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This chapter investigates children’s play and social interactions in a multilingual preschool context where the lingua franca (common language) is English. This investigation follows the experiences of one child for whom English is a second language (L2). The analytic focus explores how the child gains access and participation in play activities in relation to the peer culture of the group.

Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis approaches, this chapter offers turn-by-turn analysis to show how the children’s interactions unfold and identifies children’s interactional approaches as they enter play and make friends. Particular attention is focused on how one of the children manages his attempts at entry into the peer group’s games using the building blocks.

The close detailed analysis of one extended episode highlighted the co-produced nature of interaction. The findings identify a repertoire of four resources used by one of the L2 children within the peer group, to access play activities in the building space: (1) linguistic resources of requests, such as “Can I play?” “Are you building?”; (2) “tailing” others closely; (3) references to the moral obligations of being a best friend; and (4) using objects as resources for entry. While the analytic focus is on one child’s strategies, analysis considers this child’s individual actions in relation to his peers. What is made apparent is that children’s uptake and participation in peer interaction is dependent on the social agenda and the local aspects of peer culture, not solely on children's language proficiency.

Attention to how children employ strategies to play and understanding the local conditions of peer culture can assist educators to support children’s attempts for participation and friendship in multilingual early years settings.

Corporate governance has attracted enormous attention both in the area of law and in the area of financial economics. In comparative corporate governance studies, many people have devoted their energy to find a best corporate governance model. I argue that a functional analysis does not support the view that there is a single best corporate governance model in the world. I further use the transplantation of an English style takeover law into China to show that the importation of foreign law is not always based on careful analysis whether the imported foreign law is the best in the world. Furthermore, I use the subsequent adjustment of the transplanted English takeover law in China to show that the imported foreign law is subject to local political and economic conditions. If there is no best corporate govern model and the transplantation of foreign law into other countries with different social and political background does not achieve similar objectives, the search for a best corporate governance model is misguided. Just as tort law or constitutional law regimes may have diversified models, so do corporate governance regimes in countries with different historical, social and political backgrounds.

Rawls, most visibly in A Theory of Justice, made numerous references to various topics in economics, and footnoted a significant number of economists. This paper will argue that Rawls made use of the ideal theory of markets as a reference point and as an analytical tool. In their ideal form, markets represent attributes Rawls intended to describe his system, and in their real-world guise embody certain sorts of striving – for instance, after power – that were central to Rawls’s justification of the original position. Markets also serve in Theory as a benchmark against which political forms can be criticized. Additionally, markets in Theory are approved of as allocative and wealth-producing mechanisms, but criticized for their final distributional results. The paper suggests that these assessments in Rawls likely originate in early essays by economist Frank Knight. Knight was, according to Pogge, the probable source for an early version of Rawls’s original position, and is footnoted in key spots in Theory. But the similarities between Knight’s reasoning and Rawls’s appear more significant still. Using Rawls’s extensively annotated copy of Knight’s Ethics of Competition, that supposition is explored.

The purpose of this study is to conduct a comparative analysis of the economic determinants of the compensation for chief executive officers (CEOs) between the pre- and post-financial crisis periods. To conduct the comparative analysis, the authors consider five years before and five years after the financial crisis of 2008. The authors use the data from the US financial service institutions and run separate regressions for the pre- and post-crisis periods to check if there is any significant difference in the economic determinants of executive compensation before and after the financial crisis. The authors find that total compensation and its incentive components decreased significantly in the post-crisis period. In the pre-crisis period, total compensation was determined by stock performance, accounting profit, growth, and leverage, whereas in the post-crisis period stock returns and leverage are the major factors influencing total compensation. The authors also find that firms’ leverage negatively influences the sensitivity of the pay for performance, but the influence of leverage on pay for performance is weaker in the post-crisis period. Our research is significant in the context of the US economy, the regulatory reforms of financial institutions, and the perspectives of the executive compensations. This is the first study that compares the relationship between compensation and firm performance over the pre- and post-crisis periods. It is an explicit attempt to develop a theoretical understanding of the compensation/performance relationship for the financial industry, which is blamed for the financial crisis and is affected by the Dodd–Frank regulation after the crisis.

As the primary target of the school reform movement, urban education remains the most difficult to assess and repair. Indeed, the crisis evident in urban school systems mirrors many of the problems found in big cities themselves — poor economic conditions for schools and families, personnel shortages and high turnover rates, improper facilities and materials, and political struggles over issues of structure and control. This book analyzes the problems effecting urban schools and their students and some of the efforts that have been developed to make these schools more accountable and effective.

Since the beginning of the 1980s, a growing number of cities around the world have been looking to invest in extensive city-reimaging and place-marketing initiatives in efforts to announce themselves or to raise their profiles on the tourism market. In either case, the objective is to facilitate economic growth in times of rising importance of the service sector, of which tourism is widely seen as one of the most lucrative areas since it helps attract new investors, generate more revenue, and create additional jobs. It is in pursuit of such economic benefits that government officials, policy-makers, urban-planning agencies, land developers, and other private stakeholders have been coming together to identify potential urban precincts within cities, before transforming these precincts into art and cultural districts, often home to at least one visually striking art museum or a performing arts center – almost always designed by an elite band of celebrity architects. Fully or partially funded by taxpayer money, these signature art museums and performing arts centers are conceptualized and built as icons of the city, and as objects of the tourist gaze, with little or no interest in the physical and environmental peculiarities of place and with little or no regard for local residents including local artists and cultural producers. Traveling from Bilbao in Spain to Bhopal in India, this chapter expands on some of the events that led to an outburst of formally overstated and spatially exclusive venues of art and culture in the last two decades, before sharing some thoughts and restarting conversations on reclaiming and reimagining these venues as open, inclusive, and pulsating public spaces embedded in the actual fabrics of cities, at once accessible to locals and tourists.