bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Law of Consumer Credit and Hire
Authors: Philpott Fred , Hibbert William , Neville Stephen , Popplewell Simon , Say Bradley , Sayer Peter , Smith Julia
Published: November 2023

Inspired by the Consumer Credit Act 2006, this detailed work offers practical guidance on the legislation. The scope and impact of the regulation is undergoing fundamental change; for example, financial limits on regulation are being partially removed, the OFT are given the power to fine licensees, an Ombudsman scheme is being introduced and agreements can be reopened where the relationship arising is held to be unfair. This book addresses topics of practical concern and examines the areas most relevant to practitioners drafting, securitising or seeking to defend claims under credit or hire agreements. In particular, the book focuses on the outstanding problems and issues arising from the application of the Consumer Credit Act. In-depth commentary is provided by an expert author team who have appeared in many recent cases where enforceability of rights under credit and hire agreements has been in issue.
French Dislocation
Authors: De Cat CéCile
Published: November 2023

The pervasive use of dislocations (as in Le chocolat, c’est bon) is a key characteristic of spoken French. This book offers various new and well-motivated insights, based on tests conducted by the author, on the syntactic analysis, prosody, and the interpretation of dislocation in spoken French. It also considers important aspects of the acquisition of dislocation by monolingual children learning different French dialects. The author argues that spoken French is a discourse-configurational language, in which topics are obligatorily dislocated. She develops a syntactically parsimonious account, which maximizes the import of interfaces involved with discourse and prosody. She proposes clear diagnostics, following a reexamination of the status of subject clitics and a reevaluation of the characteristic prosody of dislocated constituents. The theoretical arguments throughout the book rest on data that comes from corpora of spontaneous production and from various elitication experiments. This book throws new light on French syntax and prosody and makes an important and original contribution to the study of linguistic interfaces. Clearly expressed and tightly argued it will interest scholars and advanced students of French and of its acquisition as a first language as well as linguistic theorists interested in the interfaces between syntax, discourse, and phonology.
Language Anxiety
Authors: Machan Tim William
Published: November 2023

This book looks at the ever-present anxieties associated with language change. Focusing on English from Alfred the Great to the present, Tim Machan offers a fresh perspective on the history of language. He reveals amusing and sometimes disconcerting aspects of our linguistic and social behavior and suggests that anxiety about language has sometimes allowed us to avoid the issues we really find disturbing: when speakers of English worry over grammar, sounds, or words the real source of their anxiety is often not language at all but issues like immigration or social instability. Drawing on an array of evidence from archives, literature, history, polemics, and the press, as well as centuries of legislation, Tim Machan uncovers the perennial nature of concerns about the poverty and purity of English. There has never been a time, he shows, when we weren’t worried about the corruption of language and its apparent connections with educational standards, the morality of youth, the integrity of society, and the identity of our nations. This is a fascinating story, told here in consummate fashion, combining insight and anecdote, and learning with wit - a book for everyone interested in languages and the people who speak them.
Diabetes
Authors: Matthews David
Published: November 2023

There are over 2 million people diagnosed with diabetes in the UK and worldwide 194 million. An epidemic of diabetes is reported and by 2025 it is predicted that there will be 330 million people with diabetes in the world. Diabetes is likely to present one of this century's greatest medical challenges. However, the impact of diabetes on the individual and their carers is equally important. This book provides an easy to understand guide to diabetes and is aimed at all those living with diabetes. This book gives an overall introduction to diabetes including a short history of diabetes, causes, symptoms, possible complications, management (both of diabetes and the associated risk factors), psychological factors and what care to expect. It emphasises self management and gives invaluable advice on how to achieve this.
The heart
Authors: Selikowitz Mark
Published: November 2023

About one-third of children with Down syndrome will be born with a heart abnormality. If no defect is found on the echocardiogram of your child’ s heart, you can be confident that your child is one of the two-thirds of children who have no heart problem. Early complete repair of many heart defects in children with Down syndrome is now possible. About one-third of children with Down syndrome will be born with a heart abnormality. It is important to realize that the heart defects of Down syndrome are already present at birth. If no defect is found on the echocardio- gram of your child’ s heart, you can be confident that your child is one of the two-thirds of children who have no heart problem. If so, this chapter will not concern you.
Which school?
Authors: Selikowitz Mark
Published: November 2023

It is important to realize that every child with Down syndrome has different educational needs, and that these needs change with time. There are eight possible settings in which a child with Down syndrome can be educated. You should not hesitate to request a meeting with your child’ s teacher if there is something that is causing you concern. Do this as early as possible. All children with Down syndrome benefit from appropriate schooling. In addition to gaining new skills at school, children with Down syndrome usually enjoy the company of other children, the familiarity of the routine, and the rewards of learning.
Adulthood
Authors: Selikowitz Mark
Published: November 2023

