Search results

This paper considers what purposes regulation and supervision of financial institutions are designed to serve. Historical experience with regulation and supervision is considered, and it is argued on the basis of that examination that a fairly ‘light touch’ in regulation is likely to achieve the objectives that governments and citizens require regulation to achieve. Accordingly, the paper concludes that when regulation is evaluated and compared against unregulated systems, one should be careful to compare fallible regulation with fallible markets, rather than implicitly assuming regulation is perfect. Otherwise over‐regulation will result.

In a by now classic article, R.A. Mundell demonstrated that an open economy could maintain internal and external balance without using the exchange rate as a policy tool. This, he showed, could be done by using fiscal policy to produce internal balance, and interest rate policy to produce an imbalance on the capital account to offset whatever imbalance there might be on the current account. There have been two criticisms of this analysis. The first, fairly common in the literature, is that it presumes international capital movements are flows. If, as is often maintained, they are stock adjustments, a certain amount of funds will move in response to an interest rate rise, and then to produce a further reallocation of portfolios a further rise in interest rates will be required. It is thus concluded that Mundellian policy in the presence of a current account deficit would have to be not merely interest rates above those elsewhere, but interest rates rising higher and higher above those elsewhere. The second criticism was first suggested by H.G. Johnson, and later developed in detail by John Williamson. They attacked not the feasibility of the policy, but its desirability. They argued that the policy would produce resource misallocation, both because it compels the choice between home and overseas investment to be made exclusively on short‐term balance of payments grounds, and because it distorts the consumption/investment mix at home.

The chapter contains a methodology for formalized evaluation of the role of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation (Bank of Russia) in ensuring monetary and financial sustainability with the help of the monetary policy transmission mechanism and its inflation target regime. The significance of the research of the Bank of Russia operations to ensure financial sustainability is due to a number of circumstances: the uniqueness of the Bank of Russia that appeared only 27 years ago and experienced several devastating events related to the 1998 financial crisis, the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, and the stagnation of the Russian economy in 2014–2016, as well as high volatility of world prices for Russian commodity exports and the latest contra-Russian sanctions that significantly affected the volatility of the Russian ruble. Taking into account all the above, the issue of the Bank of Russia’s effective activities in the long run is aggravated by the fact that there are still more open questions than proven relationships of causes and effects regarding the potential of specific monetary policy instruments in the context of low-growth and high-volatility environment. The modeling of the Bank of Russia strategic and operational targets has been based on the parameters’ dependencies presented by the money (credit) multiplier in the interpretation of G. Schinasi (2006) and on the instability of stable economy hypothesis of H. Minsky (2008). As a result, there have been established the marginal levels of definite indicators of the banking system performance that could allow the Bank of Russia to ensure financial sustainability in the low-growth and high-volatility environment.

