right to be.
standards body
An organization that develops, publishes, and maintains technical standards through consensus processes among industry participants, governments, and other stakeholders.
standards capture
The process by which a dominant firm shapes a technical standard to its own advantage, either by controlling a standards body, by implementing proprietary extensions that become de facto requirements, or by refusing to implement open standards that would reduce switching costs.
structural lock-in
The condition in which technical, contractual, or network dependencies make switching away from a platform or system prohibitively costly, regardless of dissatisfaction with it.
suppressive person
In Scientology, the designation applied to individuals who publicly criticize the organization or leave it in ways deemed harmful to its interests; those so designated may be cut off from contact with current members, including family members who remain in the organization.
surveillance economy
The business model in which user behavior data is systematically collected, analyzed, and monetized through targeted advertising and data brokering.
switching costs
The financial, practical, or social costs incurred when changing from one product, service, or platform to another, which incumbents exploit to retain users.

T

tax haven
A jurisdiction that imposes low or zero taxes on foreign income, profits, or wealth, attracting capital and corporate registrations that have little or no genuine economic activity there.
TESCREAL
An acronym for Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism. These movements are not identical, but they share a belief that a small group of enlightened individuals can and should steer humanity’s long-run trajectory, which tends to position democratic institutions as obstacles rather than safeguards.
tithe
A mandatory contribution of one-tenth of income or produce, historically collected by the Catholic Church as a form of taxation with legal enforcement in many countries.
tontine
A historical financial arrangement in which subscribers contribute to a shared fund and receive income from it; as each subscriber dies, the remaining subscribers’ shares increase until the last survivor inherits the whole. Banned in most jurisdictions because the structure creates incentives to hasten the deaths of other participants.
tort liability protection
Tort liability is legal responsibility for harm you cause someone outside of a contract; tort liability protection (also called liability shield or immunity) is when a law specifically exempts you from being sued for such harms.
transfer pricing
The setting of prices for transactions between subsidiaries of the same multinational corporation, which can be manipulated to shift profits to low-tax jurisdictions by under- or overcharging for goods, services, or intellectual property licenses.

U

union avoidance
A formal management discipline focused on preventing workers from forming or joining unions, employing specialized consultants to structure workplaces, communications, and compensation to reduce organizing incentives.

V

vertical integration
A business strategy in which a company controls multiple stages of its supply chain, from production through distribution and retail, reducing dependence on external parties and raising barriers to competitors.

W

waqf
An Islamic charitable endowment in which property is dedicated in perpetuity to a specified purpose and cannot be sold or inherited; historically used to fund mosques, hospitals, schools, and public infrastructure across the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa.
winning coalition
In selectorate theory, the minimum subset of supporters a leader must keep satisfied to remain in power. The smaller the winning coalition, the more each member must be rewarded with private benefits rather than broad public goods, creating strong incentives for corruption and cronyism.
workplace politics
The process by which individuals and groups within an organization attempt to influence decisions in their favor when there is no shared agreement on goals or priorities. Workplace politics is not exceptional behavior by bad actors; it is the normal mechanism by which organizations resolve disagreement.

X

Y

yellow press
Late nineteenth and early twentieth century sensationalist newspapers known for emotionally manipulative coverage that prioritized circulation over accuracy, named after the Yellow Kid comic strip.

Z