It is often worthwhile contacting a local citizen advocacy programme to obtain an advocate for your son or daughter once he or she becomes an adult. It is important that planning should be individualized, and that the disabled person should be as fully involved with the decision-making as possible. An adult with Down syndrome should have a number of regular health checks to detect specific problems that are more common in people with the syndrome.
Controversial treatments
Authors: Selikowitz Mark
Published: November 2023

It is important that you carefully assess any treatment programme before becoming involved. Discuss any proposed treatment with your doctor, and consider the reported advantages and disadvantages. Do not rely on stories of miraculous improvements and cures, but ask to see published evidence comparing children who have been treated with those who have not.
Just and Unjust Warriors
Authors: Rodin David , Shue Henry
Published: November 2023

Can a soldier be held responsible for fighting in a war that is illegal or unjust? This is the question at the heart of a new debate that has the potential to profoundly change our understanding of the moral and legal status of warriors, wars, and indeed of moral agency itself. The debate pits a widely shared and legally entrenched principle of war-that combatants have equal rights and equal responsibilities irrespective of whether they are fighting in a war that just or unjust-against a set of striking new arguments. These arguments challenge the idea that there is a separation between the rules governing the justice of going to war (the jus ad bellum) and the rules governing what combatants can do in war (the jus in bello). If ad bellum and in bello rules are connected in the way these new arguments suggest, then many aspects of just war theory and laws of war would have to be rethought and perhaps reformed. This book contains eleven original and closely argued essays by leading figures in the ethics and laws of war and provides an authoritative treatment of this important new debate. The essays both challenge and defend many deeply held convictions: about the liability of soldiers for crimes of aggression, about the nature and justifiability of terrorism, about the relationship between law and morality, the relationship between soldiers and states, and the relationship between the ethics of war and the ethics of ordinary life. This book is a project of the Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War.
The Moral Inequality of Soldiers: Why jus in bello Asymmetry is Half Right
Authors: Rodin David
Published: November 2023

These two theses are closely related but not identical. This is because the content of the norms of jus in bello could be symmetric in a particular conflict even if the independence thesis is false. This would be the case if the ad bellum status of both combatants was the same (e.g. if both sides were fighting an unjust war). Second, there may be reasons for denying the symmetry thesis that are unrelated to the independence thesis. For example, it may be that in bello rights and obligations are asymmetric, not because they are dependent on ad bellum status, but because they are dependent on the varying capabilities of combatants. Thus, non-state actors and weak states have long argued that they ought to be bound by relaxed standards of jus in bello, relieving them of the obligation to wear distinguishable uniforms, bear their arms openly, and perhaps even allowing the targeting of civilians in terrorist attacks. I have recently argued for the converse conclusion that strong states fighting radically weaker opponents should be bound by more stringent in bello requirements. Nonetheless, the connection between the independence thesis and the symmetry thesis is close, and of crucial importance to the ethics of war and its theoretical foundation.
Just War and Regular War: Competing Paradigms
Authors: Reichberg Gregory M
Published: November 2023

The idea that in bello rules of armed conflict can be defined without reference to the ad bellum status of belligerents (the ‘independence thesis’), such that the same rules apply to all belligerents, irrespective of the justice of the cause for which they fight (the ‘symmetry thesis’), has been advanced by Michael Walzer as a central presupposition of traditional just war theory. Historically, this is incorrect. From the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries (Aquinas to Grotius), concerns that now go under the heading of jus in bello were in fact treated largely as an extension of the jus ad bellum. On this understanding, belligerent rights attached only to the party that was possessed of a just cause. By virtue of its guilt, the opposing party enjoyed no such rights, and for this reason, there could be no set of in bello rules that applied to both sides, just and unjust, simultaneously.
Employee and Organizational Performance
Authors: Brewer Gene A
Published: November 2023

The relationship between public service motivation and performance is a matter of great interest to scholars and practitioners alike. Scholars are interested in identifying predictable linkages between what drives organizational members and the outcomes organizations produce. Practitioners are interested in finding ways to achieve goals because they are accountable for producing results in public organizations. Public service motivation may thus be a pathway to improved performance. But does the relationship between public service motivation and performance exist in fact? This chapter assesses the current state of knowledge on the public service motivation–performance relationship and seeks to advance our understanding of it. It begins with a discussion of the theoretical and practical bases for expecting a positive relationship. Evidence from previous research is then reviewed in detail. Implications and suggestions for future research are then presented, and the chapter closes with some concluding thoughts.
The Normative Model in Decline? Public Service Motivation in the Age of Governance
Authors: Moynihan Donald P
Published: November 2023

