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Annual general meetings have been variously described as dull rituals for accountability versus entertaining theatre at the expense of accountability. The research analyses director and shareholder participation and dialogic interactions at annual and extraordinary general meetings of Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company (BSAC). The BSAC was incorporated under a royal charter in 1889 in return for power to exploit a huge territory, Rhodesia/now Zimbabwe. The BSAC's administration ceased in 1924/25. Thus, the BSAC had a dual mandate as a private for-profit listed company and to occupy and develop the territories on behalf of the British government.

The article analyses 29 BSAC general meeting minutes, comprising 25 full sets of verbatim minutes between 1895 and 1925. The study adopts manual content analysis. First, the research adopts conversational analysis to analyse director and shareholder turn-taking and moves by approving and dissenting shareholders. Second, the study identifies and analyses incidents of shareholder sentiment from the shareholder turns/moves. Finally, the article assesses how shareholder sentiment changed throughout the period and whether the BSAC's share price reflected the shareholder sentiment.

The BSAC's general meetings were associated with the greater colonial project of building the British Empire. The authors find almost 1,500 incidents of shareholder sentiment. Directors and shareholders take roughly an equal number of turns (excluding shareholder sentiment). Ritual and ceremony dominate director and shareholder turns and moves, while accountability to shareholders was minimal. The BSAC share price spiked in the early years of the project, waning after that. Shareholder sentiment, both positive and negative, reflect the share price behaviour.

A unique database of verbatim general meeting minutes records shareholders' reactions to what they heard in the form of sounding off through cheering, “hear, hears,” laughter and applause (i.e. shareholder sentiment).

This study aims to answer the research question of how a calculative regime for public universities is implemented, how and under which conditions its symbolic use emerges and what kind of unintended consequences occur over time.

The empirical material presented in the paper derives methodically from a longitudinal qualitative research approach analyzing higher education systems (HES)-reforms in Austria. To better understand the consequences of the organizational changes in line with the new legal framework, 2 series of qualitative interviews in 2011/2012 and 2016/2017 on the field level and the organizational level were conducted.

Identifying two enabling consequences from the tactical behaviors of resistance and symbolic use, i.e. new processes of communication and horizontal network building, allows for theory-building with a focus on the dynamics how accounting begins, then next becomes an established infrastructure, is then destabilized and re-elaborated before it becomes, again, an infrastructure which is different from before.

Although the findings are based on a national empirical context, they are linked to the international discourse on HES in transition and the role of calculative regimes including performance measurement and management attitudes and instruments. They are relevant for an international research community open-minded toward differentiated case studies in a longitudinal perspective on HES-reforms.

When reflecting on their own specific settings governing bodies and practitioners managing the transition of HES may find insights from longitudinal case studies inspiring. The dynamics initiated by new calculative regimes installed need a sensitive framework to handle dissent, resistance, tactical behaviors and changes in power relations between the field level and the organizational level.

This is a unique longitudinal case study of the Austrian HES and its public universities in transition.

The CoViD-19 pandemic has brought about a panoply of institutional challenges both domestically and in the international arena. Classical constitutional theory thereby underwent a reinvention by the executive for the sake of speedy policy action and to the detriment of institutional control while favouring authoritarian forms of governance. This paper concerns itself with institutional responses to such developments, placing emphasis on the role of the judiciary and people*s in contesting emergency decrees and other executive orders, especially where fundamental rights are infringed upon. The paper aims to explore the difficulties arising with exerting absolute executive powers during the health crisis, the respective role assumed by constitutional courts and the impact of the new governance paradigm on forms of public contestation, also as a means of quasi institutional control.

Indeed, the right to health may be translated into political discourse and become foundational to security and public interest paradigms. This may result in a shrinking public space given the constraints to the freedom of movement. In the name of public safety, the (collective) right to assembly, expression and protest have been submitted to major limitations in that regard.

Ultimately, this re-opens debates on the meaning of absolute rights and contextualities of derogations, as well as the reconcilability of civil and political rights and economic, social and cultural rights. It also exposes social inequalities, social justice dimensions and vulnerabilities, often exacerbated by the health crisis; migrant rights demonstrably face particularly severe and intersectional forms of violations.

Particular values lie with the interdisciplinary approach embraced in this paper; the authors draw on a variety of social sciences disciplines to shed light on this very current issue. Both theoretical and empirical methods are used and combined here, making sense of the underlying logic of virus governance and its impacts on fundamental rights.