Dennis Beach is a Reader in Education Sciences (Pedagogy) who is currently employed at the Department of Education, Göteborg University. His research interests lie in the field of the sociology of education, the sociology of teachers’ work and the problems of education change. He has authored or co-authored three books and a number of articles and chapters in these subject fields and has also supervised several Ph.D. projects. At present he is head of two major national research projects in the fields mentioned, both of which are financed by the Swedish Research Council, and collaborates in two large European projects.Marie Carlson Ph.D. in sociology 2002, Göteborg University, Sweden. Her earlier studies were in social anthropology, Swedish for immigrants, and ethnicity and migration. Her main research interests are cultural studies and sociology of education. The wider project of which this chapter is a part focuses on Swedish language courses for immigrants as a social and cultural construction in the Swedish knowledge arena. It deals with questions regarding the impact of social and cultural practices on conceptions of knowledge and education. (e.g. Carlson, M., 2001) “Swedish Language Courses for Immigrants – Integration or Discrimination?” in Ethnography and Education Policy (Ed.) Geoffrey Walford, Oxford: Elsevier.) Marie Carlson also lectures on courses in ethnicity and migration, and is tutoring within the fields of “Language & culture,” “Islam” (Muslim women) and “Ethnicity.” Currently she is engaged in a project “Competing Ideas in the Renewal of SFI (Swedish for Immigrants) – An Investigation of Discursive Practices in SFI-education during Re-structuring” (financed by The Swedish Research Council). The project is carried out in corporation with Dennis Beach, Department of Education, Göteborg University.Marianne Dovemark was formerly a teacher at a comprehensive school in Sweden for over 20 years. She is in the process of completing a Ph.D. (in Educational Sciences) supervised by Dennis Beach and is currently employed as a lecturer on the pre-service Teacher Education Programme at the University College of Borås where she also does researches in the field of Sociology of Education. Her research stresses the new aims of comprehensive education in a re-structured school in Sweden with a special focus on the possibility of free choice within the school.Caroline Hudson is a Research Consultant whose company is called Real Educational Research Ltd. Caroline’s research interests encompass adult learning, literacy, family structure, offending and education, and issues related to social exclusion. Caroline is currently evaluating three literacy, language (ESOL) and numeracy developmental projects in the National Health Service (NHS), with the National Research and Development Centre (NRDC) for adult literacy and numeracy. She is also researching the impact of use of a PC tablet on the writing skills of young people who offend, for Ecotec Research and Consultancy on behalf of the Youth Justice Board (YJB). Caroline has worked as Basic Skills Advisor in the Home Office National Probation Directorate, and as an English teacher both in the United Kingdom and abroad.Bob Jeffrey has worked with Professor Peter Woods and Geoff Troman at the Open University since the early 1990s researching the effects of reform on teachers and young people in primary schools using ethnographic methods. In particular he has focused on the how the reforms have affected the creativity of teachers and more recently he has concerned himself with young people’s perspectives of their learning experiences in a project involving ten European countries. He has also contributed to the development of Ethnography in Education by publishing regular articles on methodology, editing books in this area, co-ordinating an international email list as well the Ethnography network for the European Educational Research Association and is currently co-organising the annual Oxford Conference for Ethnography in Education.Janet Donnell Johnson is a clinical lecturer and doctoral student in English Education at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, USA. A former English teacher at an alternative high school, her research interests include the interconnectedness of student identity, agency, and resistance, and literacy as a social practice in and out of classrooms. Janet is currently researching and writing a critical qualitative study based on how non-mainstream students use language to take up certain subject positions and how those positionings create opportunities for literacy learning in and out of school. In her role as clinical lecturer, she teaches writing, methods of teaching English, and coordinates partnerships between Indiana University’s English Department, Language Education Department, and teachers in the schools. She also works closely with secondary and college teachers on incorporating critical literacy and teacher research in their classrooms.Jongi “Mdumane” Klaas is currently completing a Ph.D. in Education at the University of Cambridge. The study examines the perceptions and experiences of learners and teachers vis-à-vis the processes of racial integration in two South African secondary schools. Jongi obtained a Bachelor of Pedagogics degree majoring in English Literature and History at the University of Fort Hare in South Africa. He taught History for two years at Gwaba Combined School in South Africa before taking a Fulbright Scholarship to study a Masters degree in Comparative Education at the University of Oklahoma, USA. Jongi is married to Nocwaka Sinovuyo Klaas.Jerry Lipka is a full professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He has worked in cross-cultural education for the past 22 years. During this time, he has developed a long-term relationship with a group of Yup’ik Eskimo teachers and elders. This collaborative relationship has resulted in numerous publications. Most recently, this work has developed a culturally-based math curriculum; research on its effectiveness has shown that rural Yup’ik Eskimo students outperform their counterparts in math understanding.Gerry Mitchell is a Research Student at the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion and member of the Social Policy Department at the London School of Economics. She is in the final year of an ESRC funded Ph.D. researching the New Deal for Young People’s Voluntary Sector Option in London. The work is divided into three: It focuses on methodology – what is gained from applying ethnographic methods to social policy evaluations? Secondly, it analyses delivery of the New Deal at ground level and lastly explores the construction of identities around work in the narratives of young unemployed people. Recent Publications: “Choice, Volunteering and Employability: Evaluating Delivery of the New Deal for Young People’s Voluntary Sector Option” Benefits (2003), 11(2), 105–111.Farzaneh Moinian was formerly a teacher at different comprehensive schools in Iran and in Sweden. She is a doctoral student in pedagogy at Stockholm Institution of Education. Her research areas are linked to ethnography in education as well as the exploration of childhood in its historical and current manifestations. Her doctoral project includes children’s perception of morality, self-concept, values and goals as well as children’s life world from their own point of view. Her project would draw on a range of theoretical perspectives from inter-disciplinary Childhood studies, and would employ mainly qualitative methodologies, including ethnography. The various research projects carried out by Farzaneh Moinian focus on understanding the ways in which children percept and interpret their lives as well as how they communicate with other children about it.Ruth Soenen is research assistant (Fund for Scientific Research – Flanders) at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of The Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. Her work concerns ethnographic research into everyday relationships in urban settings. Research was carried out in schools and in collective city spaces (e.g. public transport and shops) within the reflection on intercultural matters, learning, community and public domain. She wrote a book in Dutch on intercultural education, research reports for Flemish Government (Educational and City Policy) and made several contributions in leading Flemish journals and books. In English she made a contribution to “Debates and Developments in Ethnographic Methodology. Studies in Educational Ethnography Vol. 6.” Other English publications are forthcoming.Geoff Troman is a Research Fellow and Associate Lecturer in the Faculty of Education and Language Studies at the Open University. Geoff taught science for twenty years in secondary modern, comprehensive and middle schools before moving into Higher Education in 1989. Throughout his time in schools he carried out research as a teacher researcher. His Ph.D. research was an ethnography of primary school restructuring. He is currently conducting research on teachers’ work and lives and focusing on the educational policy context and primary teacher identity, commitment and career in performative cultures of schooling. Among other publications in the areas of qualitative methods, school ethnography and policy sociology, he co-authored Primary Teachers’ Stress with Peter Woods and Restructuring Schools, Reconstructing Teachers, with Peter Woods, Bob Jeffrey and Mari Boyle. Geoff is a joint co-ordinator of the Ethnography Network for the European Educational Research Association and is currently co-organising the annual Oxford Conference for Ethnography in Education.Geoffrey Walford is Professor of Education Policy and a Fellow of Green College at the University of Oxford. His books include: Life in Public Schools (Methuen, 1986), Restructuring Universities: Politics and power in the management of change (Croom Helm, 1987), Privatization and Privilege in Education (Routledge, 1990), City Technology College (Open University Press, 1991, with Henry Miller), Doing Educational Research (Routledge, editor, 1991), Choice and Equity in Education (Cassell, 1994), Doing Research about Education (Falmer (Ed.), 1998), Policy, Politics and Education – sponsored grant- maintained schools and religious diversity (Ashgate, 2000) and Doing Qualitative Educational Research (Continuum, 2001). Within the Department of Educational Studies at the University of Oxford, he is Director of Graduate Studies (Higher Degrees), has responsibility for the M.Sc. in Educational Research Methodology course, and supervises doctoral research students. He was Joint Editor of the British Journal of Educational Studies from 1999 to 2002, and has been Editor of the Oxford Review of Education from January 2004. His research foci are the relationships between central government policy and local processes of implementation, private schools, choice of schools, religiously-based schools and qualitative research methodology.Joan Parker Webster is an assistant professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, where she teaches courses in multicultural and cross-cultural education, children’s and young adult literature, reading theory and language acquisition, and ethnographic research methodology. She has researched and published in the areas of literacy, language acquisition, indigenous language revitalisation issues and ethnographic methodology. Parker Webster is presently working with Yup’ik Eskimo teachers and elders on a literacy-based curriculum project using traditional Yup’ik stories.Anita Wilson is a Research Associate with Lancaster Literacy Research Centre, Lancaster University, Lancaster, U.K. She has spent almost 14 years undertaking ethnographic and collaborative inquiry with people in prison. Between 2001 and 2003 she held a Spencer Post-Doctoral Fellowship from the National Academy of Education, New York which she used to introduce her theory, method and approach to prisoners in America, making a transatlantic comparison of how policy and practice impacts on prison literacies as they are “lived out” on a day to day basis. Her doctoral thesis Reading a Library – Writing a Book: The Significance of Literacies for the Prison Community proposes that people in prison live in a “third space” community, socialising the institutional in order to retain their sense of personal rather than prison identity. She maintains a strong focus on the ethics of working in constrained and sensitive settings and considers issues around exploitation, equity and advocacy to be central to ethnographic work. She has published widely and shares her work with policy-makers, practitioners and prisoners around the world. At present she is undertaking research funded by the National Research and Development Centre which investigates the importance of education to the lives of young offenders.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