As more of the public sector operates as markets or quasi-markets, is there still room for public service motivation? The past quarter century has seen the validation of the concept of public service motivation. At the same time, reforms based on assumptions of self-interest were being widely adopted. The market model relies on financial incentives and performance measures to control behavior, and has been applied both within the traditional public sector, and in contracting out public services to third-party government. Perry notes that ‘the rules embedded in new governance structures, which are tied to market forces, are likely the most compelling influences on behavior in the new public service because of their scope and power’(Perry, 2007, p. 8).
The Extreme Right
Authors: Linz Juan J , Mir, Miguel Jerez , Ortega Carmen
Published: November 2023

An analysis of the extreme right must discuss whether the object we are dealing with is really an “extreme right” or a variety of “anti-system” opposition parties (depending on the period and the system), protest parties, conservative authoritarian parties, truly fascist parties in the interwar years, and finally, so called “neo fascist” and “anti-immigrant” (more or less racist) parties in recent years. The enumeration already tells us that this is a heterogeneous catgory of very doubtful validity for a collective characterization across time and countries.
Slavery and the British Empire
Authors: Morgan Kenneth
Published: November 2023

Slavery and the British Empire provides a clear overview of the entire history of British involvement with slavery and the slave trade, from the Cape Colony to the Caribbean. The book combines economic, social, political, cultural, and demographic history, with a particular focus on the Atlantic world and the plantations of North America and the West Indies from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. Kenneth Morgan analyses the distribution of slaves within the empire and how this changed over time; the world of merchants and planters; the organization and impact of the triangular slave trade; the work and culture of the enslaved; slave demography; health and family life; resistance and rebellions; the impact of the anti-slavery movement; and the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 and of slavery itself in most of the British empire in 1834. As well as providing the ideal introduction to the history of British involvement in the slave trade, this book also shows just how deeply embedded slavery was in British domestic and imperial history – and just how long it took for British involvement in slavery to die, even after emancipation.
Trade Unions and Industrial Relations
Authors: Heery Edmund
Published: November 2023

Despite their diminished presence in the real world of work, trade unions continue to feature prominently in the academic study of industrial relations in the United Kingdom. The field of industrial relations has been redefined as the study of the employment relationship (Edwards 1995) and the compass of academic research and debate has widened but unions remain an abiding interest. Partly this is due to the conservatism of the industrial relations profession, though it arises also from the nature of the field. Industrial relations, unlike other subjects taught in business schools, has never accepted the priority of employer interests or framed its research agenda solely in terms of the needs of managers. The interests of employees and their organizations have provided an alternative starting point and the subject, quite rightly, has been responsive to a range of interests within the employment relationship.
Integration through Culture? The Paradox of the Search for a European Identity
Authors: Eder Klaus
Published: November 2023

European identity is on the agenda—a European consciousness is called for. Scientists, intellectuals, and politicians have started to provide recipes to create it. Historical memories of a common European experience are remobilized. The repertoire of symbols and metaphors has become the object of interest and curiosity in the humanities which allows what is required to be found: a collective identity. What results is what sociologists call a social construction of reality. Europe is going to be invented, and the discourse set in motion is to be expected to have real consequences.
Local Production Systems in Europe: Rise or Demise?
Authors: Crouch Colin , Gales Patrick Le , Trigilia Carlo , Voelzkow Helmut
Published: November 2023

This is the first book to present a systematic analysis of specialized clusters of small manufacturing enterprises in the main European economies. Combining knowledge from case-study literature with original analyses of statistical data enables the authors to present full accounts of the role of these clusters in Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, showing the considerable diversity of forms they take. Local production systems (as these clusters are termed) are seen to exist where there are either particular competitive advantages for participation by clusters of small and medium-sized, as opposed to large, firms, or where such clusters at least stand as good a chance as large firms. Small firms may work through a diversity of forms of governance: certain forms of market; cooperation among themselves; through associations; with larger firms located in the same area; or by making use of local facilities provided by governmental or other external agencies - or a combination of all five. The introduction shows how previous literature has been divided into two strands. First came optimistic, mainly 1980s, writings, which assumed that the search for flexibility and quality, typical of post-Fordist models of economic organization, would enhance the role of SMEs. In the ensuing decade, a more pessimistic analysis was put forward. It was argued that the increasing globalization of the economy would bring about a demise of local production systems, under pressure from new global large firms. The authors discuss the possibility of more nuanced findings, and propose a combination of the literature on local production systems with theories of economic governance to assist this process. There follows a chapter which surveys overall economic development in the four countries, concentrating on local economies. Then four national surveys take up the theme of the governance of local production systems in Italy, Germany, France, and Britain. A concluding chapter identifies a diversity of forms of clusters of small firms, and on that basis develops a sociological critique of current neo-institutionalist theories of markets. Local production systems are found to be growing, not declining, in importance, as they facilitate the circulation of tacit knowledge - a precious resource in all sectors which depend on both constant innovation and the flexibility of small enterprises. However, the most rapidly growing form of these systems is that where groups of small suppliers depend on a major customer firm - a form that in the long run might undermine the autonomous capacities of local small-firm systems.
Taxation Research as Accounting Research
Authors: Lamb Margaret
Published: November 2023

