Search results

How can public institutions achieve their goals and best nurture virtue in their members? In this chapter, I seek answers to these questions in a perhaps unlikely place: the television series The Wire. Known for its unflinching realism, the crime drama narrates the intertwined lives of police, criminals, politicians, teachers and journalists in drug-plagued urban Baltimore. Yet even in the thick and quick of institutional dysfunction the drama portrays, human virtue springs forth and institutions (despite themselves) sometimes perform their roles. I begin this exploration of The Wire by drawing on Montesquieu and other political theorists to evaluate the problems facing state institutions – problems of diversity and principle as much as selfishness and power-mongering. I then turn to the prospects for virtue within modern institutions, developing and applying the system of Alasdair MacIntyre and paying particular attention to the role of narrative in cementing and integrating virtue.

In order to deepen our understanding of contemporary social structures, we must often trace their distant origins in our evolutionary past. The origins of two structures are analyzed here. Both religion and collective ascription are shaped in part by a common imperative to access rewarding emotional arousal release protected by a special set of arouser screening rules. Only certain enhanced arousers with an attractive ratio of contrast values to access costs can regularly tap these emotional reservoirs. In these two cases, it is the larger social group context that must supply the enhancements. The result is that some group processes are marked by emotional dynamics deeply rooted in the pursuit of these extraordinary arousers.

The chapter addresses the unique aspects of Brazil’s news agencies and the Brazilian news syndication market. It reveals the pattern of Brazil’s two prevailing business models regarding the wire services industry: that of the State, particularly the federal government, which invested little in a nationwide distributor to peripheral and alternative media; and that of major media conglomerates, which set out their syndication services labeled as “news agencies” in order to multiply profits with no extra labor. In the latter case, an asymmetrical relationship of dependency and circularity ensues between these major conglomerates and regional media groups, who rely on these “news agencies” to perpetuate their dominance in local markets. The chapter also assesses a few causes for this unique model and describes the main players in Brazil’s news agency sector. A concise historical background is presented (Molina, Morais, Saroldi & Moreira) and provides context for the present-day players in the news agency business in Brazil, including the institutional framework they form with their customers, predominantly smaller newspapers. The chapter analyzes attributes of the Brazilian news agency ecology, including the parallel reach of distribution networks belonging to the private and state-owned agencies; the adaptation of conglomerate agencies to challenges entailed by the digital convergence (shrinking newsrooms, multitasking staff); and the prevalence of the interconglomerate model within the Brazilian news syndication industry.

Corruption can take many forms. One of the most alarming aspects of corruption has been the impact of money laundering on financial markets. The amount of money laundered in the Asian region is estimated at approximately $200 billion, or one-fifth the global total. Some of the Asia-Pacific countries still lack any consistent anti-money laundering legislation. The Asia-Pacific region is also home to five of the six remaining non-cooperative countries and territories on The Financial Action Task Force's 2004 list. In this paper, I present a clinical examination of the impact of money laundering and Off-shore financial centres on Asian Pacific financial markets. I describe the money laundering cycle, tools and techniques utilized in the Asia-Pacific region as well as anti-money laundering measures and regulation.

We address here how the U.S. neoliberal policy regime developed and how its reconstructed vision of modernization, which culminated, under the rubric of globalization, was neutralized by 9/11 and neoconservative geopolitics. We analyze the phases in the rise of neoliberalism, and provide a detailed map of its vision of global modernization at its high tide under Clinton. We also address how the Bush Doctrine's unilateral, preemptive polices and the consequent War on Terror and Iraq War eroded U.S. legitimacy as the globalization system's hegmon and shifted the discourse from globalization to empire. Cold War modernization theorists, neoliberal globalization advocates, and Bush doctrine neoconservatives all drew on an American exceptionalist tradition that portrays the U.S. as modernity's “lead society,” attaches universal significance to its values, policies, and institutions, and urges their worldwide diffusion. All three traditions ignore or diminish the importance of substantive equality and social justice. We suggest that consequent U.S. policy problems might be averted by recovery of a suppressed side of the American tradition that stresses social justice and holds that democracy must start at home and be spread by example rather than by exhortation or force. Overall, we explore the contradictory U.S. role in an emergent post-Cold War world.

In 2012, the New York Department of Financial Services threatened to revoke Standard Chartered Bank’s U.S. license for alleged money laundering violations involving Iran. The bank’s settlement with US regulators and law enforcement cost the bank approximately $1.099 billion. In 2013, as a signal that no bank was too big to jail, the Holding Individuals Accountable and Deterring Money Laundering Act was introduced into the U.S. Congress. We focus on a clinical examination of the Standard Chartered money laundering case and examine the role of the US regulators and law enforcement in the settlement.

The platform economy reflects the business model of some of the largest and fastest-growing firms in the economy. Platform business models emerge and thrive because of the potential profit in taking advantage of transactions cost reductions to connect people for mutual benefit, and this value creation is best understood by thinking about the epistemology of decentralized market processes. Three essential aspects of knowledge are relevant to platform business models: (1) knowledge can be private and diffuse; (2) knowledge can be contextual; and (3) knowledge may not exist outside of the economic process. After defining and analyzing the technology, economic, and institutional aspects of platforms the author defines and applies market epistemology to explore how platforms harness technological and organizational features to create value-enhancing market platforms by exploiting the epistemic benefits of technology-enabled decentralized market processes. The author concludes by using this epistemic framework to propose an electricity distribution platform business model – the retail electricity industry is undergoing a process of technological dynamism, and as a regulated infrastructure industry, evolving into a decentralized market industry is presenting challenges to which this epistemic framework can bring increased understanding.