The purpose of this paper is to establish the evidence for, the why and how recent austerity policy atmosphere associated with the UK government affected environmental protection decisions within planning in Scotland.

A qualitative analysis based on perspectives gathered via questionnaire survey targeted at stakeholders involved in planning in Scotland was undertaken. The questionnaire responses were analysed thematically, supplemented by using statistical tests of significance and variance to show how responses differed across participants.

The evidence showed that austerity policy atmosphere resulted in a pervasive neoliberal imperative of resuscitating the economy; whilst producing subtle and adverse effects on environmental decisions. This was best understood within a neo-Gramscian perspective of hegemony, borrowed from the field of political economy of states.

The gathered views were constrained within unknown biases that the participants may have had; and because the case study approach was not equipped to generalise the results beyond the study, more research testing cause-effect between the austerity and selected environmental parameters is needed, from various contexts.

Decision-making frameworks should explicitly acknowledge the unique pressures during austerity periods; and contemplate resilient decision-making frameworks that can withstand the hegemonic tendencies which prioritise economic goals above environmental ones.

Whilst the area of austerity’s impacts on the environment remains poorly evidenced, empirically, this seminal paper uses robust analysis to establish how the austerity policy atmosphere affects environmental decisions. This is insight into what may be happening in other similar situations outside Scotland, raising concern as to whether and how we should approach the challenge of hegemonic ideas.