Accounting involves processes of calculating, valuing, reporting, and evaluating ﬁnancial transactions, performance, and events. Accounting processes involve techniques, apply principles, and attract theories of improvement and explanation. Accounting research focuses on these processes, their outputs, and the institutions created around them. As an object of accounting research, taxation represents a cost for which accounting is required, a separate process that interacts with and inﬂuences accounting, and a specialist practice area of accounting. And, like accounting research, a focus on tax generates research with emphasis on theories, principles, and techniques.
Monitoring by and of Banks: A Discussion
Authors: Bhattacharya Sudipto , Boot, Arnaud W A , Thakor Anjan V
Published: November 2023

A key paradigm in the modern literature on financial intermediation is that informational asymmetries and moral hazard across borrowers and investors are central to understanding the role of financial intermediaries (Fis). This literature has shown that Fis attenuate information-related problems more efficaciously than is possible with direct (non-intermediated) financing transactions in financial markets, because of free-rider problems, coordination failures and duplicated monitoring costs among dispersed investors.
Core Syntax
Authors: Adger David
Published: November 2023

This is an introduction to the structure of sentences in human languages. It assumes no prior knowledge of linguistic theory and little of elementary grammar. It will suit students coming to syntactic theory for the first time either as graduates or undergraduates. It will also be useful for those in fields such as computational science, artificial intelligence, or cognitive psychology who need a sound knowledge of current syntactic theory. Sentences in human languages are not just collections of random sounds with associated meanings. They involve a host of intriguing phenomena including constraints on possible word orders and the establishment of relationships between words and phrases which affect both phonological form and meaning. David Adger leads the reader in easy stages through the development of an approach which explains how these phenomena work. This approach is based on ideas from Noam Chomsky’s Minimalist Programme - notably the derivational nature of the linguistic system, the interpretability of syntactic features, and the reduction of syntactic operations to Merge and Move. These ideas are explained in clear, simple terms, backed up with examples and diagrams. The book emphasizes the importance of cross-linguistic evidence in the development of syntactic arguments. Above all it demonstrates the value of building a consistent theoretical system via repeated processes of hypothesis testing and evaluation. Exercises are provided at key points through the book. The book may be used as part of a course or for self-tuition. It offers a sound basis for advanced work in linguistics and related fields.
The Significance of Penrose’s Theory for the Development of Economics
Authors: Loasby Brian J
Published: November 2023

To appreciate the significance of Edith Penrose’s (1959) Theory of the Growth of the Finn, it is best (as it often is) to begin with Adam Smith. In this instance what matters is Smith’s agenda for economics and its treatment by his successors. When Smith’s name is invoked by mainstream economists, it is typically as the formulator of the proposition that an economy of self-interested individuals can generate a coherent, and even, in a carefully specified sense, an optimal pattern of activity. This attribution is not entirely wrong, but it is dangerously misleading as a guide to Smith’s concerns. It is misleading even when considered in isolation because it suggests that modern conceptions of rational choice equilibrium adequately represent Smith’s proposition; but it is fundamentally misleading because that proposition is removed from its con text, which is described with exemplary clarity at the outset of Smith’s (1976B) Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
Innovation, Profits and Growth: Penrose and Schumpeter
Authors: Cantwell John
Published: November 2023

In this chapter the Schumpeterian theory of profits and growth through innovation is revisited and recast, with explicit reference to the changing institutional form of inno vation during the twentieth century. It is shown how many dues for the restatement and modernisation of Schumpeter’s approach can be found in Edith Penrose’s The Theory of the Growth of the Finn, her 1959 book having benefited from her reading of what for our purposes are the crucial aspects of Schumpeter (1943). The chapter has four parts following this introduction. Section II sets out an evolutionary and insti tutional account of how profits are created through innovation, which is contrasted with the standard interpretation of Schumpeter’s theory found in the literature.
A View of Language
Authors: Seuren Pieter A M
Published: November 2023

