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The bankruptcy of Enron Corp. has evolved into a scandal of enormous proportions involving allegations of fraud, corruption and unethical practices on the part of Enron’s corporate executives, members of its board of directors, external auditors, and high government officials in the USA. No doubt there will be many articles written about various aspects of the Enron scandal. The focus of this paper is on the relationships between Enron’s business model and the deregulatory phase of the American economy during the 1980s and 1990s. It is the argument of this paper that deregulation in the US electricity and natural gas industries fostered the creation of the Enron business model, and that this model was unsustainable, resulting in the demise of Enron Corp. Furthermore, while Enron can be viewed as an example of capitalistic excess, the paper reveals how the Enron business model developed as an American form of a public private partnership, similar to the types of public private partnerships that have been created in recent years in the UK. Investigating Enron as a public private partnership may help us to better understand the role of public private partnerships in contemporary capitalism and shed some light on the advisability of deregulatory schemes and the unintended consequences that can result from such schemes.

This paper describes the experiences and the contentious issues on eight existing PPAs in Nepal with varying type of investment, the key areas where IPPs are treated fairly and the areas where IPPs are discriminated against by the clauses are highlighted. Power Purchase Agreements on IPPs in Nepal are of three types: with foreign investment, local investment and investment in JV with the Utility. A critical issue in designing power purchase agreements is to create a level playing field for the players to secure successful and sustainable IPPs and PPAs. To create this environment, discriminatory clauses or unequal treatment to IPPs in the key issues of the PPAs should be avoided; the key issues being power purchase guarantees, force majeure guarantees, financial and foreign exchange guarantees, operation guarantees, and guarantees concerning insurance and dispute resolution. The analysis shows that discriminatory clauses and unequal treatment are present in the key issues of the agreements.

The publicly listed company, Sea Breeze Power Corp., had its origin in 1990 through a private company called Powerhouse Developments. This company eventually went public through a reverse takeover (RTO), and the new name for the public company was Powerhouse Energy Inc. Powerhouse Developments became a wholly owned subsidiary of the parent company and was purely devoted to developing run-of-river hydroelectric projects. Paul Manson personally became involved through helping the company with the RTO. The original private company, Powerhouse Developments, had been a partnership between a California Investor out of the Central Valley, named Chase Hoffman, and a local man from British Columbia. They had met each other through the real estate business in Hawaii. During this time, Manson was working with the company as a consultant. However, in 2000, there was a falling out between Hoffman and his partner, so Manson was asked to move from purely being a consultant with the company to taking on the title of Corporate Secretary. He was effectively the General Manager, and along with a hydroelectric engineer (Bill Harmond) who had been hired, took over management of the company. Hoffman remained an investor, and Harmond and Manson formed the new management team.

Social movements can disrupt existing industries and inspire the emergence of new markets by drawing attention to problems with the status quo and promoting alternatives. We examine how the influence of social movements on entrepreneurial activity evolves as the markets they foster mature. Theoretically, we argue that the success of social movements in furthering market expansion leads to three related outcomes. First, the movement-encouraged development of market infrastructure reduces the need for continued social movement support. Second, social movements’ efforts on behalf of new markets increase the importance of resource availability for market entry. Third, market growth motivates countermovement that reduce the beneficial impact of initiator movements on entrepreneurial activity. We test these arguments by analyzing evolving social movement dynamics and entrepreneurial activity in the US wind power industry from 1992 to 2007. We discuss the implications of our findings for the study of social movements, stakeholder management, sustainability, and entrepreneurship.

This case looks at the design and implementation of a risk management strategy. It reviews the early moves by Great Plains Energy (GPE) to establish a corporate-wide Enterprise Risk Management program. The corporate Chief Risk Officer is Andrea Bielsker. Andrea appointed Jana Utter to take charge of coordinating the design and implementation of the ERM program. Utter faces a number of challenges. She has had to first conceptualize the program given the charge by the Board of Directors, then design a process by which she identifies the risks that the corporation faces, assist in designing measures for the risks, and work with the various divisions and functional areas to put processes in place to mitigate the identified risks.

For any developing countries in the 20th century, there exists a problem of how to choose the economic development route – socialist or capitalist; which means how to compare different social and economic benefits and make different value judgements in economic development. Socialism is not a pure political and ideological question, certainly not just a political question. It is a way for developing countries, particularly large agricultural countries, to realise their industrialisation and modern commercial economy. Essentially, it is a focus of development economics. For economically backward countries the aim of socialism is not to fight against the capitalist world, but first to develop their own economy. Socialist public ownership connected with the stage of economic development involves inner contradictions in its own development from the very beginning. We cannot make socialist public ownership perfect without overcoming those contradictions. Public ownership cannot improve social productivity without coming across its own historical limitation. Economic reforms now being practised in China are an effort to improve socialist public ownership: to reform traditional forms of public ownership which have not satisfied the development of productivity. Socialism and public ownership are not features for economically backward countries to flaunt. Neither are they historical trends. They are a way to get rid of poverty, and to realise a modern commercial economy, a way different from the development route of capitalism. There are historical necessity and economic rationality for that kind of socialist public ownership connected with economic development of backward countries. And, of course, socialist public ownership has its own inner contradictions and historical limitations, just like any other kind of ownership in history. It changes and develops continually. Socialist public ownership needs to improve itself, to realise its own development and evolution, and finally to make assets of public ownership the social capital satisfying the demand of highly socialised productivity.

This study examines the legal codification of nascent markets, specifically, the process of defining and incorporating Islamic banking and organic agriculture within the legal system in Turkey. I find that actors’ priorities differ significantly with respect to formal codification and that the existing legal order and socio-political and economic contexts shape how state and non-state actors influence legislative and regulative action. This study contributes to our understanding of how actors and their ideological commitments and relational concerns affect the legal formulation of new industries.

We examine the construction of “empty categories” – that is, categories created prior to the existence of producers and consumers – and their implications for industry emergence. Drawing on the case of the ji-biru category among Japanese microbreweries, we exemplify how external actors – including governments, the media, consultants, and other entities – frequently create empty categories that are “legitimate yet not legitimated” (Vergne & Wry, 2014). We show how such empty categories generate lower entry barriers, resulting in higher founding rates and significant innovation. We highlight how empty categories impede evolutionary forces by inhibiting shared understandings of what constitutes a legitimate category member.