The central purpose of this paper is to explore how implicit knowledge capabilities and sharing helps secure organizational survival and success. This article explores the challenging in better management knowledge in the South African clothing and textile industry. In moving from a closed protected market supported by active industrial policy, South African manufacturing has faced intense competition from abroad. The ending of apartheid removed a major source of workplace tension, facilitating the adoption of higher value-added production paradigms. However, most South African clothing and textile firms have battled to cope, given cutthroat international competition. The authors focus on firms that have accorded particularly detailed attention to two instances characterized by innovative knowledge management. The authors highlight how circumstances may impose constraints and challenges and how they paradoxically also create opportunities, which may enable firms to survive and thrive through the recognition and utilization of informal knowledge, both individual and collective.

This study is based on in-depth interviews, primary company and industry association and secondary documents.

The study highlights how successful firms implemented systems, policies and practices for the better capturing and utilization of external and internal knowledge. In terms of the former, a move toward fast fashion required and drove far-reaching organizational restructuring and change. This made for a greater integration of knowledge through the value chain, ranging from design to retail. Successful firms also owed their survival to the recognition and usage of internal informal knowledge. At the same time this process was not without tensions and paradoxes, and the findings suggest that many of the solutions followed a process of experimentation. The latter is in sharp contrast to many South African manufacturers, who, with the global articulation of production networks, have lost valuable knowledge on suppliers and their practices. At the same time, both firms have to contend with an increasingly unpredictable international environment.

At a theoretical level, the study points to the need to see informal knowledge not only in individualistic terms but also as a phenomenon that has collective, and indeed, communitarian features. Again, it highlights the challenges of nurturing and optimizing informal knowledge. It shows how contextual features both constrain and enable this process. It further highlights the extent to which the effective utilization of external knowledge, and rapid responses to external developments, may require a fundamental rethinking of organizational structures and hierarchies. This study focuses on a limited number of dimensions of this in a single national context but could be replicated and extended into other contexts.

The study highlights the relationship between survival, success and how knowledge is managed. This involved harnessing the informal knowledge and capabilities of workforce to enhance productivity, in conjunction with improvements in machinery and processes, and a much closer integration of design, supply, production and marketing, underpinned by a more effective usage of IT. Paradoxically, other clothing and textile firms have survived doing the exact opposite – reverting to low value-added cut-and-trim assembly operations. At a policy level, the study highlights how specific features of South African regulation (above all, in terms of job protection), which are often held up as barriers to competiveness, may help sustain the knowledge base of firms.

The preservation and creation of jobs in a highly competitive sector was bound up with effective knowledge management. The study also highlighted the mutual interdependence of employers and employees in a context of very high unemployment and how the more effective usage of informal knowledge bound both sides closer.

There is a fairly diverse body of literature on manufacturing in South Africa, and, indeed across the continent; however, much of it has focused on challenges. This study explores relative success stories from a sector that has faced a structural crisis of competitiveness, and as such, has relevance to understanding how firms and industries may cope in highly adverse circumstances.

This purpose of this paper is to explore variations in the extent of control mechanisms, according to country of origin and organizational characteristics, in a challenging country of domicile.

A survey research design involving the use of a questionnaire as the primary data source was adopted. A total of 350 subsidiaries were initially randomly selected and contacted in person, or via telephone and e-mail, of which 147 agreed to take part in the study and responded to the survey.

The authors find that Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) from highly financialized Liberal Market Economies will be associated with a greater reliance on formalized control mechanisms; this will enable the MNE’s headquarters to closely monitor subsidiary managers according to objective measures, to ensure that the maximum shareholder value is released.

This study reveals a greater reliance on control mechanisms in larger firms, reflecting a desire to maximize bureaucratic economies of scale.

The authors find that the presence of expatriates regardless of country of origin leads to greater decentralization, suggesting foreign firms do not trust local staff.

This is one of the few studies of this nature conducted for the region of Middle East – and the only one the authors are aware of for Saudi Arabia. Further, it sheds new light on the impact of contextual circumstances on how closely firms monitor their subsidiaries, the challenges of doing business in the Gulf region and the consequences of the large-scale usage of expatriates.

This study aims to assess the relationship between unionization and employee collectivism, and managerial strategies for employee participation and involvement, within an emerging market economy that has prioritized export competitiveness.

This paper centres on a survey of South African employees

The paper reveals the coexistence of high levels of union power, with a range of mechanisms for participation and involvement.

The South African experience underscores the extent to which greater regulation of the employment contract (through law and unions) can be complementary to both high value added manufacturing strategies and robust export performance. The South African case further highlights both the bounded and institutionally constrained nature of strategy formulation, yet also the willingness of clusters of firms to experiment with alternative strategies, albeit with mixed results: strategy and action represent a product of both setting and real strategic choices.

The paper highlights the extent to which greater collectivism and regulation within the workplace may contribute to economic success within an emerging market context.