This book collects the best and most influential essays of one of the world's most original linguistic scholars and thinkers. They show Pieter Seuren's remarkable erudition from classical antiquity to current theory, his descriptive and theoretical sophistication, and his beautiful clarity of style. They provide many examples of the cogency of his argument and his willingness to speak out trenchantly against accepted wisdom. In the extensive introduction the author describes the evolution of his theoretical position and its development in relation to Chomskyan syntactic theory and model-theoretic semantics. He argues here and throughout the book that grammar and semantics should be studied as branches of cognitive science, not as mere formalisms. He propounds, develops, and applies a theory of semantic syntax in which a grammar is seen as a mediating device between propositionally structured thoughts and corresponding surface structures. He rejects conventional notions of autonomous grammar as unsustainable and, in a realist theory of language, unnecessary. He demonstrates that his semantic theory achieves empirically adequate and formally precise explanatory generalizations, developing a theory of discourse semantics as a means of providing elegant accounts of topic-comment structure. The twenty-two essays are divided into four parts dealing broadly with general theory, syntax, semantics, and the linguistics of creole languages. Many of the author's classic papers will be found here, including those on autonomous versus semantic syntax, predicate raising and datives, clitic pronoun clusters, donkey anaphora ('every man who owns a donkey beats it'), serial verb constructions, and many more. Provocative and thoughtful, accessible and entertaining, they add up to a book of real, enduring value.
Conclusion and policy implications
Authors: Gugler Klaus
Published: November 2023

This book has reviewed the main aspects of the corporate governance debates in the USA, Europe, and Japan. The Appendix to this chapter summarizes our main findings. While the ‘answers’ to the research questions are well backed by the evidence, they necessarily reflect at least in part the opinions of the authors.
Copyright in Sporting Events and Broadcasts or Films of Sporting Events after Norowzian
Authors: qc Richard Arnold
Published: November 2023

Over the past 10 to 15 years, the grant of exclusive rights in sporting events has become an increasingly valuable source of income to the promoters of such events. ‘Exclusive rights in sporting events’ are rights to exploit sporting events by means other than the admission of spectators to the events themselves. Such exclusive rights may be divided into two broad categories, namely media rights and merchandising rights. Media rights consist essentially of the exclusive right to cover the event in question in the medium in question. Thus in the case of, say, football matches, the main media rights will be the right to broadcast (or narrowcast) the matches in audiovisual media and audio-only media either ‘live’ (meaning in real time as the event takes place) or on a time-delayed basis (including ‘highlights’ programmes such as ‘Match of the Day’). The audiovisual rights will embrace television (terrestrial analogue and digital, satellite, cable) and now audiovisual transmission via the Internet. The audio rights will embrace radio (analogue and digital) and now audio-only transmission via the Internet.
Integration and Integrity in the Legal Reasoning of the European Court of Justice
Authors: Bengoetxea Joxerramon , Maccormick, Neil , Soriano Leonor Moral
Published: November 2023

The task set to the authors of this chapter was to give an account of the legal reasoning of the European Court of Justice-to look at the style and method of reasoning adopted by the Court, in the light of contemporary understandings of legal reasoning more generally. In doing so, we naturally and necessarily draw upon our own prior contributions to this study. We approach the task aware of the critique, by Rasmussen and others, that the Court’s reasoning is altogether too often invention in the guise of interpretation, policy enacted behind a smokescreen of alleged legal principle. In place of the modest communities created in the foundational treaties and their subsequent extensions and elaborations, a ‘new legal order’ has been conjured into being clothed with the doctrines of supremacy and direct effect, overriding to a substantial extent the sovereign rights, perhaps even the legal sovereignty, of the Member States.
Turning Remedies Around: A Sectoral Analysis of the Court of Justice
Authors: Kilpatrick Claire
Published: November 2023

In the journey taken by the Court of Justice to constitutionalize the Treaties, the promotion of the private enforcement of Community law has been a lodestar, pointing the Court along the road ahead. Direct effect and supremacy, combined with the preliminary reference procedure, provided the basic tool-kit for getting Community law into the parts of national systems other international law regimes reached much less often. This tool-kit placed Community law in the hands of private parties which could use its provisions ‘at home’ to provide tangible, applicable, enforceable results. This functional, effectiveness-related aspect of the transformative capacity of private party enforcement was melded with a second, symbolic aspect. The private party in Community law could be presented as, and importantly sometimes actually was, a real flesh-and-blood individual. This provided both impetus and justification for the Court of Justice’s development of the private enforcement model. Protection of the rights of individuals-the triumph of rights over goals, principles over policies-provides a convincing mandate for the judicial development of a new legal order. In the private enforcement model, of course, the functional desire for greater effectiveness conveniently pointed in the same direction as the symbolism of effective judicial protection of the rights of individuals in the construction of this new community.
Privacy and Freedom Of Expression
Authors: Clayton Richard , Tomlinson Hugh
Published: November 2023