This study operationalizes risks in stakeholder dialog (SD). It conceptualizes SD as co-produced organizational discourse and examines the capacities of organizers' and stakeholders' practices to create a shared understanding of an organization’s risks to their mutual benefit. The meetings and online forum of a German public service media (PSM) organization were used as a case study.

The authors applied corpus-driven linguistic discourse analysis (topic modeling) to analyze citizens' (n = 2,452) forum posts (n = 14,744). Conversation analysis was used to examine video-recorded online meetings.

Organizers suspended actors' reciprocity in meetings. In the forums, topics emerged autonomously. Citizens' articulation of their identities was more diverse than the categories the organizer provided, and organizers did not respond to the autonomous emergence of contextualizations of citizens' perceptions of PSM performance in relation to their identities. The results suggest that risks arise from interactionally achieved occasions that prevent reasoned agreement and from actors' practices, which constituted autonomous discursive formations of topics and identities in the forums.

This study disentangles actors' practices, mutuality orientation and risk enactment during SD. It advances the methodological knowledge of strategic communication research on SD, utilizing social constructivist research methods to examine the contingencies of organization-stakeholder interaction in SD.

Thailand has seen waves of youth-led protests over the past three years. Pro-democracy youth activists have vociferously criticised authority figures: teachers, parents and political leaders, especially the king. Drawing on vignettes assembled over a 14-year ethnographic work with young people in Thailand, as well as on current research on youth (online and offline) activism in Bangkok, I examine the multi-layered meaning of kinship in Thai society. The chapter reveals the political nature of childhood and parenthood as entangled modes of governance that come into being with other, both local and international cultural entities. I argue that Thai youth activists are attempting to rework dominant tropes that sustain “age-patriarchy” in the Buddhist kingdom. Their “engaged siblinghood” aims to reframe Thailand's generational order, refuting the moral principles that establish citizens' political subordination to monarchical paternalism and, relatedly, children's unquestionable respect to parents. As I show, Thai youth activists are doing so by engaging creatively with transnational discourses such as “democracy” and “children's rights,” while simultaneously drawing on K-pop icons, Japanese manga and Buddhist astrology. In articulating their dissent, these youths are thus bearers of a “bottom-up cosmopolitanism” that channels culturally hybrid, and politically subversive notions of childhood and citizenship in Southeast Asia's cyberspace and beyond. Whatever the outcome of their commitment, Thai youth activism signals the cultural disarticulation of the mytheme of the Father in Thailand, as well as the growing political influence of younger generations in the region.

This paper examines the decline of the largest working parliamentary democracy in India overtime, but accelerating since 2014 as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Center (as the federal government is commonly known).

It is eclectic. Original constitution, along with commentaries, are studied. News outlets, government pronouncements, journal articles, and other media outlets — electronic and print — are also sourced.

The findings show how three important features in democracy — elections and their outcomes, control of information, and suppression of dissent are widely used to undermine constitutional democracy.

Democracy can be undermined without altering the Constitution itself. It also explains the irony of Modi’s popularity, given the undemocratic practices. As he may continue in office for some time to come, commanding a log-rolling majority, the need of the hour is a united, constructive and effective opposition to ensure a healthy working democracy.

Companies around the globe increasingly receive immense shareholder scrutiny due to perceivably excessive executive director remuneration. The debate in South Africa intensifies due to severe pay inequality. The authors thus accounted for the perspectives of asset managers and listed financial services companies in South Africa pertaining to the impact of voting and engagement on director pay policies and practices.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with selected asset managers, chief executive officers, chief financial officers and remuneration committee members of listed financial services companies to gauge their views on the impact of shareholder activism endeavours on remuneration governance. The qualitative data was analysed by conducting thematic analysis.

Most of the asset managers and financial services representatives preferred proactive, private engagement on pay concerns, given the impact thereof on voting outcomes, and ultimately director remuneration practices and policies. Independent remuneration committees have a prominent role in facilitating engagements with investors to ensure fair remuneration.

The consequences should be clearer if organisations receive substantial votes against their pay policies and implementation reports. South African regulators can consider the “two-strikes” rule to ensure that action is taken in response to shareholder voting on director remuneration matters.

Representatives of asset managers and listed financial services investee companies offered valuable insights on remuneration governance deliberations in an emerging market. This in-depth analysis highlights the importance of proactive engagement to ensure that corporate leaders are paid fairly.