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Analysts of modern-day sub-Saharan Africa have argued that its “neopatrimonial regimes,” descending from pre-colonial polities, translate badly to the scale of the nation-state and hinder democratic accountability. In this paper, I argue by contrast that the problem with today’s failed or failing states is that they are not patrimonial enough, if we understand patrimonialism in classic Weberian terms as a system based on traditions of reciprocal interdependence between rulers and citizens, and characterized by personal but malleable ruling networks. I make this argument by showing how the Asante Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries shifted from a working model, incorporating both patrimonial and bureaucratic forms of authority, to an exploitative one that reneged on its traditional commitments to the wider public. The cause of this shift was the expansion of exchange with European nations as a rival avenue to power and wealth. This problem continues today, where African rulers are incentivized by the demands of global banks, the United Nations, and G20 governments rather than internal authority traditions, thus limiting their ability to establish locally effective and publically accountable hybrids of patrimonial and bureaucratic governance.

Using a sample of US firms more likely to be affected by agency problems, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between corporate value and financial policies and to study whether credit market freedom (CMF) affects this relationship.

The authors identify a sub-sample of non-financial US firms potentially affected by agency problems using a joint criterion of over-investment and high cash-holdings. A generalized method of moment econometric framework is then used to estimate the impact of cash-holdings and leverage policies on firm value for this sub-sample. This exercise is also performed by taking into account the level of CMF of the state where the firm operates.

The results show that the relationship between cash-holdings – or leverage – and firm value is “U-shaped.” In addition, when the authors focus on the role played by the level of CMF, the authors find a number of interesting facts: CMF facilitates the firms’ access to external finance, thereby relaxing the need of internal funds for investing; the relationship between cash-holdings and firm value is “U-shaped” only in states enjoying high levels of CMF; the probability of observing firms more likely to be affected by agency problems is higher in states with high levels of CMF.

The empirical findings provide important insights to policymakers, shareholders and practitioners. To policymakers, the results suggest that providing institutional environments with greater CMF can enhance the firm access to external finance, the level of corporate investment and the economic growth. To shareholders, the findings highlight that the conflicts of interest between managers and shareholders may be more severe in states with higher CMF; therefore, adequate financing policies and corporate governance mechanisms must be used to mitigate these conflicts and maximize the firm value. Finally, to practitioners, the evidence suggests that, in valuing a firm, they must take into consideration whether the economic environment provides managers with more freedom to stockpile cash and invest sub-optimally.

The paper contributes to the corporate finance and governance literature in two respects. First, it provides new evidence on the shape of the relationship between cash holdings and firm value for firms affected by empire-building managers. Second, at the best of the knowledge, it is the first corporate finance study, which analyzes the role played by the CMF at the state level on the capital structure and the level of investment of the firms.

In terms of the concept of broken home as a juvenile delinquency risk factor, whilst Nigeria and Ghana are culturally different from western nations (Gyekye, 1996; Hofstede, 1980; Smith, 2004), parental death (PDE) and parental divorce (PDI) have been previously taken-for-granted as one factor, that is ‘broken home’. This paper aims to deconstruct the singular model of ‘broken home’ and propose a binary model – the parental death and parental divorce hypotheses, with unique variables inherent in Nigerian/Ghanaian context.

It principally deploys the application of Goffman’s (1967) theory of stigma, anthropological insights on burial rites and other social facts (Gyekye, 1996; Mazzucato et al., 2006; Smith, 2004) to tease out diversity and complexity of lives across cultures, which specifically represent a binary model of broken home in Nigeria/Ghana. It slightly appraises post-colonial insights on decolonization (Agozino, 2003; Said, 1994) to interrogate both marginalized and mainstream literature.

Thus far, analyses have challenged the homogenization of the concept broken home in existing literature. Qualitatively unlike in the ‘West’, analyses have identified the varying meanings/consequences of parental divorce and parental death in Nigeria/Ghana.

Unlike existing data, this paper has contrasted the differential impacts of parental death and parental divorce with more refined variables (e.g. the sociocultural penalties of divorce such as stigma in terms of parental divorce and other social facts such as burial ceremonies, kinship nurturing, in relation to parental death), which helped to fill in the missing gap in comparative criminology literature.

This paper aims to present two distinct approaches to migrant entrepreneurship.

Drawing on ethnography of two Ghanaian migrant businesses, one of which draws on the Ghanaian community and another which distances itself from it, the author shows that the current understandings of social capital romanticise the notion of community. The author argues that to gain a better appreciation of the ways in which community resources are used by migrant entrepreneurs, we would need to reject such romanticised notions.

The ethnography revealed the operation of two entrepreneurial strategies. These, in turn, were shaped by the nature of the migrant community and the resources that entrepreneurs have at their disposal.

The limitation of this research is that it draws on only two cases. Focusing on two cases allowed for an in-depth understanding of the mechanisms at play but limits the ability to generalise beyond these two cases. Further research will have to use large-scale survey designs to test the mechanisms which have been identified in this paper.

There are multiple, sometimes conflicting, tendencies in any specific entrepreneurial context, and the author proposes that this configuration of factors leads to the dominance of one or the other entrepreneurial approach.

Underlying these dynamics is an attempt to reconcile the demands of two competing tendencies within the entrepreneurial context: the profit motive versus the community spirit.