This book is a reprint of the Chapters on Privacy and Freedom of Expression from the authors' major practitioner text, The Law of Human Rights; its separate publication in this form is intended to make it accessible to those who might not want to buy the larger work. It provides a comprehensive and systematic treatment of human rights law and practice in the UK in relation to privacy and freedom of expression, including detailed analysis of the impact of the Human Rights Act 1998. The book is in two sections: relating to privacy and freedom of expression respectively. Each section contains a discussion of the pre-existing status of the right in English law, a thorough analysis of the European Convention case law, and full examination of the likely impact of incorporation on English law. This impact is considered in relation to the applicable general principles but also in respect of a number of specific subject areas, including business and commerce, criminal law and justice, education, employment, immigration, media, mental health, police and prisoners. Each section has detailed appendices drawing out lessons from the experience under the Canadian Charter and the New Zealand Bill of Rights as well as discussion of the relevant right in other jurisdictions. It is the only book which provides such a detailed analysis of these two important rights, and is likely to be of particular interest to media lawyers and practitioners, as well as to those practising in employment and criminal law.
The Internationalization of Capital Markets: How International Institutional Investors are Restructuring Finnish Companies
Authors: tainio risto , huolman, mika , pulkkinen matti
Published: November 2023

The internationalization of capital markets is having a significant impact on corporate restructuring worldwide (Useem 1996). By restructuring, we here mean mainly portfolio restructuring, including divestitures, liquidations, asset sales, and spin-offs, and organizational restructuring, including redesigning corporate governance systems and streamlining organizational structures (Bowman and Singh 1993). At the company level, the internationalization of capital markets has encouraged the increase in foreign ownership and control of shareholdings (Whitley 1999).
The Development of Transnational Standards and Regulations and their Impacts on Firms
Authors: morgan glenn
Published: November 2023

Economic transactions require an element of shared values and norms which are enforceable within and beyond the transaction itself. Without these shared standards, it is difficult to build and sustain economic relationships. These shared standards are embedded in formal and informal institutions which govern transactions and act as the rules of the game. Within national contexts, these standards are part of a broader process of building and maintaining institutions in conditions of transactional uncertainty and complexity. Outside these national contexts, however, the existence of shared standards is much more precarious. If such standards are important at an international as well as a national level, where do they come from and what is their impact? In this particular chapter, the focus is on how certain sorts of transactional uncertainty and complexity provide the basis for firms and other economic agents to construct systems of standardization that operate beyond the national level to give actors an institutional basis for their economic relationships.
Common Principles of Corporate Governance in Europe?
Authors: Hopt Klaus J
Published: November 2023

The convergence of the common law and the civil law is an old dream—or nightmare—an outlook that depends less on which side of the Channel or the ocean the idea is held, and more on how international the outlook of the academic or practitioner is. Academics who have studied abroad or are even comparativists1 look at this differently than those who are firmly and exclusively embedded in their own national law and its legal subtleties. The same is true for the practitioners both in the legal profession and the enterprises, though a grow ing number of them are exposed professionally to European law and to international legal issues.2
Prediction of Control Concentration in German and UK Initial Public Offerings
Authors: Goergen Marc , Renneboog Luc
Published: November 2023

At first glance, the corporate-governance systems of the UK and Germany could not be more different. The German block holder system is characterized by a small number of quoted firms and poor liquidity. Most firms have complex concentrated shareholding structures. Weak managers are believed to be disciplined by large shareholders rather than by the market for corporate control and there are potential agency conflicts between controlling and minority shareholders. The Anglo-American market-oriented or outsider system has, in contrast. a large number of listed companies with mostly dispersed ownership. The high dispersion increases the potential lack of monitoring and poor corporate performance is disciplined by hostile takeovers.
Law and Equity Markets: A Simple Model
Authors: Lombardo Davide , Pagano Marco
Published: November 2023

Recent research in corporate finance has highlighted the importance of legal institutions and judicial enforcement for the performance of capital markets. Equity markets are generally thought to be the most sensitive to the legal provisions in favour of financiers and to the effectiveness of judicial enforcement of these provisions.
Less is More: Making Institutional Investor Activism a Valuable Mechanism of Corporate Governance
Authors: Romano Roberta
Published: November 2023

Institutional investors have in the past decade increasingly engaged in corporate governance activitics, introducing proposals under Rule l 4a-8, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) proxy proposal rule,1 and privately negotiating with management of targeted firms with the stated goal of improving corporate performance. For example, since the mid- l980s, mstitutions have submitted shareholder proposals on corporate governance> consisting principally of proposals to eliminate defensive tactics to takeovers, to adopt confidential proxy voting, to enhance board independence, and to restrict executive compensation, to hundreds of firms. Before 1986 only a small set of individual investors engaged in such activism: from 1979 to 1983, religious groups and between six or seven individuals, depending on the year, iubmitted more than half of all proposals, which ranged in the hundreds every year (e.g. Liebeler 1984: 438 and n. 86).
Virtual Society?
Authors: Woolgar Steve
Published: November 2023

This book investigates the precise effects on society of the new and much vaunted electronic technologies (ICTs). All aspects of our social, cultural, economic, and political life stand to be affected by their continued massive growth, but are fundamental shifts already taking place in the way in which we behave, organize, and interact as a direct result of the new technologies? The contributors to the volume argue that their transformative effects amount to our transition to a virtual society.
Clubs and Consortia: European Banking Groups as Strategic Alliances
Authors: Ross Duncan M
Published: November 2023

European cooperation in the international banking market can be dated to the confluence of two crucial factors in the 1960s. The first of these is the challenge that American banks began to set their European counterparts from the early part of that decade. By following US-based multinational companies to Europe, and by competing aggressively with the European banks only not for American business, but also for the business of European multinationals, they were seen as predators in what had hitherto been a relatively peaceful and protected set of domestic markets. The European banks considered the incursions—or, more specifically, the tactics—of the Americans to be hardly ethical and they set about trying to find a way of combating this. Ongoing European integration represented the second explanatory factor for the development of international cooperation.
German Banks and the American Challenge
Authors: Ramm Ulrich
Published: November 2023

Despite all the difficulties and setbacks, the German economy recovered fairly quickly from the aftermath of the Second World War. It largely benefited from the Marshall Plan and was put back on a track of fast and stable growth from the early 1950s. Gradual liberalization of exchange and capital control were consequences and additional factors of the ‘German miracle’. In the second half of the 1950s, the restrictions on the West German capital market were gradually eased-with tax disadvantages in particular being dismantled and the market was opened up internationally. One important aspect was the introduction of free convertibility for the D-mark in December 1958.
Colonial Cosmopolitanism
Authors: Veer Peter Van Der
Published: November 2023

Is cosmopolitanism a view from nowhere? Is its locus the enlightened individual whose allegiance transcends the boundedness of the traditions in which he or she is socialized? Sapereaude (‘have the courage to use your own intelligence instead of following traditional authority’) is the slogan of the Enlightenment, according to Kant. The boundaries of traditional authority, of belonging to one’s nationhood, ethnicity and religion, have to be transcended if one wants to be cosmopolitan and feel allegiance only to a worldwide community of mankind. In other words, one has to be an enlightened individual.
Cosmopolitanism at the Local Level: The Development of Transnational Neighbourhoods
Authors: Hiebert Daniel
Published: November 2023

To set the scene for this chapter, I would like to begin at the micro-geography scale of the street I live on in Vancouver’s Eastside (or, more precisely, the lane behind my street). My street is situated in a neighbourhood called Cedar Cottage, which for around 100 years has been an area of active immigrant reception, at first of new arrivals from the United Kingdom, then central, southern and Eastern Europe and, most recently, the Asian side of the Pacific Rim. According to the la est census (1996), 72 per cent of the residents of my part of Cedar Cottage are immigrants, 20 per cent having arrived in the last ten years. A large variety of national backgrounds are represented, including remnants of the earlier European migrations and, of course, many Asian-Canadians. In fact, just below 60 per cent are classified by the census as ‘visible minorities’, meaning that they are of non-Aboriginal, non-European descent. Of these, the bulk is of Chinese origin, from a number of countries that include China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Indonesia. Beyond the Chinese-Canadian population, there are still many, mainly older, Europeans, and new immigrants from various countries.
Towards a sociology of information technology
Authors: Sassen Saskia
Published: November 2023

The technical attributes of new information and communication technologies increasingly dominate explanations of contemporary change and development. As Watchman (2002) points out, many sociologists see technology as the impetus for the most fundamental social trends and transformations. To this, I would add a tendency to understand or conceptualize these technologies in terms of technical properties and to construct the relation to the sociological world as one of applications and impacts. The challenge for sociology is not so much to deny the weight of technology, but rather to develop analytic categories that allow us to capture the complex imbrications of technology and society.
Towards a Theory of Timing: Kairology in Business Networks
Authors: Hedaa Laurids , Törnroos Jan-Åke
Published: November 2023