The author concludes with a brief discussion of concept of strategic coethnicity by which this dilemma can be solved.

Most well-known conceptualizations of sex, gender and sexuality privilege one version or another of a Western European or North American bi-polar paradigm. However, such a focus ignores the ethnographic evidence for a larger range of sex–gender–sexuality constructs. This paper outlines parameters for known variations in cultural constructs of sex–gender–sexuality systems, and raises questions about contemporary trends in understanding sex, gender and sexuality. As a first step, and because the data are more plentiful, I focus on variations in cultural constructions of sex, gender and sexuality relevant to physiological males, leaving a thorough exploration of constructions relevant to physiological females for another paper. The contemporary spread of Western cultural hegemony, as well as some opposition to that model, has categorized many indigenous, multi-polar sex–gender–sexuality systems as either in need of modernization or simply not quite civilized. The result is a loss, not only of knowledge about human plasticity in this area, but also a loss of cultural flexibility in organizing and dealing with human biocultural variation.

To explore the relationship between the importance of African studies programs and the acquisition of African imprint titles in four selected American academic libraries.

The paper examines the characteristics of the African studies programs in four universities in comparison with library holdings including the percentage of holdings from four major English‐language African publishers.

The four research libraries acquire substantial numbers of African monographs in keeping with the importance of their African studies programs.

The paper provides information on four major African studies programs and the library holdings that support them.

The diversity of social forms both regionally and historically calls for a paradigmatic reassessment of concepts used to map human societies comparatively. By differentiating “social analytics” from “explanatory narratives,” we can distinguish concept and generic model development from causal analyses of actual empirical phenomena. In so doing, we show how five heuristic models of “modes of social practices” enable such paradigmatic formation in sociology. This reinforces Max Weber’s emphasis on the irreducible historicity of explanations in the social sciences.

Explanatory narrative.

A paradigmatic consolidation of generalizing concepts, modes of social practices, ideal-type concepts, and generic models presents a range of “theoretical tools” capable of facilitating empirical analysis as flexibly as possible, rather than cramping their range with overly narrow conceptual strictures.

To render social theory as flexible for practical field research as possible.

Develops a way of synthesizing diverse theoretical and methodological approaches in a highly pragmatic fashion.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the regional perceptions of the Middle East region in relation to international commercial arbitration and show how these perceptions influence the attempts to harmonise the modern international law in the Middle East region.

Legal positivism as a general philosophy, mainly influenced by John Austin, is used as an analytical tool in order to identify the general trends from Western and Middle East cultural perspectives that relate to international commercial arbitration.

The paper shows how the Middle East region has different social and legal values between the West and the Middle East region in respect to the primarily three general and important features of the law – namely, normative, institutionalised, and coercive. Positivism legal theory shows that such success in the context of western European commercial law is inappropriate in the Middle East where different cultural norms make its wholesale and unqualified transferability problematic, notwithstanding its acceptance in highly generalised terms.

The paper generates a proposition that reforms are more likely to succeed if adjustments to the cultural environment are made. Thus, it supports the argument that regional values can add to the global activities of the harmonisation process of international commercial arbitration law.

The paper provides a clear understanding of the guidelines for the reform and development of Middle East international commercial arbitration. Legal culture should be taken into consideration if a successful reform is to be achieved.

The authors use the debates instigated by Bernal's Black Athena to rethink the concepts of “race”, “culture” and “diversity” in organization and aim to examine their intersection with academic authority.

Drawing on the works of Derrida and Hegel, the authors question the pursuit of origins and illustrate its role in essentializing race, culture and diversity. The paper examines these through binaries including white/black, nature/culture, purity/diversity and diversity/university.

First, both the Black Athena debates and the organizational literature turn to origins to ground concepts of difference. This attests to the power of narratives of descent in defining current interests. Second, organization studies have relied on images of a clear past which had eliminated racialization and its implications. Whereas culture is considered progressive, as a user‐friendly term it has served as a “surrogate” or “homologue” for race. Diversity, in turn, has been deployed both to harbour and to control difference in organization.

The Black Athena debates alert people to the authority of scholars and practitioners in normalising identity categories in organization. They challenge people to develop theories and practices of organizational diversity that are open to ongoing difference rather than essence and origin.

Derrida's contribution has rarely been used in organizational history, particularly its implication with Hegel's legacy to the historical and cultural canon. The paper invites readers to rethink the notions of race, culture and diversity by examining their historical development and considering the history of their inclusion into the canons of management and organization. Historicising can unsettle entrenched assumptions, but the cautionary word is that it can also legitimate current practices by identifying their relevance since “the beginning”.

This paper aims to examine the paradoxes of buy local campaigns. These are popular strategies for marketing products in domestic markets aimed at supporting the local economy. Their scope can be national, regional, community or sectoral (such as agriculture, tourism, clothing or textiles).

This paper examines the paradoxes associated with these campaigns, using two cases and a mixed methods study of buy local campaigns in the Ghanaian and South African textiles and clothing industries.

The study found that both economic and cultural streams of the two campaigns have different outcomes and that the dominance of one aspect does not directly influence the other.

The use of buy local campaigns by countries as an intervention for reclaiming domestic market spaces can produce contradictory outcomes concurrently in the same campaign.

The author concludes with a brief discussion, which spells out the anatomy of buy local campaigns and the usefulness of the different aspects of these campaigns.