The concept ofKairology is derived from the ancient Greek, but largely unknown, god Kairos, who was assumed to be in control of the right moment, or god of the more contemporary notion of Timing. This chapter is an essay about new avenues for the basis of managerial thinking and theories with a temporal focus. The chapter looks specifically at the role of time and timing through event analysis in management theory. First, the impact of change and stability on models and theories in management are developed. Secondly, the role of temporality, change aspects, and timing related to the contemporary business environment is highlighted. Thirdly, a perspective of new directions of man agerial thinking with a temporal focus is developed.
Cooperation Engineered: Efficiency in the ‘Just-in-Time’ System
Authors: Ikuko Nishimoto
Published: November 2023

Kanban, kaizen, ‘total quality control’ (TQC) and ‘quality circles’ (QC), ‘flexi bility’, and ‘multiple processing’—since the 1980s Western companies have introduced concepts and practices such as these into their plants in the United States and Europe. They have done so to emulate Japanese cost-saving methods of production, or ‘lean production’, as it is known in the United States. Some figures may illustrate how the introduction of such ‘Japanese’ manufacturing techniques improved Western companies’ performance.
Labor Contracts as Partial Gift Exchange
Authors: Akerlof George A
Published: November 2023

In a study of social relations among workers at a utility company in the eastern United States, George Homans (1953, 1954] observed that a small group of young women (doing a job called ‘cash posting’) exceeded the minimum work standards of the firm by a significant margin (i.e., on average by 15 percent). Most of these women neither desired nor expected promotion in the firm in return for their troubles.
Fourth Source of Uncertainty: Matters of Fact vs. Matters of Concern
Authors: Latour Bruno
Published: November 2023

Groups are made, agencies are explored, and objects play a role. Such are the three first sources of uncertainty we rely on if we want to follow the social fluid through its ever-changing and provisional shapes. So far, our core hypothesis may still remain acceptable to those who define social in the traditional sense of the word. To be sure, it requires more work: an extension of the list of actors and agencies; a deepening of the conflicts about practical metaphysics; an abandonment of the artificial divide between social and technical ‘dimensions ‘; a pursuit through areas scarcely visited until now; a new practice of finding controversies more rewarding and, in the end, more stable than absolute departure points; and, finally, an invitation to develop a puzzling new custom to generously share metalanguage, social theory, and reflexivity with the actors themselves who are no longer considered as mere ‘informants’ .
On the Difficulty of Being an ANT: An Interlude in the Form of a Dialog
Authors: Latour Bruno
Published: November 2023

An office at the London School of Economics on a dark Tuesday afternoon in February before moving upstairs to the Beaver for a pint. A quiet but insistent knock is heard. A student peers into the office. Student: Am I bothering you? Professor: Not at all. These are my office hours. Come in, have a seat. S: Thank you. P: So ...I take it that you are a bit lost? S: Well, yes. I am finding it difficult, I have to say, to apply Actor Network Theory to my case study on organizations.
First Move: Localizing the Global
Authors: Latour Bruno
Published: November 2023

The first corrective move looks simple enough: we have to lay continuous connections leading from one local interaction to the other places, times, and agencies through which a local site is made to do something. This means that we have to follow the path indicated by the process of delegation or translation explained in Part I. As we have also learned in the preceding pages, this deployment might take the shape of a network on the condition that every transport be paid in transformations, that is, if we make sure to pave the whole way from one site to the next not with intermediaries but with full-blown mediators.
The Value Relevance of Trademarks
Authors: Seethamraju Chandrakanth
Published: November 2023

Intangibles research deals with the valuation, value relevance, and recognition of intangible assets on the financial statements. Under current GAAP, most intangible assets are not recognized in a firm’s financial statements unless they are acquired and identifiable. This contrasts with research findings that show that information about unrecognized intangibles plays a significant role in determining and explaining firm value.
Why Firms Diversify: Internalization vs Agency Behaviour
Authors: Morck Randall , Yeung Bernard
Published: November 2023

Many corporations are diversified while many others are not. An extensive literature has developed around the issue of whether diversification adds to firm value or reduces it. Case studies can yield both results. For example, in 1978 IT&T did business in twelve different industries at the three digit SIC code level and had an average Tobin’s q ratio of 0.57, while in the same year, 3M did business in eleven different industries and had a q ratio of 2.02. Did diversification hurt one firm and help the other, or did a company like 3M build shareholder value despite its diversification?